Despite the amusing coincidence that the color scheme of Eunomia already happened to be pretty close to the colors of the Honduran flag, I am going to do my best not to become an enthusiast. Nonetheless, the more I watch the global condemnation of Honduras’ new government and the expressions of support for that government from Hondurans rallying in the streets, the more I find the international response and Washington’s participation in it absolutely appalling. We should be clear about a few things: we are not all Hondurans (nor would such empty declarations of solidarity do anything for Hondurans anyway), but for that very reason their internal affairs ought to be none of our concern. As I have noted before, state sovereignty is something that very few people take seriously on a regular basis. After all, as we have been told, there are supposedly no longer any internal affairs, but if there is anything that truly is a purely domestic concern it would have to be a constitutional crisis and the enforcement of the country’s own laws against officers of its government.

The swiftness with which several major European states have withdrawn their ambassadors and the speed with which neighboring states have cut off trade relations would make you think that the Honduran government was embarked on a policy of genocide or the brutal suppression of political dissidents. Despite years of internal chaos, misrule and violence, Zimbabwe’s neighbors have never managed such decisive action. Burma’s relations with the surrounding region remain remarkably intact in the wake of the violent crackdown two years ago. Sudan has plenty of friends and allies regardless of what it does. Fortunately the world has moved with dispatch to answer the menace of an internal, largely peaceful political conflict in Honduras. Virtual unanimity in opposing the new Honduran government is easy to obtain in these circumstances, because the outrage comes at such a cheap price. Unlike a risky and probably counterproductive policy of isolating the Iranian government with sanctions and active support for the protesters, there are no serious consequences for almost all of the states now punishing Honduras’ government for its “crime.” Honduras cannot retaliate against any of the actions now being taken against it. Even when one grants that Honduras’ political and military leaders went about things in the wrong way, it is difficult to see the international response as anything more than the most obnoxious grandstanding and moral preening.

Frankly, it makes a mockery of much of the sympathy foreign governments have been showing the protesters in Iran, who are effectively in the same position vis-a-vis Khamenei and Ahmadinejad as Zelaya’s opponents are in relation to Zelaya. Both groups are seeking remedies to illegal actions taken by the heads of their respective governments, but the difference is that Honduran anti-Zelaya forces have succeeded. It is rather as if the IRGC heeded Mousavi’s call to return to the pure principles of the Islamic revolution and arrested Ahmadinejad, then Mousavi took his place, and then the entire world declared Mousavi’s ascension illegitimate and unacceptable.

There are reasonable arguments why refusing to isolate other, incomparably nastier regimes may be the better course of action, but it also doesn’t hurt that major regional and international players have vested interests in not isolating them. Honduras has nothing to use as leverage, and so has no clout, which means that it can be kicked around with impunity. This conflict is one that the deposed president escalated until all the nation’s institutions decided that he had to go. In response, many international institutions and governments have decided that it is not only acceptable but imperative to punish Honduras and to deprive an already poor country of both trade and aid. If it is normally morally questionable to pursue policies that are likely to harm the most vulnerable and weakest members of a population, in this case it seems simply inexcusable, because the wrong that has been done is almost purely a procedural one. Few seem willing to dispute that Zelaya had broken the law and deserved to be removed from office. To its credit, the administration has so far refused to go as far as others have, but it has nonetheless provided cover and support to those beating up on Honduras.

Update: On that last point, I may have given the administration too much credit. The State Department has already suspended much of our aid to Honduras, which will then be cut off indefinitely once they formally declare that a coup has taken place.

To me, the only takeaway is this: As godawful as Barack Obama has been and will continue to be, it is very difficult to feel it is some great loss that these people [in the McCain campaign] didn’t get a chance to help run the country. ~Jim Antle

It is all the more difficult to feel any loss when one realizes that on policy a McCain administration would have been no less “godawful” in many important ways, and would clearly have been much, much worse on foreign policy. Pretty much everyone on the right is justifiably horrified by Waxman-Markey, but I would hasten to remind people that McCain was on board with cap-and-trade, and he would have been happy to roll over for almost any domestic legislation that the Congress sent him. As ever, McCain came to this position through his usual process of discerning that the side of the debate that would earn him more glowing media coverage as an “independent-minded maverick,” and the one that would hack off most Republicans while raising his profile as the “reasonable” Republican.

Given that he had no idea that cap-and trade involved mandatory caps, it certainly wasn’t because of any extensive or deep understanding of the relevant issues, but then his obnoxious moral posturing on issues never is informed by such understanding. How better to demonstrate his willingness to “reach across the aisle” than to endorse the most awful sort of legislation that would satisfy people in the other party and outrage his fellow partisans? He has done it several times before from immigration to campaign finance reform, and had he been President he would have been so preoccupied with dragging us into ever-worsening relations with Russia, Iran and any other country he could think of that he would have signed off on almost anything that came across his desk. Meanwhile, McCain’s ridiculous, circus-like entourage would fill up the papers and blogs every day with leak and counter-leak as each aide maneuvered for position around McCain in between attempts to exclude the Vice President from any and all decisions. So we could have had staggering levels of additional debt, government collusion with financial interests, destructive environmental policy, even icier relations with much of the rest of the world and an even more dysfunctional, mediocre crew steering the ship of state. Whenever I begin to get a bit down, I think of what could have been and thank God we have been spared the nightmare of President McCain.

When Orwell used the phrase “objectively fascist” during WWII to criticize pacifists, he at least had the advantage of talking about a situation in which there were actual fascists involved. Roger Simon, on the other hand, is complaining about Obama’s differing responses to the Iranian election and the Honduran coup/deposition and uses the differing responses to conclude that Obama is somehow “objectively fascist.” The abuse of the term fascist in a lot of the commentary on Iran has been extensive and annoying, but now it’s really getting out of hand. Let’s be clear about one thing: no matter what your view of events in Iran and Honduras and Obama’s responses to them may be, fascism has nothing to do with any of these things. Authoritarian regimes and ideologies today are not fascist. Authoritarian states using their coercive apparatus to repress dissidents do not thereby become fascist–they remain merely authoritarian. One would think that this is bad enough, but we in the West apparently need to misuse the word fascist to convey how upset we are. Chavismo and its derivatives are unattractive left-populist and socialist movements centered around authoritarian demagogues, but they are not therefore fascist movements. Even if it were true that Obama’s response to the Honduras coup is “objectively Chavista,” it would have nothing to do with fascism. As badly as I think he has handled the Honduras matter, I don’t think that he is “objectively Chavista,” either, but then I have little time for arguments that immediately resort to this sort of vilification and use of demon-words to smear a target.

This phrase “objectively fascist” was deployed by communists against pretty much everyone to their right, including gradualist social democrats, but this hideous origin does not seem to have lessened its appeal over the decades. Despite the fact that the phrase “objectively fascist” is straight out of interwar communist propaganda, and even though this propaganda was responsible for presenting a misleading understanding of fascism to the world, it continues to be repeated, and the logic behind it (“if you’re not in full agreement with us, you’re with them”) continues to poison how many Westerners think about political disagreement and policy disputes. Applied moderately, this sort of thinking leads merely to political tribalism that punishes criticism of one’s own side and insists on unthinking loyalty, but in its original form labeling someone as “objectively fascist” was intended to erase all distinctions and gradations of non-communist political activism and lump them together with the most appalling kind of anticommunism. Of course, one important reason to lump together significantly different groups of left, right and center under the label fascist was to demonize all of them and make all of them appear as politically toxic and unacceptable to communists as real fascists originally were in the ’20s. Another major reason to do this was to discredit any and all non-fascist, non-communist political forces, especially those that could compete for the loyalties of workers, and to identify anything less than the full repudiation of the prevailing economic regime as betrayal and collaboration.

In the new world of the American right, where precious displays of overzealous, unconvincing anti-racism (see the Wright and Sotomayor controversies) are outdone only by even more earnest declarations of anti-fascist sentiments, it is actually not so strange that warmed-over Soviet propaganda would find a new home. Orwell knew the history well enough when he deployed this disgusting phrase in support of the war effort. Simon probably knows only that Orwell used it, and that he used it in a WWII context against pacifists, so it must therefore be a Good Thing. Once again, Obama is blessed in having enemies who manage to make even his mistakes look brilliant by comparison.

Kevin Casas-Zamora makes the strongest anti-Zelaya case for criticizing the Honduran military’s actions as illegal. He does not contest that Zelaya was the one most responsible for the crisis, and he accepts that Zelaya was acting illegally, but believes that this was the wrong remedy. Fair enough, but let’s try a thought experiment about this question anyway. We are appropriately wary of people who invoke a political crisis to justify extraordinary and extra-legal measures. This sort of rhetoric can be so easily abused for the sake of augmenting and consolidating the power of those in government that we should normally be skeptical of such claims. That said, isn’t it the case that the response of Honduran political and military institutions to presidential illegalities is exactly the one that most of the Western world has been openly desiring in Iran?

Isn’t one of the main problems in Iran that the military and interior ministry colluded with Ahmadinejad in his crime? Suppose they had grabbed him on June 12, the day of the election, and thus prevented him from carrying out his fraudulent power-grab. Would we take seriously for a moment anyone gravely intoning about the need for proper procedure and rejecting the result as an illegal action against the democratically-elected president? (Obviously not, because very few, even the most ardent Mousavi cheerleaders, genuinely think of Iran as having anything like a real democratic process.) One way to look at the Honduran situation is that the political and military institutions removed Zelaya early on rather than permitting him to continue to abuse his office. They did what their counterparts in Iran could not or would not do. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that they were able to take such action because Honduras is a constitutional democracy in many important respects that Iran simply isn’t.

The protesters in Iran are claiming to be standing up for the integrity of their constitution and laws, and they seem to have a good case that the government has violated both. As a practical matter, we know that the protesters were never likely to succeed in removing Ahmadinejad from power unless and until military and security forces turned against him. Ahmadinejad’s IRGC and Basij connections and their commanders’ opposition to the political forces behind Mousavi make that very unlikely, but for the sake of argument suppose that it happened. More to the point, suppose Khamenei ordered these forces to arrest Ahmadinejad and remove him from office. The rest of the world would call this a revolution, and all of Mousavi’s international enthusiasts would be over the moon. No one would care how it happened, so long as it happened. When something like this actually happens in Honduras to a president we have not been conditioned to loathe, but who actually has far less political support in his country’s political and military institutions, whose tenure has been no less of a failure and whose designs on perpetuating his own power are apparently no less unscrupulous than Ahmadinejad’s, suddenly we are all aflutter about the terrible coup and the crime against democracy that has taken place.

Despite the serious inconsistency on one level, there is a common thread connecting the overzealous pro-Mousavi Westerners to the overreacting international condemnation of the Micheletti government in Honduras. What really irks Westerners who have invested so much energy into Mousavi’s cause is not that Iranian laws were broken or its constitution violated, but that the will of the majority was presumably thwarted and in any case the people were denied their voice. Mousavi believes he is fighting for the integrity of the Islamic republican system and its rules; his Western admirers embrace him (however absurdly) as a symbol of majoritarian democracy. Even though the whole of Honduras’ political class was in agreement that Zelaya had to go because they believe he threatened the Honduran constitution, this does not matter to the rest of the world. Zelaya is a populist demagogue who apparently still has considerable mass support, and it is his democratic support that counts for far more in the view of the rest of the world than his lack of respect for constitutional limits. When a democratic force is on the side of the law, it is lauded and praised, and when it is opposed to the law it is lauded and praised. This is phenomenally stupid and ideological, but there is at least some predictable pattern in it.

Don’t weep for Manuel Zelaya. It is the country he has so irresponsibly thrown into chaos that deserves our sympathy. Via Andrew, a Honduran blogger’s perspective:

I’ve yet to see more than one reporter reporting from INSIDE Honduras. So of course, with Zelaya in Nicaragua, his UN and OAS ambassadors still in place and his people calling out from other countries, of course everyone is making him out to be a martyr. He’s not. Really, people have to remember that this man had rejected the orders of Congress and the SUPREME COURT to stop his survey and had ignored them. The man was outside the law. Again, the coup was bad, but probably the only way out. This man was NOT blameless. Stop making him look like a martyr and a hero.

The same blogger has another post clarifying his original remarks. His view is that the coup was a mistake, but it was Zelaya who took Honduras over the cliff with his confrontational moves. The remarkable thing about Zelaya’s deposition is that he had managed to turn the entire legislative branch against him regardless of party. Heather Berkman of Eurasia Group explains how politically isolated Zelaya was and why:

“His own political party, his former vice president — they were all against the actions he was doing,” Berkman said. “No one knew how much he was spending. He had no coherent budget policy and his government was doing a terrible job on combatting rising poverty, crime, things like that.”

So Zelaya was evidently incompetent, power-hungry and engaged in violations of their constitution. Clearly, he is the ideal democrat. Here is more from a Daily Kos diarist who provides some additional information. So, yes, it appears that Washington and the OAS have jumped to the wrong conclusion and have handled this crisis in Honduras poorly.

Update: Here is an informative post from Juan Carlos Hidalgo at [email protected] Here is some interesting commentary on the history of the Honduran military. Via Fausta’s Blog, some groups of Hondurans living abroad have endorsed the removal of Zelaya. Tom Palmer has more.

After quite a few weeks of defending Obama against his more unreasonable detractors, it is refreshing to be able to criticize the administration for its incredible incompetence in responding to the “coup” in Honduras. What is so impressive about the bungling here is that it contradicts every argument the administration has made in support of restraint and caution when it comes to the Iranian protests. Obama didn’t want to insert the U.S. into an Iranian dispute. Iranians, he said, would decide their own future. Hondurans apparently are not accorded the same respect. Their sovereignty isn’t quite as important. Obama withheld judgment about the legality of what had happened in Iran. In Honduras, he just knows that what the military did was illegal, despite far stronger evidence that it was legal and a result of the proper functioning of their constitutional system. U.S. intervention in Honduras has been no less than it has been in Iran. Indeed, it has been far greater. At least six times in the 20th century beginning in 1907, U.S. forces were deployed in Honduras. For fear that the U.S. might be seen to be replicating the error of 1953, Obama has kept his distance from the Iranian dispute. As ever, Central American nations’ past resentments about frequent U.S. intervention count for little or nothing, and so Obama has dived right in.

The President said that a “terrible precedent” would be set if Zelaya was not allowed to return to office. Yes, there would be a terrible precedent that Presidents cannot break the law and get away with it; there would be a terrible precedent that the rule of law prevailed; there would be a terrible precedent that Hondurans coped with their own political crisis without having to depend on anyone else to fix their problems for them. If I sympathized with left-populists, executive usurpation or interventionist foreign policy, I would be deeply troubled by what the Honduran military has done in ousting a usurping populist without having to rely on outside aid. One can only guess why the administration is getting this one so badly wrong, whether it is currying favor with other OAS member states or not wanting to appear as a supporter of a “coup” or just plain fumbling the issue, but it has dropped the ball on Honduras. We can only hope that it will not lead to any greater mistakes than misguided rhetoric.

After its late spring hiatus, NBC’s Kings returned earlier this month, and I remain a regular viewer and fan of the unusual, doomed series that has been adapting the story of Saul and David. Naturally, the show has already been cancelled, as its early, abysmally low ratings all but guaranteed, and NBC made every effort to sabotage the show by putting on the television equivalent of Death Row–primetime on the weekend. Once the show had been moved to Saturday, execution was not far away. There are just a handful of episodes left out of the thirteen that had been made, and it is unlikely that there will be much satisfactory resolution of the story with what little time is left. Like another brilliant, doomed show cancelled before its time, Firefly, Kings will shortly disappear, but before it does I recommend that you all start watching it if you haven’t already. If I’m right about this, I think it will win a larger, loyal following in the years to come, and on this trivial question you will be able to say that you saw the value in it before most people had ever heard of it.

In Iran, we know that the protesters are rallying against the perpetuation of Ahmadinejad’s presidential power and the illegalities surrounding the election and its aftermath. Honduras is seeing a different play unfold: the deposed President’s backers have taken to the streets to protest the enforcement of the law against Zelaya, who was deliberately and illegally attempting to perpetuate his presidential power. The comparison between the two systems is imperfect, but the situation in Honduras is as if Khamenei had dismissed Ahmadinejad and pro-Ahmadinejad Basijis had started rioting in response. (In other words, something very much like Zelaya’s deposition is what pro-Mousavi Westerners would love to see happen in Iran.) Because he is an executive, Zelaya’s deposition is treated on the international stage as more serious and threatening to Honduran democracy than any comparable executive usurpation against national legislatures, despite the threat to constitutional government that popular executives pose. As in Thailand three years ago, a popular executive began acting as if the law did not apply to him, and to put an end to this misrule the army intervened. This is not optimal. It is never an absolutely good thing when the military must intervene, because it suggests some deeper dysfunction in the political system. Even so, it is better than the alternative, which is for an increasingly authoritarian populist to concentrate power in his own hands and to become less and less accountable to his people.

The Honduran “coup” that is today being condemned by the OAS is exactly the outcome that one might like to see occur in Iran with military institutions defending the letter of the constitution against usurpation. We know why this is unlikely to happen in Iran: the usurpers have the loyalty of the armed forces. The Honduran “coup” is a near-perfect example of how another nation has been able to handle their own internal problems and affirm their own constitutional rules without needing any outside help. Expressing disapproval of the Honduran military’s actions seems at best premature and most likely ill-advised all together. Non-interference in Honduras consistent with treaty and OAS obligations should be our policy. There appears to be a broad consensus inside Honduran political institutions that Zelaya crossed the line and had to go, and that ought to count for a great deal when deciding on how the U.S. and OAS should respond. The military’s actions in Honduras may be nothing other than law enforcement. Jason Steck explains:

As more news continues to filter out of Honduras, it appears as if the Honduran military was specifically authorized by a court order to arrest a President that was judged to be out of control. The fact that the American military would never be so authorized should not distract us from the possibility that legal authorizations for military interventions into politics might exist in other countries’ constitutional arrangements. The takeover in Honduras might be, in fact, a legal coup.

Inevitably, American reaction to the “coup” has tended to break down along ideological lines: those on the right in America are going to have no problem with it, and those on the left are more likely to see something nefarious in what has happened. It seems clear that the administration’s response was as unwisely aggressive in its condemnation as it was restrained in response to events in Iran.

P.S. As this Stratfor report makes clear, Chavez’s bluster about military intervention on behalf of Zelaya is mere posturing. Contrary to some of the fearmongers in the U.S. in recent years, Chavez hasn’t the means to project power in any meaningful way beyond Venezuela’s very immediate neighborhood, and even there he is constrained.

James has an unusual take Western attitudes towards Russia:

So here’s my peanut: bad relations with Russia make us feel so uncomfortable because they challenge and undermine our most cherished narratives about the moral and social progress of the global white community. I know even suggesting that we think analytically in terms of an ‘international white race’ sets off alarms, but it’s obvious that Russian disinterest in, or outright hostility to, liberal political norms is noteworthy primarily because virtually every other majority-white country in the world has embraced and institutionalized them. We (small-l) liberals recoil at the very idea that any white person could seriously appreciate or even live under a regime like Russia’s, because this is a reminder that white people are not the charmed winners of Earth’s civilizational marathon — contestants who can rest easy now that they’ve completed the course and won the race.

I have to give James high marks for creativity, but I don’t think so. The idea of a “global white community” doesn’t set off any alarms, because this refers to something that is a community in about the same way that “the international community” is actually a community. Discomfort with poor Russian relations is not anxiety caused by Russia’s subversion of some international white narrative. Put differently, what James is trying to say might not sound so strange. What annoys Westerners about Russia is that Russians are historically Christian, culturally European and are the most thoroughly Westernized so-called “Eastern” nation (in no small part because they have been part of “Western Civilization” for a millennium), but this does not lead most Russians to quite the same political preferences as their neighbors. That suggests that political preferences and constitutions are highly contingent and they are driven by particular interests and conditions. Western liberals seem to find this hard to believe, and they are reduced to explaining away such things by invoking irrationality as the cause.

It also suggests that a country’s history imposes limitations and constraints on how a polity develops, and it tells us yet again that there is no single model of modernity or modernization. Westerners may accept this in theory, but a lot of them don’t like it. However, before we get carried away in emphasizing Russian “disinterest” in or “hostility” to liberal norms, it is worth noting, as Lieven has done, that most Russians want a free media and the rule of law, or at least they say they do, but this does not therefore translate into what is conventionally defined as a “pro-Western” attitude on various matters of policy. This may help get at one of the real sources of Western frustration with Russia: the enduring importance of nationalism in international affairs.

If post-1989 central and eastern European liberal democrats embraced Western norms, they did so in part to reject Russia. As Lieven made clear in that item from earlier this month, liberal democracy succeeded in post-communist Europe where it did in part because it was grounded in an anti-Russian, nationalist reaction that the Russians themselves could never have. Instead, like every other post-communist nation (and like every still-officially communist state in existence), Russians have become or rather continued to be very nationalistic. Undomesticated, fierce nationalism in post-Soviet space is fine in the eyes of most Westerners, provided that its hostility is directed squarely at Moscow or its allies, but any expression of nationalism coming from Russia causes Westerners to worry, even though this resurgence of nationalism is something that is common to all post-communist nations.

This brings us back to a more basic issue, which is widespread and persistent hostility to Russia that taps into various old prejudices about tsarism, communism, Orthodoxy, Slavs and all things from “the East.” Were Russia somehow to become the vanguard of a global democratic revolutionary force, I can almost imagine many Westerners finding cause to celebrate authoritarian governments cropping up all over eastern Europe to help thwart the democratic Russian menace. After all, even a thoroughly liberal democratic Russia will not cease to have its own national interests and ambitions, and a liberal Russia would have far more pretexts for intervention in the affairs of its neighbors, perhaps beginning with the “liberations” of Belarus and Azerbaijan from the grip of their local despots. One can almost imagine all of the defenders of “liberal imperialism” from the last few years suddenly discover the dangers of ideologically-justified interference in the internal affairs of other nations.

I would say that Russia vexes Western liberals (broadly defined) because the Russian example suggests that historical memory, culture and the nation’s past are far from irrelevant to the constitution of a polity. Western liberals seem to want these things to be absolutely irrelevant, because they tend to get in the way of planting liberal democracies in other countries. I’ll wager the people who are made uncomfortable by bad relations with Russia are very few, and we are unlikely to be representative. Most people are either indifferent to this or may even be pleased by it. Nothing brings back comfortable, lazy policy-making and self-congratulatory rhetoric like being able to vilify “the Russkies” as in the old days. Unless ensuring bad relations with Russia is the deliberate goal, I cannot explain how else Washington can persist in policies that are guaranteed to result in bad relations.

The Russian example is discouraging to democracy enthusiasts, because it makes clear how vital strong legal institutions and limitations on state power are to a mass democracy if it is not going to become a plebiscitary authoritarian state. Even if the enthusiasts acknowledge this, they don’t like being reminded that liberal and good government is largely of a function of all the very un-democratic institutions and elements of our system. Whenever these people whine about Russian “backsliding” away from democracy, they don’t want to have to think about how the current Russian government is illiberal, authoritarian and interventionist in the economy because this is in many (though not all) ways what most of the people want.