“America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend”

So, let me get this straight. When Iranians are putting their lives on the line against a thuggish regime that has made a mockery of the rule of law and of elections, the Obama administration dithers. Wouldn’t want to offend the government that constantly refers to the U.S. as the Great Satan and even now blames the CIA and Basij “impostors” for the death of that young woman, Neda, caught on the video. Certainly one would not want to call that a “coup,” as quite a number of commentators have analyzed it.

But, lo and behold, that same Obama and his officials are very quick to call what happened in Honduras a coup. Indeed, unlike the example of Iran, where the administration did not want “to meddle,” they had no such reticence about meddling in Honduran politics. There, the incumbent president, a leftist ally of Obama buddy Hugo Chavez, could not run for re-election due to constitutional term limits. South American citizens, with their experience with caudillo governments that run rigged elections and serve decade after decade, have a reason to be suspicious of multiple terms, so term limits are a protective device.

The Honduran president, Zelaya, following the lead of his mentor Hugo Chavez, then tried to get the constitution changed by popular referendum to allow him to run again. Problem is that the Honduran constitution does not permit amendment by popular referendum called by the president. Instead, it has to come from the Congress.  But the Congress, worried that Zelaya was becoming a Chavez stooge, refused. The country’s Supreme Court ordered Zelaya not to undertake the referendum. When Zelaya persisted in pursuing the referendum against the constitutional order, Congress told the military not to assist in the referendum. The army chief warned Zelaya not to proceed and told him that the military would obey Congress. Zelaya fired him, whereupon the heads of the military resigned. The Supreme Court ordered Zelaya to reinstate the general. When Zelaya refused the Supreme Court’s order and also persisted in pushing for the referendum, the army (acting on the order of the Congress) deposed him. This appears to be permitted under Article 239 of the Honduran constitution.

The military did not seize control. Rather, Congress elected an interim president (from Zelaya’s own party), as the constitution requires, and kept the election date set for November. Zelaya has no support among the political institutions of Honduras, apparently. Yet Obama wants this man restored, presumably to make it easier for Chavez, who has demonstrated his support for Iranian agents and Hizb’Ullah-connected figures, to influence Honduras. Iranian influence has already spread into Latin America through Chavez, Castro, and Ortega in Nicaragua. Now it is to spread into Honduras, a country even closer to Mexico, a likely Iranian target for destabilization.

Meanwhile, Obama’s buddy Chavez has threatened military action against Honduras to restore his puppet to power. Not a word against that from Obama, of course. It is rich that Chavez, who himself led an unsuccessful actual military coup against the Venezuelan government before he became president, rails against this civilian change as a coup, language duly adopted by the White House. Further, some members of the Organization of American States want that group to expel Honduras. At the same time, they want the real gulag-enforcing thugocracy of Cuba duly admitted as an honored member, another matter where Chavez and Obama see eye-to-eye.

Yet another example of Obama’s keen intellect at work and proof again of the historian Bernard Lewis’s aphorism that “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”