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Longtime reader Isaac recently alerted me to an important article in the most recent edition of PARAMETERS. Some excerpts:

“Deconstructing our Dark Age Future” by LTC. P. Michael Phillips

….This article suggests that the system of Westphalian states is not in decline, but that it never existed beyond a utopian allegory exemplifying the American experience. As such, the Dark Age thesis is really not about the decline of the sovereign state and the descent of the world into anarchy. It is instead an irrational response to the decline of American hegemony with a naïve emphasis on the power of nonstate actors to compete with nation-states. The analysis concludes that because the current paradigm paralysis places a higher value on overstated threats than opportunities, our greatest hazard is not the changing global environment we live in, but our reaction to it.

….The state as described in this article differs greatly from the ideal imagined in the Westphalian paradigm. States do not universally enjoy unrestricted sovereignty. Nor are they equal. In fact, the sovereignty of a great number of the states in the international system is merely ascriptive.27 Because these imperfect conditions have more or less existed since long before 1648, it may be more helpful to think of any observed chaos in the international system as the natural condition, rather than a decline into disorder. If the system is not melting down, are so-called nonstate actors as significant for the long-term as they appear to be for the present?

….For some observers, this so-called NSA victory over a modern state underscores their warnings of impending global chaos. But in making this declaration, they fail to appreciate the source of Hezbollah’s strength: its dependent relationship with Iran, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Syria. Hezbollah did not create out of whole cloth its impressive array of modern weapons, nor did it independently develop the tactics, techniques, and procedures to employ them. Instead, Iranian weapons completed Hezbollah’s impressive arsenal, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers created the command and control center that coordinated the militiamen’s missiles.

Read the whole thing here.

This was an interesting read for me; many points with which to agree and disagree. A few thoughts in no particular order:

I am sympathetic to Col. Phillips’ criticisms of the overly abstract and detached nature of IR in regard to the nature of international law and sovereignty. You can certainly see that “arid” and “imperialistic” attitude in many academics and NGO activists who like to present their novel theories and interpretations as “international law” when they lack any historical basis whatsoever (and are usually gamed to be highly restrictive on the authority of Western sovereign states to use force and permissive/exculpatory of the actions of Marxist/radical/Islamist terrorists or insurgents).  Much of Phillips’ condemnation of IR smacking of unreality from a practitioner’s perspective is spot on.

That said, while definitely fuzzy and spottily adhered to in practice international law is not entirely “illusory”, nor is it a byproduct of 20th century Wilsonian American exceptionalism as Phillips argued. Perhaps Hugo Grotius rings a bell? Or Alberico Gentili? Or the long history of admirality courts? Like common law or an unwritten tribal code, international law has evolved over a very long period of time and does exert some constraint upon the behavior of sovereigns. Statesmen and diplomats think about policy in terms of the impression it will make on other sovereigns, and international law is one of the yardsticks they contemplate.  Admittedly, at times the constraint of international law is quite feeble but in other contexts it is strong. An American military officer, who can see firsthand the effect of creeping JAG lawyerism on command decisions on the battlefield ( in my view, greatly excessive and harmful ) and in the drafting of byzantine ROE, should know better than to make such a silly statement.

Phillips main argument is about the direction of international relations and non-state actors and he comes down firmly on the supremacy of states, at least the Great Powers and regional power states enacting an age-old realpolitik. Non-state actors are an overhyped and trendy threat and really amount to a continuation of traditional proxy warfare, where powers harass each other by subsidizing barbarian “raiders”; Phillips makes much use of Hezbollah as a modern example. Juxtaposed against the more extreme claims of the 4GW school or of Martin van Creveld, Phillips criticism looks reasonable because it is easy to make an empirical case that falsifies the absolutist claim that all states everywhere are in decline or that war is endemic.  They are not and war is not.

Matched against the real world however, Phillips’ argument suffers. In terms of sovereignty and legitimacy, the globe is a ball of swiss cheese – in what Thomas P.M. Barnett terms “the Gap” there are deep holes in Africa, Asia and even Latin America where states could be but are not. Somalia has not had a state since 1991. The Congo is a vast swath of warlordism and democide on a scale of millions (!). The Lebanese government is the de facto junior partner in Lebanon to the Hezbollah militia. Mexico next door is increasingly militarizing its law enforcement apparatus toward full-blown counterterrorism and COIN because of the erosion of state authority vs. the anarchy being spread by the narco-cartels. Are sovereign states more stable and authoritative than fifty years ago? Some are. Many are not. Others are relatively fragile potemkin villages. This is why 4GW theory, while historically flawed, retains analytical strategic resonance – in some regions of the world, the premises of 4GW apply very well. Better in fact, than the traditional schools of thought.

Again, Phillips has written an interesting and thought-provoking article with salient ideas. My problem rests more with the length to which he takes some of his assertions. Phillips swings the pendulum a little too far in the opposite direction where a synthesis would serve better.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. Charli Carpenter at The Duck of Minerva, weighs in on Phillips with  Westphalian Illusions.

Most of you have followed the series on the Afghanistan strategy debate at Abu Muqawama that was prompted by the Andrew Bacevich article or read the exchange I had with Dr. Bernard Finel or at the many other defense blogs talking Afghanistan. So many at once, that Dave Dilegge of SWJ asked everyone to chill out and lower the “noise”. Dilegge later explained on Dr. James Joyner’s OTB Radio program that he wasn’t trying to stifle debate so much as point out that the staff working for Gen. McChrystal that are trying to put together a strategic plan were feeling overwhelmed by the blizzard of contradictory expert and not-so-expert advice that was suddenly flying furiously in the blogosphere.

When we consider that a lot of the recent debate was of a “should we be there?” character rather than “what should we do now?”, Dave had a reasonable point. The military leadership in Afghanistan doesn’t have the luxury of asking the former question or any control over regional or national policy as it should be designed at the level of the NSC – they have to answer the second question. 

In that spirit, I’ll try to offer a few concise thoughts on relating strategy to what should come next in Afghanistan.

1. Is there a strategic American interest in Afghanistan?:

Many anti-war and anti-COIN writers have pointed out that the U.S. does not have any intrinsic interests in Afghanistan. In a narrow sense, this is correct. Afghanistan has nothing we need and no economy to speak of. We abandoned Afghanistan after the end of the Soviet War and are there now only because al Qaida happened to be based there at the time of 9/11. Why not just leave again?

Afghanistan could properly be fitted into national strategy from two angles. A regional strategy for Central Asia and the Subcontinent or as part of a global strategy in the war against al Qaida. As the former task would be too complicated and slow to finesse from an interagency perspective, we should view Afghanistan in the context as a part of a global war against al Qaida. We need Afghanistan’s proximity to al Qaida in Pakistan’s border provinces in order to attack al Qaida effectively and to put continuous pressure on Pakistan’s government, elements of which which still sponsors the Taliban and, at least indirectly, al Qaida.

Can we do the same things from aircraft carriers? No? Then we need to be in Afghanistan, at least for a time.

2. Why is al Qaida so important and how will we know if we”win”?:

What makes al Qaida distinctive from all other Islamist terrorist-insurgencies is their transnational, strategic, analysis and commitment to struggle against the “far enemy” ( i.e. the US) and for the unification of the “ummah”. That’s really unique. Every other violent actor in the jihadisphere is really dedicated to their own particularist Islamist project of struggle – nationalist or secessionist – against the “near enemy” of their home country regimes.  Like Lenin and Trotsky working for world revolution, Bin Laden and Zawahiri try to plan and make AQ an independent player on an international level, unlike HAMAS, Hezbollah, Salafist Call to Combat and various other Islamist armed groups. They have also, from time to time, managed to operationalize these ambitions and “project power” through major acts of terrorism around the world.

We “win” when Bin Laden, Zawahiri and their small cohort of “global revolutionary” jihadists are dead and their paradigm discredited in favor of “localist”, “near enemy” jihadists – who have always composed the vast majority of violent Islamist extremists. The latter are no threat to us, it is the commitment of Bin Laden and co. to their vision that represents a threat. When they are gone al Qaida is likely to be seen among Islamic radicals as a grand failed experiment.

3. What are America’s objectives in Afghanistan?:

Our goal should be that Afghanistan’s government and populace are hostile towards the return of al Qaida to their territory. That’s it.

4. How should we accomplish this objective?:

My perception is that we have tried three interrelated, interdependent but also competing policies in the last eight years in Afghanistan.

1. Counterterrorism

2. COIN

3. State Building

Counterterrorism has been the policy that we have been most effective at – disrupting al Qaida organizationally, keeping its leadership on the move and in flux, squeezing it financially and grinding away at it’s primary local ally, the Taliban. We should keep doing this and even become more aggressive as this is the policy closest to American national interest.

COIN is vital in Afghanistan – but not as an end in itself. If the US embarks upon some kind of 25 year Roman Legionary version of COIN on steroids, then we have gone badly astray. We need intelligence. We need cooperation and support from Afghans. We need Afghans to see the U.S. as a benefactor and al Qaida and the Taliban as bringers of woe and misery. That requires COIN with local U.S. and NATO commanders being given great flexibility – including with discretionary expenditure of funds and alteration of policy, without a mountain of red tape and second guessing in far distant capitals by bespectacled lawyers wearing silk ties and gold cuff links.

COIN is – like Afghanistan – a means to an end.

State Building is a cardinal part of COIN doctrine. I suggest that in terms of Afghanistan, we throw that premise out the window and just accept dealing with provincial and local elites who have real power (i.e. – armed men with guns, respect of local population, a clientela network of officials and notables). Afghanistan has rarely ever had a strong, centralized, state in its history and Afghans do not have high expectations of what Kabul can do for them. Trying to swim against that current, the sheer cultural and historical inertia it represents, is a waste of our time and money.  While state building as an objective fascinates diplomats and the academic-NGO set, it is actually the least of our priorities and if we ever did build a strong state in Afghanistan, it’s first order of business would be to interfere in our making war on al Qaida and second, to kick us the hell out of their country.

If we have to build a state apparatus, let’s build them locally with a heavy emphasis on their stimulating economic activity and financing local, private, production of goods and establishing security forces composed of residents. That way, someday, if Afghanistan ever has a functioning national government, it will at least have a stream of revenue from levying taxes in relatively orderly provinces.

5. These seem like “minimalist” goals:

Yes. But in practice, quite large enough.

The problem with the asymmetric mismatch between the U.S. and it’s foes is that we bring so astronomical a flow of resources in our wake that we end up “growing” our enemies. Like parasites, they manage to feed off of our war effort against them. Afghanistan is so miserably poor that nearly everything we bring in to the country has relative market value. If you remember CNN clips of the U.S. retreat from Somalia, the last scene was the local warlord permitting  impoverished Somalis to swarm over our abandoned base, the mob was gleefully seizing scraps of what most Americans would consider to be worthless crap. 

That market differential inevitably breeds corruption when it comes to US. aid. It cannot be waved away any more than we can pretend supply and demand does not exist. While it is counterintuitive, less is more. Keeping our clients on bare sufficiency is more functional for our purposes then generosity. 

That’s not just being pragmatic, its’ cheaper too. It makes no sense to spend a trillion (borrowed) dollars in a country whose GDP will not generate that kind of wealth in a thousand years.

6. What about “destabilizing” Pakistan?:

The primary destabilizer of Pakistan is the Pakistani government’s schizophrenic relationship with the extremist groups it creates, subsidizes, funds and trains to unleash on all its neighbors. When the Islamist hillbillies in FATA or their Punjabi and Kashmiri equivalents try to menace the interests of Pakistan’s wealthy elite, the “ineffectual” Pakistani Army and security services can move with a sudden, savage efficiency.

Anyone who thinks the Pakistani Taliban can come down from the hills and take over Islamabad has a very short historical memory of what the Pakistani Army did in Bangladesh before the latter’s independence.

7. When can the troops “go home”?:

Right now the estimates range from our needing to accomplish everything in 2 years (David Kilcullen) to 40 years (Gen. Sir David Richards).

To be blunt, we are not staying for four decades; it is not in American interests to make Afghanistan the 51st state. We stayed in Germany after WWII for 50 years only because it was Germany – the industrial and geopolitical heart of Europe. Afghanistan is not “Germany” to any country on earth except Pakistan (their “strategic depth” against an invasion by India). If we dial down our objectives to the simple obliteration of al Qaida, I suggest that our departure could take place within the few years time it would take to convince/squeeze Islamabad into seeing that path as the fastest, cheapest, way to get rid of a very large American presence in their backyard. Right now, Islamabad sees us setting up shop for generations to come and Pakistan’s generals are acting to frustrate that perceived goal as much as they dare.

Strategy involves making choices and accepting costs. What costs do you think the U.S. should be prepared to shoulder in solving the problem of Afghanistan ( either by staying or leaving)?

ADDENDUM:

In the comments section, Slapout and Lexington Green have recommended some very good links that I would like to offer below.

Col. John Warden –  Strategic Options: The West and Afghanistan

Dr. Stephen Biddle – Is It Worth It? The Difficult Case for War in Afghanistan

Both good but entirely unrelated.

Tom Barnett belts on out of the park at Esquire magazine:

What the Hell Is Really Going Down in Honduras?

….The primary charge was treason relating to Zelaya’s stubborn effort to mobilize popular support, through a non-binding poll, for a constitutional assembly. But the underlying suspicion was that the lame-duck and deeply unpopular (as in, sub-30-percent approval ratings) president was plotting to extend his personal rule with the strong encouragement of his new “oil daddy,” Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, whose well-established blueprint has worked with political protégés elsewhere (e.g., Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa).

Essentially, this Chavez scenario was a Pandora’s box that Honduras’s political elite refused to open. Why? Because after too many decades of nasty military dictatorship, Honduras, while still quite poor, had managed seven straight civilian transitions thanks to its 1982 constitution. So the Honduran legislature, which had previously ordered Zelaya’s arrest (but not his deportation), promptly voted him out of office and – following the constitution – selected its ranking member, Speaker Roberto Micheletti, as the interim president. Two key points to remember here: Martial law was never instituted, and the national elections, slated for November, are still a go. In effect, Zelaya’s removal from power was an impeachment without trial – a classic rush job that denied him his day in court even as he had already lost his battle with the country’s supreme court and displayed overt contempt for its rulings on his proposed poll.

From the Honduran military’s point of view, their actions broke no law, and since the military never assumed power, calling these events a “military coup” is completely misleading. From America’s point of view, it seems clear enough that Chavez-style politics has its limits, so overreactions are to be avoided. But from a national-security perspective, when your own Drug Enforcement Agency is telling you (as a Bush official did a year ago) that Chavez has become a “major facilitator” of the flow of Colombian cocaine to America, and when there are credible reports that Honduras, under Zelaya, has joined that network as a trans-shipment waypoint, there definitely needs to be some limits to your diplomatic efforts to reinstate this suddenly revered “pillar of democracy.”

I am in full agreement with Tom here about Mel Zelaya, who is the Rod Blagojevich of Latin America as well as a supplicating client of Hugo Chavez. The Obama administration, with the thrust coming from the State Department, has been too supportive of Zelaya’s outrageous behavior in an effort to avoid giving the Latin American left room to blame America for Zelaya’s removal. Now that moment has passed, it is time to distance the US from Zelaya and let him twist in the wind as OAS encouraged negotiations with the legitimate interim government in Honduras drag out for weeks or months

Chris Albon at War & Health has an excellent book review of Before My Helpless Sight (The History of Medicine in Context) by Leo van Bergen:

Leo van Bergen’s book, Before My Helpless Sight, is a history of suffering in World War I, a description the author readily admits: “At the roots of the book lies the question of what can happen to a soldier between the moment he steps onto a train or ship bound for the theatre of battle an the point at which he is evacuated wounded, or whether dead or alive, buried in the ground” (pg. 1). Needless to say, the book is not a light read.

….Van Bergen cannot be criticized on methodology. The book is impressively well researched (and cited), including qualitative and quantitative sources in numerous languages. Apart from the organization of the book itself, you see very little of the author in the pages. Readers are bounced from anecdotal accounts to descriptive statistics with little commentary or fanfare. This is not necessarily a negative, the sources speak for themselves. Their sheer, horrifying weight is ample to progress the book forward.

….However, in the light of the book’s contribution these issues are quickly forgotten. Before My Helpless Sight is a powerful counter to the innumerable discourses on WWI tactics and strategy. Van Bergen pulls back the curtains of glorious offensives and magnanimous generals, revealing the grim, muddy reality of life on the Western Front. It is a story of pus, rats, hunger, dirt, disease and madness. You do not know World War I before reading this book.

More and more, as passing time gives historians greater perspective, the Great War appears as a civilizational turning point for the West on the broad spectrum of human activity. WWI produced, really for the first time, a significant number of horrifyingly disfigured and maimed survivors, who would have perished from their wounds in, say, the Civil War or the Napleonic Wars. John Keegan writes, in his The First World War how postwar European governments resorted to segregating these most unfortunate of war invalids away from the eye of their publics and being at a loss how to deal with those soldiers  mentally shattered by “shell shock”, what we now recognize as PTSD.

Modern war as an industrial, mass-synchronized, 2GW meat grinder was so awful that the West turned to all kinds of stratagems to avoid a repeat of the Western Front – from political pacifism, isolationism and maginot lines to political revolution, blitzkrieg  tactics and technological innovations like the tank or airplane. None of them were a complete answer to the horrors born in 1914.

Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole

I recently finished reading Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole, the influential academic, well known liberal-left blogger of Informed Comment, past president of the Middle East Studies Association and occasional media talking head. Cole has written an intriguing book on contemporary foreign policy that is of special interest to those readers concerned with public diplomacy, the Muslim world, terrorism and the domestic politics of American foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq. I will state straight off that there are arguments in this book presented by Cole that I profoundly disagree with, or, national security related assertions that I consider questionable; but in other instances, when Cole is concentrating on the nuances of the Arab-Muslim world’s political-cultural lens, he is an illuminating and insightful analyst from whom I have learned new things. 

Engaging the Muslim World is…well….engaging. I found Cole’s prose flowed smoothly, as if the author was talking to the reader across a table, and I had a hard time putting the book down, albeit I was frequently scribbling furiously in the margins. This is a polemical -policy book written by an academic for a lay audience and the reader’s reaction to Engaging the Muslim World will depend in part on their own worldview. Liberals will cheer more than they disagree with Cole, while conservatives and supporters of Israel are likely to reject many of the book’s normative assumptions long before they read the conclusions – but Cole also offers some prescriptive advice that center-right COIN and public diplomacy advocates will warmly embrace.

The book  is divided into six chapters. The first, “The Struggle for Islamic Oil:The Truth About Energy Independence” which deals with energy markets, the Cold War history of the Mideast, global warming, environmental policy, alternative fuel technologies and globalization, is a necessary effort to concisely account for the geoeconomic importance of Muslim oil producing states and the future of fossil fuel economies.  Cole argues – correctly, I suspect – that there will be no short or medium term substitutes for oil and gas until solar power technology is cost-efficient enough (and efficient in a physics sense) to compete with fossil fuels in the marketplace. Not being a scientist or an expert in energy market issues, I am poorly placed by professional background to evaluate Cole’s claims in these areas and will leave those to others.

That said, chapter one remains the odd man out. It smacks of having been  compacted by an editor out of two or more chapters and consequently has disparate issues jumbled together with insufficient explanation; as a whole, chapter one fits uncomfortably with the subsequent chapters which flow together naturally and thematically. On the other hand, the topic of oil can hardly be dispensed with either in a geopolitical discussion of the Mideast, so Cole was right to tackle it and the primary problem is really one of sequence, not subject matter.

Chapters two through six are the heart of Engaging the Muslim World, where Juan Cole articulates a theme of “Islam anxiety” permeating Western, particularly American, media and public opinion. Poorly informed about even the most basic information regarding the Muslim world, such as the differences between Shia and Sunnis, secular Baathist nationalists and Islamist radicals, quietists and the politically militant, Arabs and non-Arabs, Cole asserts that Westerners tend to lump Muslims of all shades of political belief, religiousity and nationality into a homogenous, vaguely mysterious but ever dangerous entity. Cole cites as one example, Egypt’s Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which has foresworn violence and has members who sit in Egypt’s legislature, being lumped uncritically by American commentators with al Qaida and Hezbollah (which is a radical Shiite group).

A better way to understand violent Islamist extremists in relation to normal Muslims, in Cole’s view, would be to see them as analogous to our homegrown, violent, far-Right, white racist underground that produced Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing or as cult-like movements. While smaller in size than Islamist radicalism, the racist Right shares with violent Islamists the trappings of a fringe, ostracized, quasi-religious, political cult with a conspiratorial worldview that diverges sharply from the nation’s mainstream religious life. Violent Islamists often make themeslves as unpopular with their co-religioinists as do neo-Nazi extremists here, through actions that horrify society, such as the bloody massacre of Western tourists and Egyptian workers at  Luxor, Egypt.

Cole’s analogy with cults and racial extremists I think is a useful one. Radical Islamists are difficult to classify on a traditional political spectrum as their political behavior has definite similarities with those of the fascist and communist totalitarians of the 20th century, but will not fit smoothly with either, given Islamist religious extremism and the fanatical atheism or at least radically secular nature of the Bolsheviks and Nazis. The psychological overlap however is certain, something akin to the 19th century Anarchist-terrorists or what Eric Hoffer captured in his classic work, The True Believer.

On Israel and Iran, Cole bends over backwards, like a circus sideshow contortionist, to try and explain the lunacy (and Cole admits it is, at best, a crackpot worldview) of Ahmadinejad’s violently antisemitic statements about the Holocaust and Iran’s generally defiant behavior toward the international community while giving Israel no similar benefit of the doubt.  Cole argues that Ahmadinejad’s oft-stated “wipe Israel off of the map” is a deliberate mistranslation by the Western media. Ok, possibly so. I do not speak Farsi, so I’ll take Cole’s word here. If it is the case though, Ahmadinejad is well aware of how his repeated statement is being mistranslated by Reuters and AP, yet he keeps using it. Again and again. That is an ominous statement in itself.

This uneveness regarding Iran and Israel will no doubt enrage conservatives and delight progressives, but in fairness to Juan, I must say that despite his partiality toward Iran in his book, as a blogger he was very quick to denounce the obvious stealing of the recent election by Khameini-Ahmadinejad-IRGC and my perception is that Cole views the apocalyptic Mahdist tendency in Twelver Shiism that Ahmadinejad embraces as a kooky deviation from mainstream Shiism. That not just Ahmadinejad holds this belief dear, but also many influential figures in the Iranian security apparatus as well, is in my view, a cause for alarm.

Despite his politics, Cole concludes Engaging the Muslim World with a very pragmatic prescription for American public diplomacy for engaging Arabs and Muslims in a more effective manner than in the past eight or eighteen or eighty years. If I do not agree with every aspect, it is a good deal better than what the State Department and the rest of the USG is doing now:

Once I saw an Iraqi tribal leader interviewed on al-Jazeera. He said. “There is good and bad in America”. I was struck by how pragmatic and realistic his response was, and how different it was from so much of the fundamentalist vigilantee propaganda about the United States posted on radical internet bulletin boards. If Washington could reach out to all Muslims and bring them around to a more nuanced -and clear-view, in which America was not simply demonized, it would be a major accomplishment. The point is not that they should see the West through rose colored glasses, but that they should be willing to see the good and bad.

That would represent a step up by an order of magnitude.

With an arrest warrant from the Honduran Supreme Court (hat tip NYkrinDC), the Honduran military today removed from office President Manuel Zelaya, a political protege of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for proceeding with an illegal referendum designed to lay the groundwork for an unconstitutional additional term in office. Zeleya has been sent into exile in Costa Rica.

Zelaya’s referendum had been rejected by the Supreme Court, the Congress and even his own political party. Zelaya had ordered the military to support the referendum, when Army chief  Gen Romeo Vasquez refused, Zelaya attempted to fire him and subsequently took possession of the ballots by leading a large crowd of supporters to a military base where they had been impounded.

The Congress had already moved to investigate Zeleya’s fitness for continuing office prior to today’s coup. Venezuelans and Nicaraguans had been infiltrating Honduras in order to help Zelaya’s supporters with the referendum, and predictably, Chavez reacted with frustration at the setback dealt to Zelaya’s Bolivarian “soft coup” before it could even get off the ground to change the system itself.

Given Honduras unhappy history, military involvement in politics is naturally suspect, but in this instance, it was the civilian president who was determined to act against the constitutional order, operate outside it and break the rules in his own political interest. What happened in Honduras seems to me to be less a pro-active coup than a reactive counterrevolution by the military and broad elite. That Hondurans resented the hijacking of their country by the international left, orchestrated at home by a Chavez stooge is unsurprising, but the best strategic move now would be for the Honduran military to turn over power to Zelaya’s constitutionally designated successor, Congress President Roberto Micheletti, and let the civilian government take appropriate legal action, if any, against Zelaya and any foreign ALBA apparatchiks active in this crisis.

According to Zelaya’s initial comments, the USG has thus far,  mostly stayed out of this affair, refusing to sanction Zelaya’s removal, except to issue a mild reprimand against the Honduran military’s action.

ADDENDUM:

The State Department attempts to square the circle with intellectually incoherent positions.

ADDENDUM II:

Chirol at Coming Anarchy weighs in:

….Former President Manuel Zelaya, ally of Venezuelan thug in chief Hugo Chavez, sought to illegally hold a referendum on changing the Honduran constitution. This could have allowed him to run again in violation of the country’s current term limits. It’s a classic trick of would-be-dictators and luckily did not succeed. While some in the media and elsewhere are labeling this a coup, I would not not. It’s rather a ‘coup’ in the same sense as Turkey has experienced several times whereby the military removed leadership that was violating the country’s laws.

Some may argue that the military’s removal of the president by force was not democratic. Indeed, on the surface it would seem to be illegal, however given that the president was pressing on with his illegal actions, declared so by the supreme court, congress and the military, it was in fact a fairly reasonable and foreseeable response. While of course, I do not encourage such actions by any military in general, in the case of Honduras, the constitutionally mandated checks on presidential power had failed. Since Zelaya blatantly continued his illegal activity, we can in fact be thankful that he was ousted before having a chance to rewrite the constitution and turn the country into an even poorer, worse off Venezuelan satellite.

ADDENDUM III:

Having just suffered a humiliating electoral defeat at home, leftist Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez, vows to accompany Zelaya back to Honduras.