PrintJuly 28, 2009
The Diplomacy of Jackals
Enabling tyrants is never wise, and whether political or religious, a despot cares nothing for "social justice" except as a rhetorical tool. The success of their "revolutionary struggle" is paramount. The downtrodden and disadvantaged swayed by their populism seldom prosper for long, because in the end it is about power and conquest and control. President Obama has yet to realize that in the real world, the diplomacy of jackals seldom goes well for the sheep.
When the Honduran judicial and legislative branches of government removed a corrupt and criminal President for illegal activity, the Obama administration condemned the action as a "military coup" and called for the return of the exiled president, Manuel Zelaya. An ally of presumptive Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Zelaya brought Honduras into the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America (ALBA). Its membership includes Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. It has been instrumental in mobilizing leftist movements in Central and South America, propagandizing populations, intimidating the press, and where possible, rigging elections in favor of populist leftist candidates. ALBA, under Chavez's leadership, specializes in all the predictable electoral abuses the US press is congenitally incapable of reporting and the US government now tacitly condones.
Using Hugo Chavez's tactics as a template, ALBA helps its candidates gain power by manipulating the democratic institutions of their native country, then deconstructing those institutions to ensure they maintain power, becoming in effect "elected" dictators. This is what President Zelaya was doing when he was removed from power. He was attempting to circumvent the Honduran Constitution and establish an electoral precedent through a rigged referendum to change constitutional term limits. This would allow him to seek further terms in office, a change expressly forbidden by the Honduran constitution and declared illegal by the country's Supreme Court. The justices pursued the matter in an expressly constitutional manner when they requested the military act as law enforcement as outlined in the Honduran constitution.
One would think our intrepid Central American experts, the ones that inhabit the State Department, would have pointed out these facts. The President, advised by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, should have steered a less confrontational course on the issue, instead of condemning a clearly legal and constitutional action by the elected government of Honduras. Their reflexive response, supportive of a socialist thug, was sadly predictable, because at its core, the Obama administration has far more in common with the governments of Hugo Chavez and Manuel Zelaya than it does with the new lawful government of Honduras.
There is no formal alliance, rather it is more an ideological commonality, an instinctive understanding of motives and methods and intended outcomes. This springs from the primal leftist urge -- to rule the citizenry they consider too stupid to participate in the democratic process, modern day peasants fit only to be lead and manipulated by educated anointed elites who can conceive great ideas and endeavor great works. The ancient curse of arrogance and privilege comingled with the failed ideologies that have vexed us for a century. Its acolytes are quick to recognize a fellow traveler.
The Obama administration even has a back channel network to communicate its intentions, those too radical and politically dangerous to reveal to the overly conservative citizenry, a network of couriers and confidants, who carry the "unofficial" policies to the Marxists that Harvard and Columbia University teach are merely the misunderstood victims of capitalism and American imperialism.
Found on a laptop in a FARC terrorist camp in 2007 and released by Columbian security services, a series of letters between FARC hierarchies confirms the substantial support of FARC by Hugo Chavez. A passage from one letter is particularly troubling and has nagged at my curiosity since:
"The gringos will ask for an appointment with the minister to solicit him to communicate to us his interest in discussing these topics. They say that the new president of their country will be Obama and that they are interested in your compatriots. Obama will not support "Plan Colombia" nor will he sign the TLC [Columbian Free Trade Agreement]. Here we responded that we are interested in relations with all governments in equality of conditions and that in the case of the US it is required a public pronouncement expressing their interest in talking with the FARC given their eternal war against us." Raul Reyes, FARC Terrorist Commander
And so it has come to pass in Obama's foreign policy, the Columbian Free Trade Agreement is effectively dead in the water, undercut by Democrats beholden to labor unions and the far left sympathetic to brutal terror groups like FARC and Marxists like Chavez. Columbia, our most loyal ally in the region, is rewarded with a stunning betrayal. Who was the messenger? The US had several congressional delegations visit the region at the time. Members of the congressional black caucus have since made their Marxist allegiances abundantly clear when they visited the Castro brothers this year. Obama's long time confidant and friend William Ayers, former terrorist and activist Marxist, is an outspoken supporter of Chavez and visits the region frequently. Members of Obama's advisory team also visited Syria, no doubt with similar messages about Israel, brought by Americans who despise their own history, carrying messages of friendship to enemies that would gleefully destroy us. The consequences of these actions may be small, or they may be catastrophic, but when so little wisdom is behind them, we should all be worried.
The "post-American" America of Obama's worldview can only lose in the foreign policy he constructs, and the lack of a superpower's realistic self-interest only encourages bad men to do bad things. Bad decisions made out of ignorance or naiveté receive no forgiveness from those who suffer for them. Time diffuses blame, the exact origins of suffering may be forgotten but the consequences remain.
Our Democrats, more accurately called Socialists, adhere to Alinsky/Machiavelli models as their guiding principle of political combat. The gutter they fight from in domestic politics is ill suited to form foreign policy or ensure our security. So invested in undermining their political opponents, they forget that we all prosper or fail in the same nation, and instead of simply defeating a political party, they work to defeat the republic itself. Like their natural allies Chavez and Zelaya, they intend on politicizing the instruments and institutions of the nation, finally controlling them, their desired outcome, unchallenged power.
Every passing week gives us more evidence that the tricks and tools used by Chavez in Venezuela are to be found here, in the hands of Democrats, attempting the same deconstruction of our republic that Chavez has orchestrated in South America. Critical industry is being nationalized; the banks are coming under ever expanding government control, the prosperity of our citizens is under assault with "cap and trade" energy taxes, health care "reform," and ineffective "stimulus." The government prints money with abandon, short-term political goals paramount and the lessons of history forgotten. Special interests, unions and select minorities receive exceptional treatment, entitlement and status. Criminals in the Black Panthers and ACORN go free as they are in the Obama cabal. Corruption is rampant as the party in power steals from its citizens, lies to them and rewards their political cronies with billions in taxpayer money. The press is a lap dog, endorsing and propagandizing the government agenda. Their role in a free democracy is abandoned. Things are not looking well.
The betrayal of allies fighting for their lives against monstrous evil is a foretelling of what is to come if we sit idle. If we let them, the Socialists will attempt to control everything, how we live; what we eat, what we drive, where we shop, what we buy, and in the end, they will even try to control what we think. Every victory for Obama brings with it dire consequences for the nation. In 2012, we may well sit down to a "Banquet" indeed, a banquet of lost freedom, a divided and weakened nation, full of unemployment, wracked by violence, crippling taxes and broken industry and neglected infrastructure. It will be a banquet of ashes, the same one Chavez and Zelaya and Ortega prepare for their nations writ large, with all its consequences. The Jackals will howl with glee.
Exaggerated self-criticism would be a harmless luxury of civilization if there were no enemy at the gate condemning democracy's very existence. But it becomes dangerous when it portrays its mortal enemy as always being in the right. Extravagant criticism is a good propaganda device in internal politics. But if it is repeated often enough, it is finally believed. And where will the citizens of democratic societies find reasons to resist the enemy outside if they are persuaded from childhood that their civilization is merely an accumulation of failures and a monstrous imposture?
-- Jean Francois Revel, How Democracies Perish
