One of the more remarkable international stories of the past year has been the fate of Honduras. Somehow this tiny, plucky, and extremely poor Central American country managed to outwit and outmaneuver the regional authoritarian, the United States, and the much-ballyhooed power of “international opinion.”
I salute the Hondurans for preserving their democracy in the face of the odds they faced:
[The] United States did everything short of invading Honduras to see the “coup government” fall.
This, of course, is the bad news amidst the good news of Honduras remaining a pro-American government despite the odds, in a bizarre tale of Hondurans defending their democracy in the face of ridiculous claims that Zelaya was the wronged party and not the scoundrel out to wreck Honduran democray.
It is bad news because Hondurans quite literally had nobody on their side but a relative handful of writers who wrote about the affair. Yet despite our own government weighing in against the isolated Hondurans, we were unable to achieve our objective.
Consider that. We attempted to reverse what we called a coup and could not--even though Honduras is weak and reliant on our aid and trade. Mind you, I'm glad we failed. We were on the wrong side (Chavez and Castro). But we were unable to achieve our objective. How inept is our foreign policy establishment?
At some level, that failure is disturbing. After all, I can't rule out the possibility that our government will try to achieve something actually in our national interest.
