Despite all of the talk about the recent Vanity Fair feature on her, Andrew’s renewed obsessions with every detail of her life raising of important questions, John’s tireless refutations of those obsessions important questions, and reports of the continued support she enjoys from most Republicans, I have felt no need to say anything about her for several months. By the end of the election campaign, I had come to think that she was unqualified for the post she was seeking, and I probably allowed her more irritating supporters to color my judgment of her more than I should have, but once the election was over I would have been pleased to let her get on with her work in Alaska. After a flurry of post-election appearances, she seemed to do just that, and that was fine. I don’t think I ever feared that she would run for President in 2012. If she ran, she would lose the nomination to someone else, and if she didn’t she would have gone off into the sunset with all of the other losing VP candidates. Palin was never as threatening to the left nor as wonderful for the right as both sides imagined. Her resignation will prove to be a good thing for her, her family and Alaska. Her tenure as governor has been so lackluster that it might be fair to say that Palin never demonstrated her worthiness for the office so much as in her departing from it.

Never has a major political candidate been so poorly served by her own supporters. To quote that Russian proverb again, “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” Palin was surrounded and cheered on by almost nothing but yes-men, because once anyone tried to offer any kind of criticism that person seemed to become persona non grata in her circle and in the wider conservative world pretty quickly. That is why a reasonable column offering advice and encouragement to Palin could be met by so much insane fury from so many of her supporters. It will be very difficult to explain to later generations what it was that the Palinites saw in her that made them so fervent and enthusiastic. The Palin enthusiasm of 2008 will not end up making much sense a few years from now. At least the excitement about a Jack Kemp presidential campaign after 1996 was based in a record with some accomplishments in it.

While I initially gave her some benefit of the doubt, I never pretended to be a supporter, because I could not bring myself to cheer on anyone who would work so closely with McCain, but like many on the right I found something initially very likeable about her. After the first week or so, likeability became much less important once we started finding out something about her record. What came to be so annoying about her was not so much that she performed poorly in interviews, had no policy knowledge outside of issues related to oil, and had an unremarkable record as governor (except when she was jacking up windfall profits taxes to redistribute liberate the money from oil corporations), but it was that her supporters seemed intent on never acknowledging her errors, refused to hold her accountable when she made misleading statements and began making virtues out of her weaknesses. Whether or not Palin could have become a much better candidate, there was no way that things could work out well for her or the country with supporters like this.

P.S. I never did understand why so many people on the right liked to refer to her as conservatives’ Joan of Arc. At least in the earthly, political sphere, that meant she was doomed to defeat. Just another example of the sheer weirdness of some of her supporters, I suppose.

Update: This was not clear to me when I started writing this post, but it seems that there are crazy people advising Palin that this is how she can run for President in 2012. John Weaver observes that it doesn’t make sense:

“I’m not smart enough to see the strategy in this,” said John Weaver, a senior party strategist. “Good point guards don’t quit and walk off the court.”

To use a different sports reference, there are no votes in becoming the Vince Young of politics.

Second Update: I keep seeing these odd Richard Nixon references in commentary on this resignation. As Alex Massie notes, Richard Nixon was already a fairly significant, well-established political figure by 1960. Just as important, he was the losing candidate in a close race in which he was the presidential candidate, and so far as I know Nixon never resigned from a major office before his term was up unless it was to take a more prestigious post. To make a Nixonian comeback, it might be helpful if Palin’s career were in any way comparable to Nixon’s.

Even so, there is no evidence of Hondurans clamouring for the president’s return with anything like the enthusiasm of outsiders. ~The Economist

This much has been clear. Al Giordano can whine about statements from the “Oligarchic Diaspora” to his heart’s content–it doesn’t make the transitional government’s actions any less popular, nor does it change the overwhelming consensus of the Honduran political and military leadership that he had to be removed from power. We have seen in many “color” revolutions that the “pro-Western” or “pro-American” faction in other countries is often more oligarchic and has a much narrower social base than its opponents. Naturally, those are the causes that Westerners have embraced wholeheartedly, including during the Iranian protests. Today we have the spectacle of the world united in support of the cause of a disgraced cattle baron with 25% support who allies himself with Hugo Chavez, and they call that support for democracy.

One of the dangers of any sudden change in who holds political power, be it a coup or revolution, is that it does not necessarily reflect public opinion and has not been done with the consent of the majority. Worse than any simply legal violation, it can damage the social and political fabric of the country, and it can tear at the organic constitution that has grown up over time. As a result, the sudden change creates upheaval and conflict in the country, and introduces bitter divisions that can lead to cycles of violent resistance and reprisal. If the change is violent, as if often is, it can radicalize the entire society and make future political compromise impossible. However, what we have seen in Honduras does not fit these descriptions at all. Somehow the deposition of a wildly unpopular, law-breaking president has been declared anti-democratic. I would have thought that only Cheney-like presidential cultists could so closely identify the substance of democracy with the element in modern republican government that is most monarchical, but I would be wrong about that.

According to Mexican pollster Mitofsky’s April survey, Zelaya was Latin America’s least popular leader. Only 25 percent of the nation supported him. Another survey found that 67 percent of Hondurans would never vote for him again. Why? Because the Hondurans attributed to him a deep level of corruption; because they assumed he had links to drug trafficking, especially drugs originating in Venezuela, as former U.S. Ambassador to the O.A.S. Roger Noriega revealed in a well-documented article published in his blog; and because violence and poverty — the nation’s two worst scourges — have increased dramatically during his three years in power.

Simply put, a huge majority of the country — including the two major political parties (including Zelaya’s), the Christian churches, the other branches of government and the armed forces — do not want him as president. ~Carlos Alberto Montaner

Does it really make any sense to say that the collective response of all of the country’s political institutions to remove Zelaya from power, which reflected an overwhelming majority consensus of the population, resulted in an attack on democracy? What would its defense look like? It would be one thing to say that Zelaya should return to restore social peace because he still has broad support from much of the country, but this is not the case. He broke the law and most people there are sick of him. It’s all very well to say that the Honduran government should have handled things better, but what would bringing Zelaya back into the country and back into office do except exacerbate political tensions and increase the chance of civil strife? That is what the U.N. and OAS (and Washington as a member of both) are demanding Honduras do, and it doesn’t make sense.

Can you remember a story where pundits have varied so widely on the basic facts?

Yes, I can. The war in Georgia, the pre-war debate on Iraq’s weapons programs and supposed ties to Al Qaeda, and the “genocide” in Kosovo come to mind as the most outstanding examples of two different sides seeming to inhabit entirely different universes. We went to war against Yugoslavia and Iraq because the side that was largely inhabiting a fantasy world won the public relations battle. Fortunately, the experience of Iraq, the complexity of the situation in Georgia and the dangers of intervening directly prevented fools from rushing in once more. In Honduras, the stakes for the U.S. are lower, which may help account for why there is less fundamental disagreement about what has happened there. The differences are more a matter of emphasis and interpretation than fact, but to some extent there are still pretty wildly differing accounts of recent events.

One of the reasons why I was so skeptical and wary of the pro-Mousavi enthusiasm that automatically sprang up everywhere after June 12 was that it reminded me of the same kind of enthusiastic misunderstanding about foreign affairs that led so many people to be so spectacularly wrong about what was happening and what should be done about it in those other cases. I am still wary of attributing too much significance to the protests, but in the early days of the protests the general Western presumption in favor of a “coup” explanation of what happened in Iran seems to be identical to the early, automatic international acceptance of pro-Zelaya arguments. At this point, the coup label is much more appropriate for Iran than it will ever be for Honduras, and even in Iran it doesn’t fully convey what happened.

What worried me about the automatic solidarity with Mousavi and his supporters was that it was simply taken for granted that the side we in the West found more attractive could only have lost through fraud and illegality, and therefore must have won and been cheated. Even now, we do not know and will probably never know what the real vote count was, because it seems clear there was never any intention of actually counting it, but the illegality of the government’s response has been plain for all to see for some time. Likewise, the automatic presumption in the Honduras case was that it was basically wrong to depose a democratically-elected president regardless of the circumstances (even if looking at those circumstances would make his deposition seem entirely justified). Perhaps in time the illegality of Zelaya’s actions will be as universally recognized and his deposition will be seen as the appropriate response after all.

President Obama has emphasized that the United States’ post-Cold War policy towards Latin America would support institutions and legal processes, not individuals and political ideologies. ~Michael Thomas Derham

Of course, by effectively siding with Zelaya against all of the institutions of the Honduran government that had the president deposed for his illegal activities, Obama not only gives the appearance of supporting an individual and an ideology rather than institutions and legal processes, but he also really has lent support to an individual and an ideology. The administration may believe that it is showing its devotion to democratic principle by backing the claim of a politician whose agenda and alliances they claim to oppose, but by endorsing what is at this point an illegitimate claim of one man over against the institutions of the Honduran government the administration is clearly showing partiality towards an individual at the expense of principles of constitutional government. Honduran institutions blundered by involving the military in a hasty defense of those principles, and had they not done so they would not have given their foreign critics and enemies ammunition to use against them. Nonetheless, if the administration is ultimately guided by respect for institutions and legal processes, it ultimately has to come down on the side of the flawed institutions that poorly handled a constitutional crisis, but which still retain far more legitimacy than Zelaya, whose intent to challenge and undermine those institutions should make the choice between imperfect alternatives much easier. Obama may think he has chosen principle over personalities by backing Zelaya’s return, but he is badly mistaken about this.

In the meantime, he has given an easy target to the people who wrongly railed against him over his handling of the Iranian protests. Much of the criticism of Obama coming from the American right on Honduras is as opportunistic as the OAS’s newfound devotion to democratic principles and the letter of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, but Obama has provided an opening to those critics who will try to find fault with everything he does. Most of these critics may be quite confused, demanding foolish, counterproductive action in Iran and non-interference in Honduras, but that does not make them wrong on Honduras. Unfortunately I fear that some of the same knee-jerk reaction against whatever the “neocon line” appears to be is also informing the response of some realists and non-interventionists to what has happened in Honduras. Supporting the transitional government is the right thing to do even if The Wall Street Journal editors and their ilk take that view.

Honduras’s military acted under judicial orders in deposing President Manuel Zelaya, Supreme Court Justice Rosalinda Cruz said, rejecting the view of President Barack Obama and other leaders that he was toppled in a coup.

“The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,” Cruz, 55, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. “There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.”

Cruz said the court issued a sealed arrest order for Zelaya on June 26, charging him with treason and abuse of power, among other offenses. Zelaya had repeatedly breached the constitution by pushing ahead with a vote about rewriting the nation’s charter that the court ruled illegal, and which opponents contend would have paved the way for a prohibited second term. ~Bloomberg

Constitutional assemblies are convened to write new constitutions. When Zelaya published that decree to initiate an “opinion poll” about the possibility of convening a national assembly, he contravened the unchangeable articles of the Constitution that deal with the prohibition of reelecting a president and of extending his term. His actions showed intent.

Our Constitution takes such intent seriously. According to Article 239: “No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

Notice that the article speaks about intent and that it also says “immediately” – as in “instant,” as in “no trial required,” as in “no impeachment needed.”

Continuismo – the tendency of heads of state to extend their rule indefinitely – has been the lifeblood of Latin America’s authoritarian tradition. The Constitution’s provision of instant sanction might sound draconian, but every Latin American democrat knows how much of a threat to our fragile democracies continuismo presents. In Latin America, chiefs of state have often been above the law. The instant sanction of the supreme law has successfully prevented the possibility of a new Honduran continuismo. ~Octavio Sanchez

I would like to think that these reports would make advocates for Zelaya’s reinstatement think again, but whenever the magic word of democracy is invoked it seems as if even those who are otherwise the most skeptical, critical thinkers become like groupies cheering for their favorite musician. Crucially, there has been a stunning absence of Honduran voices condemning the actions of the military and the transitional government. I don’t rule out that there are many Hondurans who oppose Zelaya’s deposition, but it is getting harder and harder to credit that the Honduran military acted without orders from duly constituted legal authorities. The way Honduras is being treated by the rest of the world is a disgrace, and neither U.S. interests nor regional stability is being served by the isolation of Tegucigalpa.

More from Bloomberg:

Cruz acknowledged that the interim government faced a “very difficult” task trying to sway the U.S. and other countries to recognize its authority.

“But as a sovereign and independent nation, we have the right to freely decide to remove a president who was violating our laws,” she said. “Unfortunately our voice hasn’t been heard.”

Honduras is learning the bitter lesson that so many small nations have learned in the last twenty years and in the century before that: small nations are never really sovereign and independent if some grander scheme requires them to be trampled on. It is shameful that Washington is participating to the extent that is in the mistreatment of Honduras.

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.

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.

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.

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 Cato@Liberty. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps paleos who have recently gone on record opposing “interference” and “intervention” in Iran need to define exactly what they mean by these terms. Do interference and intervention refer to the unlikely act of sending in the Marines, or do these words also include any moral support for embattled democratic forces in Iran? While I support paleos who condemn military intervention in Iran in light of the sorry history of past interventions in the Middle East, I fail to see why democratic governments should hold their rhetorical fire against the mullahs. Surely we are not condemned to the dualistic and extreme choice between outright military intervention and eerie silence, which offers no hope to human beings like the frightened Iranian woman I mentioned earlier.

Something that I don’t quite understand is why anyone would conclude that silence or minimal comment condemning the Iranian government’s violence by government officials requires that private individuals refrain from expressing their moral support. There has been no small amount of moral support offered to the protesters by citizens of Western democracies. While I might find these enthusiasms a bit romantic, unduly earnest and misplaced (because it seems inevitably to lead to calls for the government to “do something”), other citizens are free to express their solidarity with Iranian protesters as they see fit. Interference refers obviously to actions taken by the government. The actions of the U.S. government have to be taken with American interests in mind, and representatives of the government ought to act accordingly. To borrow from the famous 1821 speech of then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, America has “abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.” We have grown so accustomed to interference that we seem incapable of grasping that it is deeply at odds with our earliest traditions of foreign policy. Does that mean that many American citizens did not openly sympathize with the Spanish and Italian liberals who were at that time being beaten down by Restoration forces? Of course not. It means that our government did not concern itself with things that were none of its business. So that is one part of the answer why the government should not interfere.

The other part is one that has already been thoroughly rehearsed over the last two weeks, which is that having our government hold its “rhetorical fire” may be more useful in aiding the protesters than a daily stream of outraged pronouncements from Washington. After all, if the call to interfere is merely a call for expressions of moral support, what good is it doing anyone? Will Washington’s moral support make the Basij militiaman more or less likely to see the Iranian protester in front of him as a fellow Iranian rather than a criminal? If it will make the protester’s situation more difficult, whose cause is served by showing solidarity?

Have the government make a statement expressing moral support, and you may feel very content, but it may have serious consequences for the very people you are trying to aid. Encouragement can easily bleed over into reckless promises of assistance, or it can be perceived wrongly as such, in which case the lost lives of protesters who trusted in empty words will be on the heads of those in government who made these statements. This would be the worst of both worlds: effectively uninvolved, but still bearing the moral responsibility for goading the dissidents into futile, bloody resistance. Unable and unwilling to take any greater direct action, perhaps it is best for the government to refrain from making statements in support of the protesters.

Havers cites Solzhenitsyn’s call for greater Western interference inside the USSR to admonish the advocates of non-interference. It may be unthinkable for some to say so, but Solzhenitsyn’s perspective on what American foreign policy ought to have been was not always as wise and sober as his reflections on moral and religious truth. In his Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn made the following remarks, which even the greatest admirers of Solzhenitsyn have to find more than a little embarrassing:

However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation’s courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

Solzhenitsyn was in many ways a moral genius and a prophetic voice, and I think he was a good writer, but in this instance he was not, alas, a serious foreign policy thinker nor was he a strategist. One can understand why a man who suffered so deeply in the Gulag would adopt an unflinching, uncompromising attitude towards communism everywhere, but the alarmism that compelled him to warn of a looming “hundredfold Vietnam” a mere eleven years before the collapse of the USSR should make us think again about his equally insistent demand to interfere early and often. What devoted anticommunists could not then and to some extent today still cannot admit is that Vietnam was basically unnecessary and irrelevant to the greater success of the West in the Cold War. They furthermore cannot accept that the millions who died in the war and the millions who perished in its aftermath most likely would not have died had there never been a “crusade” to save South Vietnam. This is a bitter truth, and there are not many people who would want to accept this. Being wrong about this does not change all of the things that Solzhenitsyn got right, but thirty-one years later we might note that we have listened more often than not to people who have said that the West was lacking in willpower, needed to show more “resolve,” and had gone horribly wrong in withdrawing from Vietnam, and in almost every instance in the last three decades those people have been as wrong as can be. If we admire Solzhenitsyn and can find a record of Solzhenitsyn saying things that could be put into the mouths of interventionists today, we should take care not to expose Solzhenitsyn to ridicule.

Do we really believe that “there are no longer any internal affairs”? While I understand why a man who wished to see the Soviet monstrosity removed from his home country would say this in 1974, is this really the sort of claim that anyone would want to endorse today? Are there no internal affairs of the United States? Are there no internal affairs of Iran? Have we all been pressed together by our sheer numbers such that we cannot discern where one state begins and another ends? I think we know the answer. One might have asked the Solzhenitsyn of 2004 whether he still believed that “there are no longer any internal affairs” when it came to Western denunciations of Russia, and I tend to think that he would have changed his mind. I suspect that internal affairs would have come back into existence. I am not saying this to criticize Solzhenitsyn. A dissident against a monstrous system will seek aid where and how he can–that is his obligation, and he is doing what he can for his country as a patriot. However, it is not necessarily the job of the United States government to follow his lead, nor does the government have to accept his claims.

In the address Havers cited, Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb: “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” I agree with this entirely. It applies to so many foreign policy debates past and present: the war in Iraq, Israel policy, America’s military presence abroad, and on and on. Turn it around and apply it to the dissenters in other countries. The advocates of interference want us not only to offer moral support to the dissenters, which probably will not help them, but they are positively urging us to become their cheerleaders and propagandists abroad. Following this proverb, this means that we will become their enemies, because we will be cheering them on in what might well be a disastrous course of action. It could be that the friend of Iranian reform and the protesters at this point will even go so far as to question whether the protesters are doing their own cause more harm than good in the long run. The meaning of the proverb is that unreflective, uncritical backing is dangerous; true concern for someone’s well-being will sometimes require disagreement and argument. I would add that sometimes it may require a government to remain mostly quiet while that person carries on his struggle, lest the government compromise or sabotage that struggle in a foolish attempt to affirm its own importance and status in the world.

Anyone familiar with the views of Barack Obama’s pastor of twenty years might wonder if Reverend Jeremiah Wright is the chief inspiration behind the president’s foreign policy. ~Mark Hyman

Well, anyone familiar with the foreign policy views of Barack Obama might wonder if Mark Hyman is very confused. First, he misrepresents what Obama has done in office as an “apology tour.” This is taken as a given in many conservative circles, but even this part isn’t correct. If anyone can show me where Obama has actually apologized (i.e., expressed regret, asked for forgiveness, etc.) for a single thing the United States has done, I would be very interested to see it. He has mostly acknowledged things that everyone already knows to be true, otherwise reiterated things that his predecessors have already said, and in other cases simply refused to take the bait offered him by ridiculous foreign leaders (e.g., Ortega). The pointed dismissal of Ortega is taken by Hyman as “deference,” which suggests that Hyman does not understand what deference is. Contemptuously ignoring someone is the opposite of deferring to him. A good example of deference would be what the now-disgraced Mark Sanford did when he yielded to Gingrich’s allegedly superior understanding in a discussion on North Korea.

Far from “finding unlimited fault” with America, as Hyman claims, Obama can earnestly spout the most predictable self-congratulatory nostrums about the country and America’s role in the world. From the first convention speech that catapulted Obama to national prominence till now, Obama has never allowed acknowledgment of past mistakes to dominate his rhetoric about America. The Obama who has repeatedly praised an America of possibility and opportunity, which conservatives were so keen to cheer on in 2007, is the same Obama who gave the speeches in Cairo, Ankara and Berlin. Bizarrely, even though the Cairo speech was laced with as much pro-American rhetoric as one could ever expect in an address presumably designed to conciliate Muslims worldwide it has been taken as some sort of calculated insult. Contrary to the caricature Hyman and others have drawn, Obama can barely bring himself to find fault with America, and even when he does he is always offsetting this by drawing attention to the flaws of others. So while he said that Americans were sometimes “derisive” of Europeans, he accused Europeans of tolerating and practicing an “insidious” anti-Americanism. Which of the two statements is stronger and more critical? Clearly, it is the latter. Naturally, conservatives are whining about the first one, because even minimal acknowledgment of American error (especially when it is an error in which they participated so enthusiastically) is intolerable in their eyes. To attempt to link this to Wright’s vastly more aggressive, vehement condemnations of U.S. policies, almost all of which are the same policies that Obama fully endorses, is simply ludicrous.

As it happens, criticism of this kind makes it that much easier for Obama to pursue his agenda overseas, because his opposition is continually sabotaging its own credibility with wacky claims about how the boring establishmentarian Obama is taking his cues from Farrakhan and Wright.

But let us judge not, that we be not judged. ~Michael Gerson

Granted, this is probably intended to be read in context as sarcasm, but this is still a bit rich coming from Gerson. After all, Gerson specializes in portraying practically everyone who disagrees with him on anything as a hard-hearted, vicious monster who would deprive a dying child of his last wish (and occasionally as someone who probably would have participated in the slave trade and genocide if he had the chance). Instead of seeing the see-saw of political turmoil in the Near East as proof of the uncertainty in the region and the unpredictability of events, Gerson has returned four years after the so-called “Arab spring” to announce another spring. Even though he claims that he is not one of those overinterpreting events to fit preexisting views, his descriptions of what has happened are themselves based on flawed overinterpretations designed to fit preexisting views. He says that every idealist will have his day and every realist his night, but as in so many other things Gerson reminds us that he cannot even tell the difference between night and day. As in 2005, this requires being very selective in the use of evidence and unduly optimistic about what the limited evidence shows. It is also crucial that one misread the evidence or twist it to fit the argument. Gerson does all of the above:

Now spring is returning. January’s local elections in Iraq favored secular nationalists instead of clerical parties. In Lebanon, Hezbollah was defeated in an open and vigorous vote. Kuwaiti women have been elected to parliament for the first time. And in Iran, brave women and men have demonstrated that democracy, not just nihilism, counts martyrs in the Muslim world.

Actually, if we look at the people involved and the constituencies voting for the parties, Iraqi elections favored more or less the same parties that portrayed themselves in less sectarian terms. As in Lebanon, parties that are blatantly sectarian in their composition and interests claim to be secular. That may well be inevitable and may simply be something everyone has to live with, but we should not pretend that it is not the case. As in Lebanon, the elections represented no meaningful change in the distribution of power, but at least in Iraq I will grant that the majority of the population is represented in the (sectarian, Iran-leaning) government. The incumbent governments remained in power in both Lebanon and Iraq, which suggests that the election results of 2009 have more or less confirmed the 2005 distributions of power. If the “spring” of 2005 was a false one because of political instability and sectarian violence that followed, 2009 has so far offered little to make us think that anything has fundamentally changed. As in 2005, insignificant and superficial changes are being taken for major, profound ones. Regarding Iran, it is true that the protesters have been using the language of martyrdom to describe those who have been killed, but that also means that the protesters are losing the political fight, much as Husayn did at Karbala.

Moreover, Mousavi’s positions have changed, just as he has. He is far different today from the Mousavi who began this electoral campaign. ~Charles Krauthammer

Yes, the dramatic changes are overwhelming. Just consider this new statement from Mousavi:

I’d like to thank you again for your peaceful objections which have received widespread coverage across the world, and would like to ask you that by using all legal channels, and by remaining faithful to the sacred system of the Islamic Republic, to make sure that your objections are heard by the authorities in the country. I am fully aware that your justified demands have nothing to do with groups who do not believe in the sacred Islamic Republic of Iran’s system. It is up to you to distance yourself from them, and do not allow them to misuse the current situation.

Oddly enough, it is because Mousavi hasn’t changed very much that he can continue to be a credible opposition leader. Unlike Russian liberals, who have never missed an opportunity to alienate themselves from the majority of Russians, Mousavi hasn’t made any great display of willing subservience to Western interests, which is why Obama’s recognition of the policy similarities between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad remains one of the most appropriate, correct and potentially helpful things he has said in the last two weeks about Iran. Americanists believe that any statement from the President that fails to build up and anoint Mousavi as the preferred candidate is discouraging to Mousavi and his supporters, because they apparently cannot grasp that being our preferred candidate is to be tainted with suspicion of disloyalty to the nation. It is strange how nationalists often have the least awareness of the importance of the nationalism of another people. Many of the same silly people who couldn’t say enough about Hamas’ so-called “endorsement” of Obama as somehow indicative of his Israel policy views, as well as those who could not shut up about his warm reception in Europe, do not see how an American endorsement of a candidate in another country’s election might be viewed with similiar and perhaps even greater distaste by the people in that country. As Anatol Lieven explains here, Russian liberals destroyed their political chances by being and being seen as stooges for Western interests and allies of every anti-Russian policy that came down the pike. A perfect example of this is Garry Kasparov, whose call for more direct support for the protesters in Iran is as poorly judged as Kasparov’s own domestic political alliances with neo-fascists.

Krauthammer uses the word radicalize many times in the latest column, but what he misses is that even if Mousavi were being radicalized by recent events to take a more adamant stand against the current leadership he would be going back to his Khomeinist roots. As his latest remarks suggest, though, rumors of his radicalization are greatly exaggerated, and one thing we can be quite sure of is that Mousavi is the one leading figure in all of this who has changed the least. The pragmatists in government seem to have no problem with altering the constitution of the system as they see fit and as it suits their needs. Mousavi is the one being inflexible and resistant to accommodation, which is what you would expect from someone leading a mass protest against the government. What you have is an opposition leader who is demanding a return to the pre-June 12 status quo. Back then, the fiction of the “Islamic republic” remained at least somewhat credible. Mousavi has correctly observed that the current leadership has moved to scrap important parts of the republican element of the system, and it is against this that he has been protesting. The reformer has shown himself to be more of a “principalist” than the so-called principalists, which is, of course, what most reformers claim they are doing: restoring what has been corrupted, rather than overturning and destroying the system.

But though Bush 41 was in many respects a smashing foreign policy success, he also made a number of egregious missteps, including the notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech, in which he essentially endorsed the survival of the multinational Soviet empire and not the nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe. ~Reihan Salam

That Kiev speech really sticks in the craw, doesn’t it? I haven’t heard so much about the elder Bush’s 1991 Kiev speech in the last fifteen years as I have heard about it in the last week and a half. It seems to be a touchstone for everyone dissatisfied with “crabbed realism,” as if the “nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe” didn’t include the aspirations to displace and slaughter one’s neighbors, expel entire populations and pursue self-destructive policies in the name of restoring national glory. All of a sudden, nationalism in Europe, which was once the scourge that neoconservatives wanted to squash in the ’90s and which horrifies them when it takes peaceful, democratic forms in western Europe, has become something in retrospect that it was wrong to discourage at the end of the Cold War.*

Over the last eighteen years, the idea that there was something unforgiveably wrong in urging Ukrainians–whose country is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy under the rule of squabbling kleptocrats–to resist seeking independence seems increasingly absurd. Warning against the dangers of nationalism as a multinational empire was coming apart at the seams was very sensible. The example of how the Ottoman Empire had come apart in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offered a sobering reminder that political fragmentation along nationalist lines in ethnically mixed societies can carry a high cost in human suffering. Given the experience of the Balkans and the Caucasus over the last eighteen years, does anyone want to look back and say that the President of the United States should have endorsed nationalist aspirations?

* I should add that neoconservatives have never had any trouble with anti-Russian nationalism, no matter what form it takes and no matter where it crops up, which is at least part of the reason why the Kiev speech must be so irritating.

Update: Of course, it doesn’t hurt to revisit what Bush actually said in 1991. For starters, there is this part:

I come here to tell you: We support the struggle in this great country for democracy and economic reform. And I would like to talk to you today about how the United States views this complex and exciting period in your history, how we intend to relate to the Soviet central Government and the Republican governments.

In Moscow, I outlined our approach: We will support those in the center and the Republics who pursue freedom, democracy, and economic liberty. We will determine our support not on the basis of personalities but on the basis of principles. We cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America [bold mine-DL].

Do not doubt our real commitment, however, to reform. But do not think we can presume to solve your problems for you. Theodore Roosevelt, one of our great Presidents, once wrote: To be patronized is as offensive as to be insulted. No one of us cares permanently to have someone else conscientiously striving to do him good; what we want is to work with that someone else for the good of both of us. That’s what our former President said. We will work for the good of both of us, which means that we will not meddle in your internal affairs.

O, the villainy! Who would want to have these words on his conscience? I mean, treating other nations as if they weren’t children to be scolded and ordered about–what was the man thinking?

Looking back over the last eighteen years, during which time Washington has been obsessed with personalities, not principles, and preoccupied with picking winners and losers and telling people how to reform their societies, one wishes that there had been more of the wisdom the former President showed in Kiev and a lot less of the carping from his detractors.

Second Update: Reihan responds with a long, interesting post. It is well worth reading.