Thanks for the post, Rachel. I'm torn about this one, but here's the upshot:
"...The real winner in this drama is the top diplomat for the key power who quietly, patiently pushed for this settlement all along. It was Hillary Clinton's State Department that first pressed for an agreement along these lines. It was State that asked Costa Rican president Oscar Arias to mediate a deal like this, and it was State that stepped into the breach when the Arias compromise fell apart: They dispatched Assistant Secretary of State for the West Hemisphere, Thomas Shannon, to Tegucigalpa on multiple occasions to help settle the dispute.
"It's therefore fitting that, from far-off Islamabad, it fell to Clinton to announce the deal. Hailing the "historic agreement", she went on to stress that "I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that, having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order, overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue".
"Perhaps most importantly, by helping to reinstate a duly elected anti-American president, the deal will be a significant first step in the long, arduous task of re-establishing the US's democratic bona fides in the region. The entrenched view of many Latin Americans - and not just those on the chavista Left - is that the US favours democracy, but only when the people who get elected hew closely to US interests.
"Undoing that view is an urgent task for the Obama administration, and Clinton understands that it can only be achieved if the US shows itself willing to stand on principle, even when - especially when - those principles favour regional adversaries."
Principle isn't something we're too strong on these days...
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Barack/Barry: If you're NOT LEGIT, then you MUST QUIT!!
"In light of all this, who was the winner in the Honduran crisis?
Certainly not the elected leader, Mel Zelaya. He's back in power, but is significantly weakened. He will not be allowed to push for the constitutional reform that precipitated the crisis in the first place. He'll be forced to head a "unity government" (diplomatese for a grown-up supervised government), and he'll have to find himself another job in January."
It was important that Zelaya was told in no uncertain terms that he had to allow these elections. If he leaves quietly in January (after the elections, since he is not allowed to run for re-election under the constitution of Honduras) this will be a victory for Democracy in Latin America. Good for HC; wish BO had kept his mouth shut since he made things worse and HC had to come in to find a diplomatic solution. If HC hadn't helped facilitated this agreement, Honduras would have been BO's Bay of Pigs. In other words, if Zelaya had come back and hadn't agreed for elections to take place Honduras might have been saddled with Zelaya for a long time to come (like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro have done in their respective countries).
