Gerald Warner http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/geraldwarner
Barack Obama has now made a statement far more significant than any of the stale rhetoric of his Inauguration Address. It is both a major upheaval in US foreign policy and a frightening insight into Obama’s total incapacity for office. If you are American, read it and weep. If you are not an American, but have concerns about freedom, be very afraid.
In response to the crisis in Honduras and the growing turmoil in Latin America, the President of the United States has now said: “The United States has not always stood as it should with some of these fledgling democracies. But over the last several years I think both Republicans and Democrats in the United States have recognized that we always want to stand with democracy, even if the results don’t always mean that the leaders of those countries are favorable towards the United States.”
My emphasis, as the convention phrases it. And it deserves emphasis because, in that brief statement, Obama has just reversed the Monroe Doctrine, dating from 1823, and the later Roosevelt Corollary. The principle that European influence would not be permitted in Latin America gradually translated into a recognition that Latin America was a US sphere of influence. Since Marxism is a European influence, surely it is important to exclude that poison, so far as is practicable, from Latin America.
Yet Obama has aligned himself with the so-called Bolivarian Alliance of Marxist fruitcakes, led by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. To both men “democracy” is a useful slogan while they pursue its elimination in their own back yards. Ortega, now the chief backer of ousted president Manual Zelaya of Honduras, is the old Sandinista tyrant who only escaped prosecution for child abuse of his adopted stepdaughter from age 11 due to a statute of limitations and parliamentary immunity. Last year he successfully falsified the municipal elections in Nicaragua by fraud and intimidation.
Obama should have welcomed the removal of Zelaya from Honduras. Zelaya had recently sided with the Iranian ayatollahs in their suppression of a democratic election: no wonder he demanded readmission to Honduras in the name of God. His illegal attempt to defy the constitution through a plebiscite his supporters were tooled-up to rig was condemned by the Honduran Congress, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the chief Electoral Tribunal. Many of his own party had turned against him, alarmed by his attempt to prolong his rule on the Chavez model. His so-called referendum was an attempted coup; the army’s intervention against him, on the orders of all the constitutional organs of state, was a counter-coup.
But the Obama administration got it hopelessly wrong. Hillary Clinton denounced this reassertion of constitutional law as a crisis that “has evolved into a coup”. In this she was echoing Obama. Zelaya was given every encouragement in Washington, when he should have been told he was “on the wrong side of history”, as Obama expressed it in his Inauguration Address.
But Obama has a soft spot for socialists, hence his insane cosying-up to the Bolivarian fruitcakes. He has invented a brand new kind of foreign policy: supporting regimes that are violently anti-American. Call it neo-masochism. Obama has reversed the Monroe Doctrine as well as the definition of “democracy”. In supporting the megalomaniac dictators who are trying to drag Latin America into the year 1917, he is mouthing the same claptrap as Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, president of the UN General Assembly and former lieutenant of Ortega in the Sandinista dictatorship, and Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) and Fidel Castro’s champion.
Washington could have done much to dampen down the Honduran crisis that the Latin American Reds are prolonging. The Honduran government’s successful prevention of Zelaya’s attempted landing yesterday was a hopeful sign of resolution on the part of pro-Western forces, but the new government should by now have been recognised by the United States. The Reds need to be presented with an irreversible fait accompli. But Latin American Marxism has a new best friend: Barack Che Fidel Obama, the Bolivarian Revolution’s latest useful idiot.
