Hands Off Honduras!

Hands Off Honduras!
By Patrick J. Buchanan
July 3, 2009

Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential
palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane
for Costa Rica.

The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by
the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to
change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another term.

Will someone please explain why this bloodless transfer of power to
the civilian legislator first in line for the presidency, in a
sovereign nation, is any business of the United Nations, the
Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers
or Barack Obama? For all have denounced the "coup" and demanded
Zelaya's immediate return.

The hypocrisy here is astounding.

Chavez was imprisoned for his bloody coup attempt in Venezuela in
1992. And to have Fidel Castro's dictatorship of half a century
denouncing a glitch in the democratic process of a Western
Hemisphere republic is beyond parody.

What percentage of the 200 member nations of that septic tank of
anti-Americanism, the United Nations, are democracies? How many
leaders of its member states came to power through free and fair
elections?

And what happened to the idea of non-intervention in the internal
affairs of Western Hemisphere republics? At this writing, Honduras
is not buckling.

"We have established a democratic government, and we will not cede
to pressure from anyone. We are a sovereign country," said Roberto
Micheletti, who was named caretaker president to serve out Zelaya's
term, which ends this year.

Unlike Tehran, where hundreds of thousands protested the election,
the streets of Tegucigalpa have remained calm. No one has been
shot, beaten with clubs or run down by thugs on motorcycles.

Just whose side is Barack on in Latin America?

Though elected as a center-right candidate, Zelaya has moved into
the orbit of Chavez, whose idea it was to change the Honduran
constitution to get Zelaya another term. Hugo even provided the
ballots. In Latin America, term limits have been written into
constitutions to prevent a return to the time of the dictators and
presidents-for-life. The folks who put Zelaya aboard that plane are
friends of the United States.

Why are Obama and Hillary Clinton meddling in the affairs of a
friendly country, to dump over a friendly government, to reinstate
a friend of Hugo's, whose goal is to bring Honduras into his
anti-American "Bolivarian Revolution"?

Like Barack's strange behavior in Trinidad, where he grinned away
as Chavez handed him an anti-American tract, then listened for an
hour to Daniel Ortega berate us for cruelty to Castro's Cuba,
without protest or retort, Obama is coming off as one who shares
the international left's view of the United States.

There is another issue raised by Obama's denunciation of our
friends in Honduras. Does he put ideology ahead of U.S. national
interests? Does he prefer hostile democracies to friendly autocrats?

What comes first with Obama?

"He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB," FDR said of one Latin
dictator. What FDR meant was that, in those grave times when Adolf
Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Japanese militarists
ruled most of Eurasia, America must take her friends where she
could find them.

In World War II, we welcomed the alliance with Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek, and the neutrality of the autocrats of Madrid and Lisbon.
We partnered with Stalin. Gen. Eisenhower cut a deal with Vichy's
Adm. Darlan to get GIs safely ashore in North Africa.

From 1961 to 1979, Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian ruler of
South Korea who sent 50,000 troops to fight beside ours in Vietnam.
Was he not a better friend than Olof Palme of Sweden, Pierre
Trudeau of Canada and Willy Brandt of Germany, who burnished their
democratic credentials by scoring points off the United States?

For most Cold War presidents, U.S. national interests always
trumped democratist ideology. Ike preferred the Shah to the
democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh. Richard Nixon preferred
Gen. Pinochet to the elected Salvador Allende.

Even George Bush, who had pushed for Palestinian elections and
insisted on Hamas' inclusion, perhaps because he thought they would
lose, did a somersault when Hamas won.

How to explain the universality of the attacks on Honduras -- when
few United Nations members outside the West condemned Tehran and
Hugo Chavez rushed to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- other
than the fact that this "coup" removed an adversary of the United
States?

Anti-Americans stand by their own, no matter how they came to
power, or retain power. Only in the West do we seem always prepared
to abandon our flawed friends who do not measure up.

This is a formula for eventually not having any friends.

That Obama finds himself in camp with Castro's Cuba, Ortega's
Nicaragua and Chavez, who is openly threatening Honduras, should
tell him something about where his ideology is taking him, and us.

One day, Obama is going to have to decide whether he wishes to be
the darling of the international left or the unapologetic leader of
the nation that is most resented and reviled by the international
left.

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