Why is the U.S. not supporting the rule of law? By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Hundreds of emails from Hondurans flooded my in-box last week after I reported on the military's arrest of President Manuel Zelaya, as ordered by the Supreme Court, and his subsequent banishment from the country.
Mr. Zelaya's violations of the rule of law in recent months were numerous. But the tipping point came 10 days ago, when he led a violent mob that stormed a military base to seize and distribute Venezuelan-printed ballots for an illegal referendum.
All but a handful of my letters pleaded for international understanding of the threat to the constitutional democracy that Mr. Zelaya presented. One phrase occurred again and again: "Please pray for us."
Hondurans have good cause for calling on divine intervention: Reason has gone AWOL in places like Turtle Bay and Foggy Bottom. Ruling the debate on Mr. Zelaya's behavior is Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who is now the reigning international authority on "democracy."
Mr. Chavez is demanding that Mr. Zelaya be reinstated and is even threatening to overthrow the new Honduran president, Roberto Micheletti. He's leading the charge from the Organization of American States (OAS). The United Nations and the Obama administration are falling in line.
Is this insane? You bet. We have fallen through the looking glass and it's time to review how hemispheric relations came to such a sad state.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2009 00:00 ||
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If Washington does not reverse course, it will be one more act of appeasement toward an ambitious and increasingly dangerous dictator.
I kinda sorta lost track here. Are we talking Zelaya or Obama?
#3
tyhe fact is simple, Obama desperately wants a precedent where a democraticly elected presodent can violate both the law and the constitution, and get away clean.
THAT'S WHY THIS IS LIED ABOUT. IT'S OBAMA'S DRECT ORDER TO THE STATE DEPT.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
07/07/2009 8:31 Comments ||
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Hillary is to meet with Zelaya today.
Maybe together they can bow to a statute of Chavez as part of the meeting.
Posted by: Lord garth ||
07/07/2009 8:38 Comments ||
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Ditto to what SteveS said. I saw on the news the ANTI Zelaya supporters are taken to the streets to confront the pro dictator rabble.
President Obama went to Moscow desperate for the appearance of a foreign-policy success. He got that illusion -- at a substantial cost to America's security. The series of signing ceremonies in a grand Kremlin hall and the litany of agreements, accords and frameworks implied that the United States benefited from all the fuss. We didn't. We got nothing of real importance. But the government of puppet-master Vladimir Putin (nominally just prime minister) got virtually all it wanted. In Moscow, this was Christmas in July.
Ignore the agenda-padding public-health memorandum and the meaningless "framework document on military cooperation" (we've had such agreements before; the Russians always just stiff us). The main course in Moscow was arms control. President Obama's ideological bias against nuclear weapons dates back to his undergraduate years. Yet those weapons kept the peace between the world's great powers for 64 years. A few remarks about deterrence notwithstanding, Obama just doesn't get it. He agreed to trim our nuclear-warhead arsenal by one-third and -- even more dangerously -- to cut the systems that deliver the nuclear payloads. In fact, the Russians don't care much about our warhead numbers (which will be chopped to a figure "between 1,500 and 1,675"). What they really wanted -- and got -- was a US cave-in regarding limits on our nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and missiles that could leave us with as few as 500 such systems, if the Russians continue to get their way as the final details are negotiated.
Moscow knows we aren't going to start a nuclear war with Russia. Putin (forget poor "President" Dmitry Medvedev) wants to gut our conventional capabilities to stage globe-spanning military operations. He wants to cut us down to Russia's size. Our problem is that many nuclear-delivery systems -- such as bombers or subs -- are "dual-use": A B-2 bomber can launch nukes, but it's employed more frequently to deliver conventional ordnance. Putin sought to cripple our ability to respond to international crises. Obama, meanwhile, was out for "deliverables" -- deals that could be signed in front of the cameras. Each man got what he wanted. President Obama even expressed an interest in further nuclear-weapons cuts. Peace in our time, ladies and gentlemen, peace in our time . . . We just agreed to the disarmament position of the American Communist Party of the 1950s.
The Russians also enjoyed our president's empathy for their position on missile defense. Apparently, Eastern Europe really does belong to the Kremlin's sphere of influence. Not least, Obama fell for the sucker offer of the year: The Russians will generously allow us to fly our troops and weapons through their airspace to Afghanistan. This ploy is utterly transparent: Putin intends to lull us into dependency on a trans-Russia supply route -- giving him a free hand in Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere. By Putin's calculus, we'll complain about further aggression on Russia's frontiers, but take no action that would jeopardize our new supply line. Meanwhile, we serve as the Kremlin's proxies, protecting its sphere of influence in Central Asia against Islamist influence from the south and working on the Russians' Afghan heroin problem.
What did our president get in return? Russia will import more American meat products (which Russia needs). And we can re-open our Moscow office investigating the cases of POWs and MIAs from yesteryear's wars. Well, I served in that office 16 years ago. Even during the Yeltsin-era "thaw," the Russians stonewalled us. And Putin's no Boris Yeltsin. Our president also got some generalizations about North Korea and Iran, but no hard commitments. Russia -- which designed many of Iran's nuclear facilities -- wouldn't even promise to permanently deny Iran the sophisticated air-defense systems that would make it harder to hit Tehran's nuke sites.
And you could read something else in President Medvedev's imperious bearing behind his podium yesterday: Moscow longs for the world to view Russia and the United States as equals again, as joint arbiters of a global condominium, reviving the Kremlin's Cold-War status (for which Russians feel passionate nostalgia). They got that, too. And we got nothing, nothing, nothing. Unless you think trading our military superiority for hamburger sales is a winner.
There's been a debate in the Obama administration between veterans who learned the hard way not to trust the Russians and the new, unblooded idealists. Now we know who won. Great news for the Russian Federation. Bad news for America. Until an adoring media spins it, of course.
#1
Whoever said a picture was worth a thousand words was correct, that picture says it all about Zero, his policies, and his followers.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
07/07/2009 14:29 Comments ||
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Raplph Peters get it. Not only did Comrade Obama give away the farm but locks the USA into a position of inferiority. This agreement does nothing about the hundreds of Russian aircraft and short range missiles (and hundreds of Chinese IRBMs) that form a large part of their nuclear strike capability. A force that puts into range most of their likely targets (China, Europe, Iran, Pakistan) saving all of their ICBM and SLBM assets for use against the USA. While US nuclear forces must be split amongst all possible targets.
He agreed to trim our nuclear-warhead arsenal by one-third and -- even more dangerously -- to cut the systems that deliver the nuclear payloads. In fact, the Russians don't care much about our warhead numbers (which will be chopped to a figure "between 1,500 and 1,675"). What they really wanted -- and got -- was a US cave-in regarding limits on our nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and missiles that could leave us with as few as 500 such systems
The Russians can't afford to maintain their current nuclear triad while ours are a small part of the budget. Their large land based based ICBMs are coming to end of life. Even if they were in good shape, the Russians won't have time to launch before a Chinese first strike wipes out the missile fields thanks to tech transfer and espionage courtesy of Bill and Hillary Clinton and a few well placed Chinese campaign contributions. Why do you think the the Soviets were so eager to eliminate IRBMs once the US began deploying Pershing 2 to Europe? To have any chance at survival, Russian ICBM must be mobile and they are very expensive and reliability is uncertain. And real time space based surveillance is improving all the time.
The Russians SLBMs are in even worse shape and they can't afford more than a few new boomers, even if they could get them working. The Russians are still living off their decrepit cold war bomber force and can't even think about designing and building new ones.
Moscow longs for the world to view Russia and the United States as equals again
Why would Americans treat dictatorships as equals, let alone allow to lock in a position of nuclear superiority? Esp one with 140 million and rapidly declining population whose GDP equals Spain's. The Russians are in real deep shit and Comrade Obama just volunteered America to bail out his soulmates.
Posted by: ed ||
07/07/2009 15:49 Comments ||
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Yalta II. Lucky us, Russia's weaker than Stalin's Soviet Union, and we're bigger than FDR's America.
For now.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
07/07/2009 15:51 Comments ||
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My take away was indeed Medvedev(Putin) was after parity between our warheads and their own. Also what struck me as interesting was how even as Medvedev was getting what he was after, he managed to look angry and put out up there on the podium while Obama was speaking. Obama in typical fashion looked uncomfortable on the podium and almost apologetic at times. Hes apologetic for our strength--what an imbecile.
Hat tip, Instapundit
Half a dozen members of the Senate Democratic Conference pose the biggest threat to President Obamas agenda, giving Senate Republicans a fighting chance to block the administrations major expansions of government.
GOP leaders have begun reaching out to these centrists, hoping they will buck their party on Obamas two biggest initiatives: healthcare reform and climate change legislation. IMO, the difference is no longer between Republicans and Democrats but between these who already understood what Obama represents and these who don't understand yet.
The Islamic Republic created its own version of the Commisars, of which Khamenei is one of the originals.
Like we said a day or two ago, they took the 'islamic' out of the 'Islamic Republic'. Just as the ardor of the members of the CCCP faded, leaving the leaders, the apparatchiks and the ChekaNKVDKGB RSF, you now have the leaders, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji.
The merger of the military/security man and the clergy was intensified when clerics were dispatched to the war fronts, and became ideological commissars of the new regime. They spied on officers and tried to convert them to the new politicized Islam. What happened, in reality, was the conversion of the clergy to a military-security ethos, not the other way around.
Clerics such as Khamenei, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani and Hassan Lahooti were among the first cadres put in charge of military personnel and commissioned by Ayatollah Khomeini to create the IRGC, a security apparatus designed to run parallel to the state's army, navy and air force. Khamenei quickly learned where the center of the state's gravity rests, and consequently, never left the security forces. Today Khamenei knows more about military and security issues than about traditional Figh and Shi'ite narratives. After the election ...
Ahmadinejad addressed a meeting with the employees of the Judiciary with these words: "Communism, liberalism and democracy are all dead; it is high time for [the rise of an] Islamic State." What he did not spell out was this: The Islamic State wears boots and parades in military fatigue.
Large segments of the clerical establishment came out against the election results. They are all rightfully anxious about what seems to be the end of clerical hegemony as they know it. The clerical rupture that followed the June events is quite telling. The entire body of the moderate clerics militated against what they felt was a mortal blow to Islamic republicanism.
Sensing the death knell of the clerical state, even hardline Ayatollahs such as Nasser Makarem-Shirazi distanced themselves from the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad-IRGC coalition. This article does not mention that officers of the IRGC are frequently antagonistic to the Mullahs. In the last 4 years the IRGC has been muscling on the Mullahs' financial turf.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
07/07/2009 15:14 ||
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The Golden State's political class comes unglued in the face of a citizens' revolt a fairly reasonable analysis at the link of our State's ills - they forecast the future of America if not stopped
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2009 20:51 ||
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Along the same veign in a way, I wanted to share with the people here why the Dallas Tea Party drew so many people vs other locations. It is rather simple.
MSM feels it has taken control of its outlets, but in Dallas - Ft Worth, there is an AM station (pretty cheap compared to the FM stations to start up) that is dedicated to airing conservative talk show personalities both locally and nationally 24/7/365.
The local personalities on that little AM channel are the ones who rallied 37,000 people to show up at South Fork Ranch in Dallas. This needs to be duplicated throughout America. This needs to be done before Obama and the Socialists in DC get a chance to prevent this as well via the Fairness doctrine. If not done quickly enough, there will not be enough support to stop the fairness doctrine that will shut even a small AM station down.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
By Ralph Peters
