President Obama was decidedly tight-lipped in his initial reactions to the election irregularities and resultant demonstrations in Iran. By contrast, he has come out quite forceful and direct in his opposition to what he – and Hugo Chavez and the United Nations – call the illegal ouster of the president of Honduras, Jose Manuel Zelaya.
Zelaya was quick to notice the unusual reaction by the American president. “The United States has changed a great deal,” he said at the news conference after the U.N. passed a resolution condemning the military’s seizure of power in Honduras. Well, change is what Obama ran on and change is what we’re getting – heaven help us.
Not only did Obama denounce Zelaya’s removal from office, calling it an illegal coup, but he went so far as to call for Zelaya’s reinstatement. This from the president so hesitant to tell other countries what to do lest the U.S. be seen as bullying. Interestingly, he chooses this situation and this leader to support loudly and without reservation.
Zelaya was elected president of Honduras in 2005 and, under that country’s constitution, he was to serve a four year term, ending this year. Instead, he had been pushing for a referendum to eliminate the presidential term limit and allow him to continue as president. He was ousted by the army on June 28 which stormed the presidential palace and took the president from his bed to a plane heading to Costa Rica. Later, the Honduran Congress replaced the exiled president with Roberto Micheletti, the president of Congress.
The Honduran Supreme Court had ruled that the proposed referendum was unconstitutional and the Honduras Congress agreed. With no backing down from President Zelaya, those opposed to his efforts to expand his term organized the ouster.
Zelaya is a socialist who is a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.
The Obama administration had apparently been trying to prevent the constitutional crisis in Honduras from exploding into a military clash, but those efforts failed.
Rather than taking the wait-and-see approach used in Iran, Obama immediately came to defend the ousted president – despite the fact that his removal seemed to have been in an effort to defend democracy and oppose a unilateral grab for power. The newly sworn in president would like the U.S. and the rest of the world to acknowledge that fact.
According to the New York Times, Micheletti has reached out to the world community, explaining that “Mr. Zelaya’s arrest by the army had been under an official arrest warrant based on his flouting of the Constitution.”
“We respect the whole world, and we only ask that they respect us and leave us in peace,” the Times quotes Mr. Micheletti from a radio interview. The Times also indicated that Micheletti confirmed that the “previously scheduled elections called for November would go on as planned.”
It would be nice if our president would at least pay lip service to the idea that the U.S. supports democracy and opposes efforts to silence the will of the people. If, in fact, the proposed constitutional referendum was an unconstitutional, illegal power grab, as their Supreme Court ruled, then perhaps arresting and removing the president was appropriate.
It begs the question why Obama was so quick to denounce the military’s action in Honduras (as “anti-democratic"), while not loudly supporting the pro-democracy protesters in Iran. Curious.
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