Che Guevara, the Argentinean communist who fermented revolutions in Cuba and the Congo, was finally dispatched by the Bolivian forces in 1967. Some 42 years later — long after the specter of revolutionary communism ceased to hound most of mankind — Che appears to be having the last laugh. His image is ubiquitous in the West — adorning the shirts and bags of an affluent but historically illiterate generation. Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, was spotted wearing a Che t-shirt few years ago. This year's "Icons" collection by Belstaff (an Italian clothing company) contains a "Che Guevara replica jacket."

Che Guevara, as Alvaro Vargas Llosa shows in The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty, was a megalomaniac and a murderer. Embarrassingly for the young idealists sporting his image, he was also a racist, a homophobe and an anti-Semite. "The Negro is indolent and lazy," Che opined about his Congolese comrades, "and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent." Ignorance about the real Che is universal. Thus, Angola's capital of Luanda boasts a Che Guevara Street and the South African capital of Pretoria may soon be graced by a street of the same name.

The continued — albeit limited — attractiveness of communist ideals and some of its protagonists, such as Karl Marx (anti-Semite), Vladimir Lenin (founding father of the Gulag), Fidel Castro (visit Cuba and see for yourself), and Che Guevara, suggests that mankind is yet to come to terms with the legacy of communism. Nazi victims are rightfully remembered in countless books and films. Their relatives can visit well-funded museums in Berlin and Washington, D.C. Except for a few discredited characters, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran among them, people around the world know about the nature and extent of the Holocaust. The crimes of communism, in contrast, remain, by and large, shrouded in veils of ignorance and denial.

Communism has so far escaped an appropriate degree of moral opprobrium for several reasons. As the historian Paul Hollander argues, most victims of communism died due to appalling living conditions in the Gulag and laogai (the Soviet and Chinese forced labor camps respectively). They were not killed in a determined way — as symbolized by the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Moreover, the evidence of communist crimes is often difficult to collect. The Russian archives, for example, have been shut by a government determined to whitewash Russia's communist past including its most notorious protagonist — Joseph Stalin.

The complicity of the current governing and intellectual elites in most of Central and Eastern Europe in the perpetuation of communism is another reason. Some, like the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, were Soviet spies. Others, like the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, were ordinary communist party members. While the degree of their complicity with communism varies, these men (and women) have been morally compromised. Absolute condemnation of communism, in other words, would amount to condemnation of their past behavior.

Few people have the courage publicly to admit their mistakes. Most prefer to justify their actions or to forget them. Unfortunately, many of the Western intellectuals who promoted communist ideas and minimized communist crimes have never recanted. Driven by naïve idealism and loathing of Western imperfections, they embraced a utopian vision of a society free of inequities between classes, races and genders; a society free of profit, greed and war. The more Western democracies tried to overcome their shortcomings, the more did the Western idealists trust the empty rhetoric of communism.

In the end, the only equality that communism achieved was that of a breadline and that of a mass grave. Che Guevara symbolizes communism like no other. His image, like his beliefs, belongs in the dustbin of history.

The saga of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has entered its fourth month. On June 28 the Honduras military, in response to an arrest warrant from the nation's Supreme Court, rousted Zelaya from his bed and deported him.

Since then the U.S., the Organization of American States (OAS), and most of Honduras' neighbors have pressed for his return.

The controversy can best be described as a muddled mess. Zelaya's term was set to expire in January. But Zelaya, who moved sharply left after his victory and allied himself with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, proposed a National Constituent Assembly to amend the Honduran constitution.

Zelaya was suspected of wanting to follow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's example of using a national plebiscite to drop term limits, which are enshrined in the Honduran constitution. Indeed, the constitution specifies that to even propose their elimination is grounds for immediate removal from office.

The Honduran high court voided the poll. Zelaya attempted to hold the vote anyway, causing the Supreme Court to issue the warrant. The National Congress named legislative head Roberto Micheletti interim president.

The result is a perfect legal imbroglio. One of the few objective analyses, from the U.S. Congressional Research Service, concluded: "Available sources indicate that the judicial and legislative branches applied constitutional and statutory law in the case against President Zelaya in a manner that was judged by the Honduran authorities from both branches of the government to be in accordance with the Honduran legal system."

People can disagree with this conclusion, but the U.S. had no reason to get involved. The Micheletti government has been heavy-handed, especially after Zelaya covertly returned to Honduras and camped out at the Brazilian Embassy. However, this is not Cuba, in which liberty has been extirpated.

Nothing required Washington to do anything. Let the Hondurans work it out themselves.

Alas, Zelaya has become a cause celebre. Left-wing activists who earlier demonstrated denouncing U.S. intervention in Latin America now want Washington to "restore democracy" in Tegucigalpa.

The Obama administration, OAS, and neighboring countries insist that Zelaya be returned to power. The Micheletti government, backed by most of the nation's traditional power centers, refuses to consider any Zelaya restoration.

So the U.S. is attempting to force Tegucigalpa into line. The administration has suspended some foreign aid and frozen all non-immigrant visas.

The U.S. State Department also suggested that it might not accept the winner of the upcoming election. Spokesman Philip J. Crowley opioned: "Based on conditions as they currently exist, we cannot recognize the results of this election. So for the de facto regime, they're now in a box."

Actually, this policy places the Honduran people in a box. The interim administration has nothing to do with the election — the holding of which offers further evidence that there was no real coup.

Balloting is scheduled for Nov. 29, with the new president to take over on Jan. 27. Which means the Obama administration is threatening to reject the free electoral choice of the Honduran people in order to pressure the outgoing authorities to give a former president of dubious legitimacy three more months in office.

The Obama administration's position would most hurt not the temporary regime, but its successor — headed by a president who would have replaced Zelaya even had the latter never been removed.

Moreover, what happens on Jan. 27 if the Honduran authorities still say no? Would the Obama administration refuse to recognize the new government because the previous administration refused to restore to power a man no longer authorized to serve under any interpretation of the Honduras' constitution?

How then would Washington allow Tegucigalpa to escape the box — delay the inauguration of a new chief executive so Zelaya could serve a couple more months as president?

Talk about being in a box: the Obama administration either would have to stick with sanctions which had lost their raison d'etre or make a humiliating climb-down from its moral high horse.

Washington is attempting to destroy democracy in the name of saving it. All the while behaving like the worst sort of Yanqui-imperialist from yesteryear. Ironically, successfully imposing an unpopular outcome via foreign diktat likely would deepen political divisions within Honduras.

Even if something important was at stake for America and other nations in the Zelaya controversy, neither side in Tegucigalpa wears all white or black hats. The crisis should be up to Hondurans, not outsiders, to resolve.

But for the reset to work, Russia must also back away from provocative actions it is taking in America's backyard. In particular, Moscow needs to end its political and military flirtation with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Instead, the Kremlin seems to be escalating its hostile and destabilizing moves. In the summer of 2008, a Russian general spoke of the possibility of Russia acquiring a military base in Venezuela. While civilian leaders quietly disavowed such intentions, in the following months Russian naval forces conducted joint maneuvers with Venezuelan units, and there has been a proliferation of arms sales, which topped the $4 billion mark by September 2009. The latest installment, which Chavez announced on September 13, is a $2.2 billion "loan" from Russia to purchase tanks, air-defense missiles, and other hardware.

Such manifestations of close political, economic, and military cooperation between Caracas and Moscow is more than a matter of academic interest. Relations between Venezuela and neighboring Colombia have deteriorated markedly in recent years, and tensions along their border have flared on several occasions. Most, although not all, of the provocations have come from the Venezuelan side, including Chavez's blatant support for the radical leftist insurgency in Colombia, spearheaded by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Russia's willingness to boost Chavez's military capabilities makes Moscow an enabler of such behavior.

Perhaps most worrisome, Chavez has recently indicated an intention to commence a nuclear program. Given his track record of duplicity, Venezuela's neighbors understandably view with some skepticism his assurances that such a program would be solely for peaceful purposes. It is also quite likely that Chavez hopes — and perhaps assumes — that Russia would aid the development of a Venezuelan nuclear effort in much the same way that the Kremlin has aided Iran's program.

This increasingly cozy relationship between Moscow and Caracas approaches, if it does not already cross, a red line when it comes to U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. It has been a long standing policy of the United States — beginning with the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s — not to allow European powers to establish political or military clients in the hemisphere. Cuba, of course, has been an irritating exception to that policy for the past fifty years, but American leaders need to make it clear both to the Chavez government and the Medvedev/Putin administration that Washington will not tolerate another exception.

Unfortunately, as the United States grew more powerful in the early twentieth century, the Monroe Doctrine became perverted into a policy that included U.S. attempts to meddle in the internal political affairs of its Latin American neighbors. Any effort to revive the Monroe Doctrine must take precautions not to go down that same path.

Even as the Obama administration should enforce the original intent of the Monroe Doctrine with respect to Venezuela, it needs to stress that if Chavez refrains from becoming a Russian client and avoids actions that threaten Colombia or other states in the hemisphere, the United States will not seek to undermine his regime. As a tangible reassurance on that front, Washington should rescind plans to establish seven military bases in Colombia, a step that has generated fierce criticism from governments throughout South America. Ostensibly, those bases are designed to help wage the war on drugs in the Andean region (a dubious enough motive), but Chavez argues that their actual purpose is to intimidate Venezuela — or worse, to serve as staging areas for an attack. Abandoning plans for the bases would effectively discredit that argument and reassure uneasy Latin American leaders.

Chavez may be an odious, authoritarian thug, but his abuses inside Venezuela are up to the Venezuelan people to deal with. They do not pose a threat to important U.S. security interests.

A Russian-instigated arms buildup, to say nothing of the onset of a nuclear-arms race in the Western Hemisphere, is another matter entirely. Such actions menace the political and military stability of the region and undermine Latin America's status as a nuclear-weapons-free zone. That prospect is very much a matter of legitimate concern to the United States. Washington should convey a message — in words of one syllable, if necessary — to both Caracas and Moscow that they are playing a very dangerous game. Chavez needs to know that his current course could lead to a regime-ending event. And Moscow needs to be told that even reasonably good relations between Russia and the United States will depend significantly on a change of its policy regarding Venezuela.

President Obama has made a conciliatory gesture with the end of the missile defense plan for Central Europe. It is time for Medvedev and Putin to reciprocate.

Even before Medina Mora’s surprise ouster, there was a growing buzz that Calderón might be rethinking the drug war, and that in marked contrast to Washington’s long-standing attitude, the Obama administration would support a less aggressive approach. In mid-August, Calderón signed a measure that the Mexican Congress had passed in April decriminalizing the personal possession of small quantities of all illegal drugs. Under the new law, anyone caught with the equivalent of as many as five marijuana joints or four lines of cocaine can no longer be arrested or fined—much less imprisoned. Police will simply give them the address of a rehabilitation clinic and urge them to overcome their habit.

That was precisely the sort of apostasy regarding drug policy that used to generate outrage and threats of retaliation from officials in Washington. This time, the reaction was dramatically different. When asked about the reform measure during a visit to Mexico in July, U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske merely responded that the United States would “wait and see” how it worked out.

Despite such developments, there is little evidence that Calderón’s government is about to abandon the military campaign against the cartels. Indeed, it is more likely that these changes are designed to clear the decks for the escalation of that war.

Medina Mora’s departure is more than a little ominous. Throughout his tenure, he had feuded with Genaro Garcia Luna, the secretary of public security. The departure of Medina Mora and his replacement by a less prominent figure, obscure federal prosecutor Arturo Chavez, strengthens Garcia Luna’s relative position in the administration. Since his approach to the drug war is even more hard-line than Medina Mora’s, his rise in status does not suggest the onset of an appeasement or accommodation strategy regarding drug traffickers.

Moreover, Chavez comes from the same faction of the governing National Action Party (PAN) as Garcia Luna, and the two men have been longtime political allies. George W. Grayson, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary and the author of Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?, concludes that Chavez’s appointment not only is a victory for Garcia Luna in a bureaucratic power struggle, it “backs the muscular approach as they try to ramp up their capabilities to fight the cartels.”

The official justification for Calderón’s signing of the drug-law reform also indicates that the hard-line policy toward the cartels is still in place, and might even intensify. Commenting on the reform measure, Bernardo Espino del Castillo, an official with the attorney general’s office who helped write the new law, stated: “This frees us from a flood of small crimes that have saturated our federal government and allows the authorities to go after big criminals.”

Nor is there any indication that Washington would welcome a de-escalation of Mexico’s offensive against the cartels. While the Obama administration seems more receptive than its predecessors to mild “harm reduction” drug-policy reforms in Mexico, any truce or accommodation with the drug lords would be another matter entirely. Such a move would signal that Mexico City had decided to abandon—or at least greatly scale back—the goal of trying to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the United States in exchange for a commitment from the traffickers to cool the violence.

That step, in the view of zealous U.S. drug warriors—and even relatively moderate Obama administration policy makers—would be a devil’s bargain. Although the U.S. response to Mexico’s new drug decriminalization law was relatively low-key, officials went out of their way to reaffirm an uncompromising stance toward the cartels. “We know that Mexican law-enforcement authorities are continuing their efforts to target drug traffickers,” U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson Laura Sweeney emphasized,

Our friends and partners in Mexico are waging an historic battle with the cartels, one that plays out on the streets of their communities each day. Here in the United States we will continue to enforce federal narcotics laws as we investigate, charge, and arrest cartel leaders and their subordinates in our joint effort to dismantle and disrupt these cartels.

The bottom line is that the drug-war violence in Mexico is likely to get worse, not better, in the coming months. Calderón is a stubborn man, and he seems intent on ignoring pleas for a de-escalation even from some of his political supporters. “The people of Mexico are losing hope, and it is urgent that Congress, the political parties and the president reconsider this strategy,” said Senator Ramon Galindo, a Calderón ally and fellow PAN member. Galindo may have a special vantage point to be alarmed, since he is a former mayor of Ciudad Juarez, the city on the Mexico-U.S. border that has been the epicenter of the drug violence. 

Washington should be concerned about the possible escalation of Calderón’s ill-advised strategy as well. The chaos on our southern border is already at alarming levels. Yet, as bad as the situation has been over the past three years, it may just be a mild prelude to what we will encounter going forward.

The saga of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has entered its third month. On June 28 the Honduras military, in response to an arrest warrant from the nation's Supreme Court, rousted Zelaya from his bed and deported him. Since then the U.S., Organization of American States, and most of Honduras' neighbors have pressed for his return.

The controversy can best be described as a muddled mess. Zelaya's term was set to expire in January; elections, in which the candidates already had been chosen, were scheduled for November. Zelaya, who moved sharply left after his victory and allied himself with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, proposed a National Constituent Assembly to amend the Honduran constitution.

The subject to be addressed was not specified, but Zelaya was suspected of wanting to follow Chavez's example of using a national plebiscite to drop term limits, which are enshrined in the Honduran constitution. Indeed, the constitution specified that to even propose their elimination is grounds for immediate removal from office.

Presuming that this was his intent, the Honduran high court voided the poll. Zelaya attempted to hold the vote anyway, causing the Supreme Court to issue the warrant. After his ouster the National Congress name legislative head Roberto Micheletti interim president.

The result is a perfect legal imbroglio. Zelaya claimed the military mounted an illegal coup. The Micheletti government says the military never took power and acted at the behest of the Court and Congress (the constitution does not provide for legislative impeachment). There was no legal authority for exiling Zelaya, but the Honduran authorities claimed exigent circumstances. Much depends on an assessment of his intentions, and whether those assumptions should be treated as facts.

Was Zelaya a dedicated populist or putative dictator? There are grounds for suspicion, yet his popularity had dropped sharply before his ouster and he was opposed even by many in his own party. Polls show Hondurans to be sharply divided, agreeing that there were legal grounds for the military's action but opposing Zelaya's ouster.

The best position for the U.S. would have been to stay out of the controversy. Let the Hondurans work it out themselves. The Micheletti government has been heavy-handed in breaking up demonstrations. But this is not North Korea, Burma, or Cuba, in which liberty has been extirpated and regime critics face prison or worse. Nothing required Washington to do anything.

However, Zelaya immediately became the latest cause célèbre of the Left in America. Activists who earlier demonstrated denouncing U.S. intervention suddenly began churning out blog posts demanding that Washington "restore democracy" in Tegucigalpa. The means: obnoxious and officious U.S. meddling.

The Obama administration, OAS, and neighboring countries all have insisted that Zelaya be returned to power. Costa Rica's Oscar Arias, among others, has proposed a compromise recalling Zelaya while restricting his authority. But the bottom line is the claim that Zelaya remains Honduras' rightful president.

The Micheletti government, backed by most of the nation's traditional power centers, including the Catholic Church, has refused to consider any Zelaya restoration. Roberto Micheletti has offered to step down, but those backing him believe Zelaya's presidency was legitimately ended by an authoritative decision of the Honduran Supreme Court.

The OAS is essentially powerless — it suspended Honduras's membership, but can do little more. Honduras' neighbors are unlikely to do anything other than lecture. The European Union suspended some foreign assistance, but can do no more. Thus, if anyone can force Tegucigalpa into line, it is the U.S. In fact, Zelaya contended that Washington needs "only tighten its fist" to restore him. However, other than mounting a military invasion or imposing a trade embargo, America's power, too, is limited.

The administration initially suspended $22 million in aid, mostly for the military, and invalidated visas for officials in the interim regime. Moreover, last week Obama officials said they're reconsidering the status of America's four-year $215 million aid program. So far the Micheletti government has refused to bend.

Thus, the administration is ratcheting up the pressure. The State Department froze all non-immigrant visas. Roughly 30,000 visas are granted for business and tourist purposes every year, which means about 2,500 people a month are being inconvenienced by the U.S. action. State explained that it was "conducting a full review of our visa policy."

No one explained exactly how preventing a Honduran businessman from traveling to America to complete a deal will help Zelaya's quest. Perhaps President Obama expects frustrated children hoping to go to Disney World to rise up and overthrow the Micheletti administration. In fact, outside sanctions typically encourage people to rally around their governments rather than back the interfering outsiders.

Even more bizarre, the State Department suggested that it might not accept the winner of the upcoming election. When asked if the U.S. would recognize the victor — the race is between Zelaya's former vice president and the opposition party candidate whom Zelaya defeated four years ago — an unnamed administration official opined: "We understand that the elections loom in the non-distant future. We certainly want this resolved before then."

State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley was even blunter: "Based on conditions as they currently exist, we cannot recognize the results of this election. So for the de facto regime, they're now in a box."

Actually, it is the people of Honduras who have been placed in a box. The interim administration has nothing to do with the election — the holding of which offers further evidence that there was no coup, at least as commonly defined. Balloting is scheduled for Nov. 29, with the new president to take over on January 27. There have been no allegations that the present government intends to fix the vote, or prevent the real winner from taking office. The Obama administration is threatening to deny the legitimacy of the president to be freely chosen by the Honduran people in order to pressure the outgoing authorities to give Zelaya four more months in office.

It is an act of desperation by those who want Washington to impose its will in Tegucigalpa. Vicki Goss of the Washington Office on Latin America said: "It's critically important that the U.S. government has stated that they won't recognize the November elections." Yet this step would hurt not the supposedly illegitimate temporary regime, but its successor — headed by a president who would have replaced Zelaya even had he never been removed.

Moreover, what happens on January 27 if the Honduran authorities still say no? Would the Obama administration refuse to recognize the new government because the previous administration refused to restore to power a man no longer authorized to serve under any interpretation of the Honduras' constitution? How then would Washington allow Tegucigalpa to escape the box — delay the inauguration of a new chief executive and bring Zelaya back for a few more months? Talk about being in a box: the Obama administration either would have to stick with sanctions which had lost their raison d'être or initiate a humiliating climb-down from its moral high horse.

Washington is attempting to destroy democracy in the name of saving it. And to do so by behaving like the worst sort of Yanqui-imperialist from yesteryear.

Even of the U.S. succeeded in imposing its will, the likely result would be to worsen the crisis. Observes Eric Farnsworth of the Council of the Americas, State's action "limits our options, a violation of the first law of diplomacy, by taking off the table the one means by which the crisis could naturally be resolved." Imposing an outcome from the outside, an outcome unsatisfactory to many Hondurans, via U.S. diktat likely would deepen political divisions within Honduras. Greater, not lesser, social strife likely would result.

Julia F. Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations complains: "If they can't get the cast of characters in Honduras to behave the way they want them to, how are they going to deal with Afghanistan or Iran?"

But Afghanistan and Iran matter in ways that Honduras does not. Nothing important enough is at stake in Honduras to warrant active intervention in a complex and emotional political struggle that concerns the people of Honduras, not America.

Representative Barney Frank, the colourful chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, put it this way: "This is the end of the era of extreme laissez-faire, of 'don't tax it, don't regulate it'. That has now been totally evaporated." Pundits have also swung into action. For example, The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: "For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn - the turn that made crisis inevitable - took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years."

To evaluate these claims, an index of economic "misery" for each US administration since World War II is presented in Chart 1. The original misery index was developed by the late Arthur Okun, a distinguished economist who served as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers in the Johnson administration. Okun's index equals the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates.

While Okun's index measures the absolute level of misery in the economy, it tells us little about whether things are getting better or worse. In Getting It Right (1996), Harvard Professor Robert Barro amended the Okun index. Barro's index, which measures the change in misery during a president's term, is the sum of the following four metrics: the difference between the average inflation rate over a president's term and the average inflation rate during the last year of the previous president's term; the difference between the average unemployment rate over a president's term and the unemployment rate during the last month of the previous president's term; the change in the 30-year government bond yield during a president's term; and the difference between the long-term, trend rate of real GDP growth (3.1 per cent) and the real rate of growth during a president's term.

These modifications had several effects; the data were smoother and more comprehensive, painting a more accurate picture of economic conditions experienced by the majority of Americans. Indeed, Barro's modifications allow one to measure more accurately the relative change in the economy over a US president's four years in office.

The data in the misery index chart speak loudly. Contrary to what has become dogma in some quarters, the Reagan "free-market years" were very good ones. And the Clinton era of Victorian fiscal prudence - when President Clinton proclaimed in his January 1996 State of the Union address: "the era of big government is over" - was also excellent. In general, the Reagan and Clinton periods were characterised by strong growth coupled with improvements in inflation, employment and interest rates.

The misery index pours cold water on the current critique of free markets - one that has taken on the characteristics of a religion. It makes one wonder if the critics actually tested their ideas by comparing them with anything that actually happened.

To obtain an economic reality check, the misery index concept can be applied to any country where suitable data exist. Let's take a look at Jamaica. A modified misery index for Jamaica is presented in Chart 2. The index is the sum of the inflation, interest, and unemployment rates, minus the annual per cent change in per capita GDP.

Several things stand out: the Manley years (1972-80 and 1989-92) were a disaster that Jamaica has never recovered from; the Seaga years (1980-89) were a bit of a rollercoaster ride, but one in which Seaga, by the end of his term, had improved on the mess that he had inherited from Manley; the Patterson years (1992-2006) were marked by a steady improvement on the dismal state of economic affairs created by Manley during the 1989-92 period; both Simpson Miller and Golding have ushered in a reversal of the downward trend in the misery index realised during the Patterson years. Jamaica remains with an elevated level of economic misery. And what is worse, the economy is pointed in the wrong direction.

As an indication of just how far Jamaica will have to travel before it reaches a state of tolerable economic health, consider that Jamaica ranks 63 out of the 181 countries graded in the World Bank's "Doing Business 2009" - a report that measures the vitality of free markets and the ease of doing business.

The latest controversy involved the postponement of a visit to by an Organization of American States (OAS) delegation to Tegucigalpa. After weeks of squabbling, both sides remain recalcitrant. Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya is no closer to reinstatement, while the interim Honduran government remains isolated.

The political confrontation may be unsettling for Honduras, but it has had little impact on the United States. It is a good example of a foreign crisis which isn't even a problem in America. Washington's response should be helpful indifference. U.S. officials should offer to assist negotiations but avoid taking sides in a dispute in which America has nothing substantial at stake.

The controversy began when President Zelaya, whose term was to end in January, proposed a referendum to establish a National Constituent Assembly to amend the Honduran constitution. Zelaya, an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, was suspected of planning to use the proposed gathering to overturn presidential term limits, though the referendum said nothing about the issue (and in any case it would have been virtually impossible for him to have run again this November).

The Honduran Supreme Court ruled that the poll was illegal. After Zelaya ignored the Court's decision and organized demonstrators to seize the ballots from the military base where they were stored, the Court issued a warrant for his arrest. At the Court's direction, the military roused him from his bed on June 28 and sent him into exile in Costa Rica. The National Congress replaced him, selecting the body's head, Roberto Micheletti, as interim president.

Zelaya denounced his ouster as a coup, though the military never took power and acted at the behest of civilian institutions. The Micheletti government insists that all of its actions, other than exiling Zelaya, were legal, and that exile was necessary for his protection and Honduras' security. Polls show a sharply divided population, with a narrow plurality opposing his ouster while agreeing that his actions legally justified his removal.

The current confrontation reflects deeper political divisions. In 2005 Zelaya, a wealthy rancher, was elected as the center-left candidate of the Liberal Party. He turned left-populist, allying himself with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban President Raul Castro. Wealthier Hondurans feared that he hoped to move towards autocracy, like in Venezuela, and even his own party — which dominated the Supreme Court and National Congress — turned against him. His poll ratings were hovering around 25 percent.

The controversy matters to Honduras, and few others. Honduras is a small nation in a region of small nations. It is relatively poor, with minimal impact on the international economy. The country possesses few national resources and has only limited military capabilities. Political instability is unlikely to generate many refugees. The dispute has no measurable impact on the United States.

Yet few issues of so little importance have generated so much heat in Washington. The battle lines formed early. President Barack Obama backed Zelaya. So have most left-leaning activists. In contrast, several conservative Republican legislators defended the interim government. So, too, did the Right and especially neoconservatives. Libertarian-minded writers divided. Everyone claimed the mantle of democracy while calling Zelaya either a devoted social reformer or a dangerous dictator wannabe.

Who's right? It's hard to say. Philip Giraldi of the American Conservative Defense Alliance may have put it best: "there is no clear good and bad in what happened in Honduras."

Without question, the Honduran constitution bars amendment via referendum of eight constitutional provisions, including term limits. However, does that provision apply to an advisory measure which does not directly address presidential tenure? Still, the Supreme Court made a clear and presumptively valid ruling, which bound the president. The National Congress and military should have ensured that the law was respected. Was his forcible removal by the military necessary? Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution states that anyone attempting to change the term limit "will immediately cease in their functions." Was it legitimate for the Court to decide that that is what he intended on doing in the future, even if he was not doing so today? If so, presumably he lost his office automatically. That still didn't necessarily warrant the military's bedtime arrest and exile, however.

What were Zelaya's plans? His intentions might have been malign, though Honduras is one of many countries where economic and political elites tend to help each other at the expense of the poor. Moreover, his critics had reason to worry that Zelaya hoped to follow the precedent created by Venezuela's Chavez, who has steadily dismantled legal restraints on presidential power and tenure, and eliminated protections for civil and political liberties. Nevertheless, suspicions alone provide a dubious basis for removing a president. Especially since Zelaya was constrained by the very institutions which removed him from power as well as his lack of popularity. Assume that his ouster was valid. His arrest and exile remain dubious. The latter certainly is extra-constitutional if not expressly illegal.

However, his refusal to respect the decision of the Supreme Court set the stage for potentially violent conflict. And while the military packing him off to Costa Rica in his pajamas looks bad, bad procedure alone does not entitle him to return to office if he violated the Honduran constitution. In short, there is no simple answer to the questions posed by the events of June 28. Was Zelaya's planned referendum legal? Did the constitution require his removal? Should he have been forced into exile?

For what it is worth, I view Zelaya with suspicion — he has been talking about launching an insurrection to contest his ouster — and believe he should have been held accountable for flouting the Supreme Court's decisions. But his critics appear to have overreacted. My views shouldn't matter, however. These are decisions for Hondurans, not Americans (and other people) to make. So too is it up to Hondurans on how to resolve the crisis, including whether to forge some sort of political compromise, such as that advanced by former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, in order to minimize future conflict.

Washington should back off. Even if the Obama administration wants to impose a solution, its options are limited.

Zelaya argued that the United States needs "only tighten its fist" to put him back in power, but he overstates America's influence. The administration already has suspended military aid (why was the United States giving anything for Honduras' military anyway?), voided visas for interim government officials and threatened to cut off economic assistance. None of these measures are likely to override the dictates of local politics in Tegucigalpa. Ending trade — America is the destination of 70 percent of Honduran exports — would damage the Honduran economy, but would penalize Zelaya supporters and opponents alike, while kindling antagonism toward the overbearing Yankee colossus. If the interim government refused to buckle, maintaining sanctions after a new, freely elected president took office in January would be pointless. Most important, even if the United States and other nations (the OAS has suspended Honduras) were able to force Zelaya's return, doing so more likely would exacerbate than heal Honduras' political divisions.

But why should officials in Washington attempt to substitute their judgment for that of people in Honduras? Sometimes there are right answers: brutal violations of human rights can never be justified. But the Honduran legal and political situation is not so clear. People of goodwill and intentions can come down on both sides. Honduras' political future depends on the Hondurans working through these difficult issues. A permanent solution cannot be imposed from outside.

Does the Honduran political crisis matter to Washington? As a humanitarian concern, yes. But as a foreign-policy issue, no. There is no direct impact on the U.S. and claims of regional effects appear similarly overblown. American officials should join the OAS in offering to help mediate in Tegucigalpa. But the outcome doesn't much matter to Washington, which has no special wisdom to offer. Instead of continuing to attempt to micromanage the globe, the U.S. government should take an alternative approach: mind its own business. No longer should every controversy in every nation, such as Honduras, require Washington's attention.

Now we have two new examples of Americans projecting democratic values onto murky foreign upheavals. One occurred in Honduras, where the military ousted left-wing President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile. American opinion leaders immediately took sides. The Obama administration stressed that Zelaya was democratically elected and demanded that he be restored to office. Conservatives asserted that Zelaya's opponents were the real democrats. This was not an old-fashioned Latin American coup, they insisted, noting that the army chiefs acted only after both the Honduran supreme court and national legislature urged them to do so. Zelaya, American critics charged, was a Hugo Chavez clone who unconstitutionally sought to extend his term and create a dictatorship.

Both American factions deserve awards for naïveté. Given the long history of military coups in Central America, it strains credulity to believe that the Honduran military acted merely at the behest of civilian judges and legislators. And one should not assume that those civilian factions were spurred by pure motives rather than engaging in a mundane power struggle.

The Obama administration's attitude was even more obtuse. The president's position was reminiscent of Bill Clinton's Haitian policy in the mid-1990s, when the U.S. threatened to invade if the military junta didn't restore elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Never mind that Aristide was both erratic and autocratic. Never mind that his followers routinely tortured and murdered political opponents. Never mind that his corrupt economic policies made the situation in a desperately poor country even worse. The fact that he won an election seemed to be all that mattered to his hero worshipers in the United States. Obama administration officials appear to regard the Honduran situation in much the same way, conveniently ignoring Zelaya's abuses.

While there was a split along ideological fault lines in the United States regarding the Honduran turmoil, there was pervasive enthusiasm about the anti-government demonstrations in Iran. Here were pro-Western democratic reformers struggling against religious zealots who blatantly stole a presidential election.

As is often the case, the narrative contained a kernel of truth. Iran's regime is certainly one of the more stifling on the planet, and there seemed little doubt that the hardline clerics maneuvered to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. (The announcement of final results barely four hours after the polls closed, when 40 million paper ballots were cast, was compelling evidence of fraud, as was Ahmadinejad's startling ability to carry long-standing reformist strongholds.)

Yet the many Americans cheering the demonstrators who took to the streets to challenge the results painfully oversimplified the situation. To start, the "reformist" presidential candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was not exactly a secular democrat. During the 1980s, he served as Ayatollah Khomeini's prime minister and ordered the imprisonment or execution of thousands of regime critics. In the recent political struggle, Mousavi and many of his followers appeared moderate only when compared to Ahmadinejad and other Islamic fire-breathers.

Republicans who pressed President Obama to endorse the demonstrations predictably equated the Iranian opposition with Eastern Europeans who resisted the Soviet occupation of their countries during the Cold War. But Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and most other prominent dissidents were genuine democrats, albeit often with rather left-leaning economic views. The political makeup of the Iranian opposition was decidedly cloudier. Key players who backed Mousavi included former presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, as well as approximately 40 percent of the Guardian Council, the assembly of senior mullahs. Virtually none of those individuals could be mistaken for committed democrats. On balance, the tumult was at least as much a split within the clerical hierarchy as a true democratic rebellion, a point that largely eluded Americans who urged the Obama administration to get involved.

This was hardly the first time that the U.S. had viewed allegedly democratic movements in other countries through the prism of American values. In April 2005, President George W. Bush described Ukraine's Orange Revolution, led by Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, as "a powerful example of democracy for people around the world." "The ideals of the new Ukraine are the ideals shared by Western civilization," he asserted. That praise was relatively restrained compared to his assessment of the achievement in Georgia.

In a May 2005 speech in Tbilisi, Bush hailed Georgia's democrats for creating the template for Crayola revolutions: "Before there was a Purple Revolution in Iraq or an Orange Revolution in Ukraine or a Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, there was a Rose Revolution in Georgia." He continued, "Your courage is inspiring democratic reformers and sending a message that echoes around the world: Freedom will be the future of every nation and every people on Earth." Georgia, he added, was "building a democratic society where the rights of minorities are respected; where a free press flourishes; where a vigorous opposition is welcomed and where unity is achieved through peace."

Four years later, the bloom is definitely off the Rose Revolution. There is mounting evidence implicating President Mikheil Saakashvili in political corruption and human-rights abuses. In September 2007, Irakli Okruashvili, an opposition leader and former defense minister, reported that Saakashvili had instructed him to have a Georgian economic oligarch assassinated. More generally, he accused the government of "dishonesty, injustice and repression." In response, Georgian authorities arrested Okruashvili.

Even if lurid tales of assassination plots remain unsubstantiated, other abuses do not. A 2008 report by the International Crisis Group concluded that Saakashvili's government "has become increasingly authoritarian." A 2007 Human Rights Watch report accused the regime of "taking serious steps" to undermine human rights and the rule of law. Saakashvili's administration has brutally suppressed opposition street demonstrations, jailed dozens of political critics, and just before the crucial January 2008 election, shut down opposition media outlets, including the country's main television station. International observers refused to certify the May 2009 parliamentary elections as either free or fair. Even Freedom House, an early admirer of the Rose Revolution, concedes in its new Freedom of the World 2009 report that Georgia ranks as only "partly free" and that the trend arrow is pointing down.

The situation in Ukraine is only marginally better. The Orange coalition has degenerated into a comic opera rivalry between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, with the latter periodically making common cause with Viktor Yanukovych, an old-style communist pol whom U.S. officials scorned as a Russian stooge. Corruption charges continue to dog Yushchenko's administration: his young son tools around the streets of Kiev in a six-figure sports car. The president's approval rating is now in the single digits, and Tymoshenko's is not much better. Once again, an American-lauded "democratic" revolution has become an embarrassment.

Such developments mock the breathless enthusiasm that the Bush administration and most conservatives expressed for the Rose and Orange Revolutions. It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that misplaced support for foreign "democratic" political movements is the exclusive fantasy of conservative Republicans. It is a bipartisan folly.

Before and during the Kosovo War in 1999, liberal politicians and pundits in the United States lionized the Kosovo Liberation Army. Sen. Joe Lieberman gushed, "The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." In realty, the KLA was a motley collection of unreconstructed communists, Albanian nationalists, organized crime thugs, and Islamic extremists. Lieberman's paean verged on the obscene. Unfortunately, his fondness for the KLA was only slightly greater than that exhibited by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and the other Clinton administration officials directing Washington's policies in the Balkans.

Perhaps the most notorious example of our policymakers linking America's fortunes to sleazy foreign movements was our support for Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress in the years leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Despite longstanding indications that Chalabi and company were corrupt political operators with disturbing ties to Iran, neoconservative cheerleaders treated Chalabi as the George Washington of Iraq. The INC exploited that gullibility to feed the U.S. government and the American news media bogus information about Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al-Qaeda and Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

Chalabi's lame excuse that he and his associates were "heroes in error" did not allay suspicions that the deception had been deliberate. His democratic credentials and his political support inside Iraq proved to be illusory. When elections were held for Iraq's parliament, his party garnered barely 0.5 percent of the vote. So much for the political giant that Washington believed would lead Iraq into a new democratic era.

One would hope that policymakers might learn from these bruising experiences. But the Iran episode suggests that they continually fail to appreciate cultural differences or complexities. Consider the portrayal of Lebanon's Cedar Revolution as a democratic surge. Lebanon's political arena is a labyrinth of opaque and shifting alliances involving pro- and anti-Syrian forces; Sunni, Shi'ite, and Druze factions; and at least two major — often feuding — Christian groups. Sorting all that out taxes even the most knowledgeable experts. Yet the talking heads on Fox News saw fit to pontificate about Lebanon's political struggle.

The attempt to portray events in Iran as a replay of the ouster of Soviet puppet regimes in Eastern Europe is erroneous on many levels. While Eastern Europeans may have welcomed an American embrace, few Iranians would. Washington was seen as the enemy of Eastern Europe's imperial oppressor, the Soviet Union. Yet Middle Eastern populations — rightly or not — regard the United States as their region's imperial oppressor.

Furthermore, whether or not foreign movements are genuinely democratic should have little bearing on U.S. foreign policy. Even if Mikheil Saakashvili were the second coming of Thomas Jefferson, it would have been unwise for the United States to go nose to nose with a nuclear-armed Russia when war broke out last year between that country and Georgia. In the same fashion, a victory by anti-Ahmadinejad forces would not necessarily solve the issue of Tehran's nuclear ambitions. That program began under the Shah, not the clerical regime, and there is no evidence that a new, more moderate government would give it up.

Why are Americans so susceptible to being gulled? Cynics might argue that our leaders do not actually believe that most supposedly democratic upheavals are genuine, but portray them as such if the insurgent faction is amenable to Washington's economic or strategic goals. They stress alleged democratic credentials to soothe an American public that would balk at embracing questionable movements or regimes on the basis of realpolitik. After all, throughout the Cold War, Washington routinely portrayed friendly autocrats, no matter how brutal, as members of the "free world." At one point, Vice President George H.W. Bush hailed Ferdinand Marcos for his "commitment to democratic principles," even as the Philippines groaned under martial law imposed a decade earlier.

Yet one should not underestimate the capacity of even jaded politicians to engage in self-delusion. How else does one explain George W. Bush's embarrassing assertion that he had looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and seen the soul of a good man?

Ordinary citizens can be even more susceptible to wishful thinking. Americans are understandably proud of the values symbolized by our revolution and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. For more than two centuries, we have expected other societies to emulate that model. At times this has occurred. On too many other occasions, Americans have mentally shoehorned unsavory political movements into the category of liberal democracy. To win support from the United States, foreign factions have become adept at telling us what we want to hear. But for our psychological, as well as our political and strategic well-being, we might pause before automatically embracing the next gathering of dissidents in some far-flung capital as newborn democrats begging for our aid.

What happened in Honduras on June 28 was not a military coup. It was the constitutional removal of a president who abused his powers and tried to subvert the country's democratic institutions in order to stay in office.

The extent to which this episode has been misreported is truly remarkable. Here are a few of the incontrovertible facts.

First of all, the decision to remove President Manuel Zelaya from office was not undertaken by the military. It was the country's Supreme Court that unanimously ordered the army on June 26 to arrest the president on the charges of "treason, abuse of power and usurpation of duties."

The Honduran constitution does not establish an impeachment process by Congress. However, in 2003 the constitution was amended, giving the Supreme Court, and not Congress, the duty to handle the processes initiated against "the highest ranking officials of the State." This amendment also eliminated the benefit of immunity that high-ranking officials had enjoyed until then. Thus, the president is subject to prosecution — just like any other citizen.

It is also important to note that after Zelaya's ouster, the army didn't seize or retain power. The Honduran Congress, as specified by the constitution, promptly swore in the speaker of Congress as the new president. Consequently, power stayed in civilian hands. The army merely enforced a court ruling, as provided for in the constitution.

The Honduran constitution is atypical in Latin American because of its repeated emphasis on presidential term limits. Due to the country's authoritarian past, when both civilian and military dictatorships were the rule, the Honduran constitution bans any sort of presidential re-election.

The document is quite clear about this: Article 4 states that attempts to violate the alternation in the office of the presidency constitute "treason." Article 42.5 even says that any person who incites, promotes or supports presidential re-election will lose his or her citizenship.

And Article 239 says that any person who has held the office of the presidency cannot be president or vice president again. Furthermore, it states that the officeholder "that violates this provision or proposes its reform, as well as those who support such a 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."

I added the italics for emphasis. Note the use of the word "immediately."

Also, the Honduran constitution stipulates that the only mechanism through which it can be amended is by two separate votes in Congress by absolute majority (two-thirds). However, Article 375 states that under no circumstance can the constitution be amended to allow for presidential re-election.

Zelaya was promoting a referendum on the need for a new constitution that would open the door to his re-election. The vote, which was scheduled the day of his ouster, had been declared illegal by the Supreme Court and the Electoral Tribunal, and condemned by the Honduran Congress and attorney general.

Since late May, the office of the attorney general had been pressing a case against the president for his efforts to call a referendum. The Supreme Court notified the president several times that his actions were out of order. Zelaya ignored those calls.

Instead, he ordered the Honduran armed forces to provide logistical assistance in the execution of his illegal referendum. The army chief, complying with the Supreme Court ruling, refused to obey the order. Zelaya sacked him.

The Electoral Tribunal ordered the seizure of the ballots and other electoral materials that were going to be used for the vote. Zelaya then personally led a mob that stormed the air force base where those electoral materials were being held in order to retrieve them.

Given Zelaya's repeated and deliberate actions against the constitution and the rule of law, on June 25 the attorney general filed an injunction with the Supreme Court asking for his arrest. The next day, the Court unanimously issued an arrest warrant and ordered the army to enforce it.

However, something went wrong. Instead of arresting him, the army disobeyed the terms of the arrest warrant by expelling Zelaya from the country. That was a clear violation the constitution; Article 102 protects a citizen from being expatriated.

The army claims it did so in order to avoid clashes with Zelaya's supporters, who might have tried to storm the facilities where he'd be held. That could have resulted in bloodshed and a terrible loss of lives.

But the army acted illegally, and the attorney general's office has already filed an investigation of the military officers' decision to expel Zelaya. The army has stated that they will comply with any court ruling in this case.

President Obama has declared that this "coup" was illegal. But if he had read the Honduran constitution — or even been provided with a brief analysis of the document's details — it seems unlikely he could maintain such a firm conclusion.

After nearly 50 years, America's cold war embargo against Cuba appears to be thawing at last. Earlier this spring, the Obama administration relaxed controls on travel and remittances to the communist island by Cuban Americans, and last week it agreed to open the door for Cuba's re-entry to the Organisation of American States.

Admitting Cuba to the OAS may be premature, given the organisation's charter that requires its members to be democracies that respect human rights, but changes to the US economic embargo are long overdue.

The embargo has been a failure by every measure. It has not changed the course or nature of the Cuban government. It has not liberated a single Cuban citizen. In fact, the embargo has made the Cuban people a bit more impoverished, without making them one bit more free. At the same time, it has deprived Americans of their freedom to travel and has cost US farmers and other producers billions of dollars of potential exports.

As a tool of US foreign policy, the embargo actually enhances the Castro government's standing by giving it a handy excuse for the failures of the island's Caribbean-style socialism. Brothers Fidel and Raul can rail for hours about the suffering the embargo inflicts on Cubans, even though the damage done by their communist policies has been far worse. The embargo has failed to give us an ounce of extra leverage over what happens in Havana.

In 2000, Congress approved a modest opening of the embargo. The Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act allows cash-only sales to Cuba of US farm products and medical supplies. The results of this modest opening have been quite amazing. Since 2000, total sales of farm products to Cuba have increased from virtually zero to $691m in 2008. The top US exports by value are corn, meat and poultry, wheat and soybeans. From dead last, Cuba is now the number six customer in Latin America for US agricultural products. Last year, American farmers sold more to the 11.5 million people who live in Cuba than to the 200 million people in Brazil.

According to the US international trade commission, US farm exports would increase another $250m if restrictions were lifted on export financing. This should not be interpreted as a call for export-import bank subsidies. Trade with Cuba must be entirely commercial and market driven. Lifting the embargo should not mean that US taxpayers must now subsidise exports to Cuba. But neither should the government stand in the way.

USITC estimates do not capture the long-term export potential to Cuba from normalised relations. The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Guatemala spend an average of 2.8% of their GDP to buy farm exports from the US. If Cuba spent the same share of its GDP on US farm exports, exports could more than double the current level, to $1.5bn a year.

Advocates of the embargo argue that trading with Cuba will only put dollars into the coffers of the Castro regime. And it's true that the government in Havana, because it controls the economy, can skim off a large share of the remittances and tourist dollars spent in Cuba. But of course, selling more US products to Cuba would quickly relieve the Castro regime of those same dollars.

If more US tourists were permitted to visit Cuba, and at the same time US exports to Cuba were further liberalised, the US economy could reclaim dollars from the Castro regime as fast as the regime could acquire them. In effect, the exchange would be of agricultural products for tourism services, a kind of "bread for beaches", "food for fun" trade relationship.

Meanwhile, the increase in Americans visiting Cuba would dramatically increase contact between Cubans and Americans. The unique US-Cuban relationship that flourished before Castro could be renewed, which would increase US influence and potentially hasten the decline of the communist regime.

Congress and President Barack Obama should act now to lift the embargo to allow more travel and farm exports to Cuba. Expanding our freedom to travel to, trade with and invest in Cuba would make Americans better off and would help the Cuban people and speed the day when they can enjoy the freedom they deserve.

The UN long has claimed to represent the greatest aspirations of humanity, running back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was approved more than six decades ago. But the UN's Commission on Human Rights routinely embarrassed the "international community." Often dominated by human rights abusers, the body routinely whitewashed oppressive governments and spent much of its time attacking Israel. It was one of Turtle Bay's finest comedy clubs -- only the performances were underwritten by U.S. taxpayers.

Three years ago the Commission was replaced by the Human Rights Council in a vain attempt to improve operations. The Bush administration refused to dignify the body with America's presence, but in March the Obama administration announced its decision to return. Doing so obviously was a mistake.

The membership list reads like a Who's Who of repressive regimes: Angola, Egypt, Gabon, China, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Cuba. Many of the other members have lesser human rights problems. Authoritarian states have an obvious incentive to go easy on their fellow autocracies. Even worse, these member governments view violating human rights as a positive good and one of the chief responsibilities of government (in their hands, at least).

As part of its commitment to human rights, the Council conducts an annual review -- which culminates in a three hour debate on the nation's human rights record. Strangely, these reviews seem a bit, shall we say, superficial?

Cuba's record isn't hard to assess. The State Department helpfully summarizes the Cuban record in its annual human rights report:

The government continued to deny its citizens their basic human rights and committed numerous, serious abuses. The government denied citizens the right to change their government. At year's end there were at least 205 political prisoners and detainees. As many as 5,000 citizens served sentences for "dangerousness," without being charged with any specific crime. The following human rights problems were reported: beatings and abuse of detainees and prisoners, including human rights activists, carried out with impunity; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions, including denial of medical care; harassment, beatings, and threats against political opponents by government-recruited mobs, police, and State Security officials; arbitrary arrest and detention of human rights advocates and members of independent professional organizations; denial of fair trial; and interference with privacy, including pervasive monitoring of private communications.

The group Freedom House ranks Cuba at the bottom in both political rights and civil liberties. "Although the degree of repression has ebbed and flowed over the past decade, the neutralization of organized political dissent remains a regime priority," explains Freedom House.

Freedom House compiles a special report on freedom of the press and, not surprisingly, ranks Cuba as "not free" in this category as well. There was some relaxation of repression last year, but "Cuba continued to have the most restrictive laws on free speech and press freedom in the hemisphere." Moreover, "state security agents continued to threaten, arrest, detain, imprison, and restrict the right of movement of local and foreign journalists throughout the year."

Cuba also is one of the worst violators of religious liberty. Last year, explained the State Department in its annual International Religious Freedom Report: "The government continued to exert control over all aspects of social life, including religious expression. Certain groups, particularly Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, faced significant harassment and maltreatment." Although repression had eased of late, "The Ministry of the Interior continued to engage in efforts to control and monitor religious activities and to use surveillance, infiltration, and harassment against religious groups, religious professional, and laypersons." Last month the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom placed Cuba on its Watch List since "Within this reporting period, the government expanded its efforts to silence critics of its religious freedom policies and crack down on religious leaders whose churches operate outside of the government-recognized umbrella organizations for Protestant denominations."

There are worse offenders, of course. Compare any country against Burma or North Korea and even the worse human rights offender looks pretty good. But Cuba's record could not survive the most cursory review by a serious body. Unfortunately, the Human Rights Council is not a serious body.

The UN issued an official press release summarizing the debate, if it can be called that, on Cuba and two other states (Saudi Arabia and Cameroon):

In the discussion on Cuba, speakers said Cuba had withstood many tests, and continued to uphold the principles of objectivity, impartiality and independence in pursuance of the realization of human rights. Cuba was and remained a good example of the respect for human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights. The Universal Periodic Review of Cuba clearly reflected the progress made by Cuba and the Cuban people in the protection and promotion of human rights, and showed the constructive and responsive answer of Cuba to the situation of human rights. Cuba was the victim of an unjust embargo, but despite this obstacle, it was very active in the field of human rights. The trade, financial and economic blockade by the United States should be brought to an end, as it was the primary obstacle to the full development of Cuba.

In short, the problem is not the brutality of the Castros' regime. It is the American trade embargo -- counterproductive in my view, but ignored by everyone else and actually used by the Cuban government to enhance its control. As my Cato Institute colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo put it, "This is not from The Onion, but the UN."

However, the Council summary does not do the debate justice. Pakistan wished Cuba well in realizing "all human rights for all citizens." Venezuela (you don't have to be a member to comment) lauded "the iron will" of Cuba's government. Russia said, "Cuba had taken a serious and responsible approach." Uzbekistan "stressed Cuba's work in the promotion of human rights." China declared that "Cuba had made important contributions to the international human rights cause." Egypt opined that "Cuba's efforts were commendable." And so it went.

Again, this is not from the pages of The Onion. It is from a debate before the Human Rights Council.

Needless to say, the Cuban government was pleased. The Cuban Interests Section (which acts as Havana's de facto embassy) put out a press release headlined: "Cuba recognized in the Human Rights Council." Havana grandly announced that it was accepting most of the Council's recommendations, and "reaffirmed its commitment to the strengthening of international cooperation on human rights issues and to the UN Human Rights Council, which must be based on the principles of universality, objectivity, impartiality and non-selectiveness."

Is there some way, in theory, in which the Human Rights Council might help advance the cause of human rights? Perhaps, but it certainly is not apparent how that might be. The official "Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review" of Cuba was as stomach-churning as the ensuing debate. Rather than advancing the cause of human liberty, the Council is providing cover for the oppressors and persecutors. Like the Castro Brothers & Co.

After receiving its UN whitewash, the Cuban government exclaimed: "The exemplary achievements of the Cuban Revolution in relation to human rights have been acknowledged once again by the international community. It has not been possible to silence the truth."

Rather than going back into the Council, the U.S. and other serious states should make a quick exit. The problem is not Cuba. It is the UN. Saudi Arabia, too, received gentle treatment. Up the next day were Azerbaijan and China -- the latter of which praised the records of Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Cameroon. This incestuous process will continue, day after day, at the expense of the rest of us.

Human rights. United Nations. Never shall the twain meet, except in a tiresome comedy routine in an expensive club operating out of a famed high-rise in New York's Turtle Bay.

The U.S. and Colombia signed the free-trade agreement in November 2006, and every month that it languishes in Congress is another month of lost opportunities to export more U.S. goods and build ties to a key Latin American ally.

Upon enactment, the agreement would immediately eliminate duties on more than 80% of U.S. exports of consumer and industrial products to Colombia, and remaining tariffs would be phased out over the next 10 years.

The U.S. International Trade Commission estimates the FTA would boost U.S. exports, of manufactured and farm goods, by $1 billion a year.

Most of Colombia's exports to the U.S. already enter duty-free because of the Andean Trade Preferences Act. The FTA would make Colombia's access to the U.S. market permanent, boosting investment and growth in that country.

And by reducing and eliminating Colombia's tariffs, the agreement would deliver the "level paying field" that critics of trade are always demanding.

More importantly, the agreement would strengthen U.S. relations with the Colombian government, which under President Alvaro Uribe has been a bulwark in the region against terrorism and the authoritarian socialism of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Rejecting the agreement would send a signal to the region that the U.S. does not stand by its friends.

The main domestic opposition to the agreement in the United States is organized labor. Reflexively opposed to almost all trade liberalizing agreements, the AFL-CIO complains that Colombia is unworthy of the agreement because of continuing violence there against union members.

Labor complaints ignore the dramatic progress that has been made under Uribe against violence of all kinds. Since he took office in 2002, the government has disarmed 30,000 paramilitary fighters and largely defeated the left-wing guerrilla movement known as FARC.

As a result, the murder rate in Colombia has been cut by 40%, and murders of union members by 80%. One study showed that union members in Colombia are actually at less risk of murder than nonunion members.

In a recent visit to EAFIT University in Medellin, Colombia, in February, I was struck by what a normal city it has become. A decade ago, it was the epicenter of drug cartel and FARC violence. Today it is a bustling commercial, cultural and tourist center.

The murder rate in Medellin has fallen by more than 90% since the early 1990s, to the same level as that of Washington, D.C. Today a union member is probably safer walking the streets of Medellin than those of our own capital.

The students I met at the university are eager to build ties with the United States and other countries in the region. Medellin's former mayor and possible presidential candidate, the blue-jeans-clad Sergio Fajardo, told me that, for Colombia, "Trade is an opportunity, not a problem."

What message will it send to the current and rising generation of leaders in Colombia if the U.S. Congress spurns an opportunity to deepen our commercial ties and to recognize the dramatic progress the country has already made?

The president's new U.S. Trade Representative, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, warned Congress earlier this month not to "set the bar too high" for Colombia with vague demands for further reductions in violence. Kirk expressed hope that the same Democratic congressional leaders that put the agreement on the shelf last year would bring it up for a vote by the end of 2009. The sooner the better.

Rejecting the Colombia free trade agreement would not save a single life in that country. To punish the people and the government of Colombia for past problems that they have managed to overcome would be an insult to our friends and a major setback for the Obama administration.

The potential benefits of the Colombia agreement are far greater than the similar agreement with Panama that USTR Kirk has been urging Congress to pass. The administration needs to put in at least as much, if not more, into promoting the Colombia agreement.

The opposition candidate, Ricardo Martinelli, has a comfortable lead over the incumbent party candidate, Balbina Herrera. Martinelli is expected to win and become Panama's fifth president since civilian constitutional government was restored in 1989. Panama now boasts sound democratic institutions and the political campaign has unfolded like in any other mature democracy. This is quite a change from the authoritarian rule of strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega twenty years ago.

The Panama economy has been humming along nicely. From 2003-2007 its GDP per capita (Power Purchasing Parity) increased at an annual rate of 6.8 percent, the highest in Latin America during this period, higher than Peru, another country that has significantly liberalized its economy in the last two decades. The expansion of the Panama Canal will likely further boost the economy. But Panama's growth has also been underpinned by the current government's efforts to liberalize trade and reduce barriers to conducting business.

Martinelli has made some low-intensity populist promises, such as creating a cabinet ministry for indigenous people and granting pensions to every single senior citizen — including those who haven't contributed to the social security system. But his platform incorporates many elements of sound economic policy, such as cutting and abolishing some taxes, continuing the efforts to cut red tape, unilateral dismantling of trade barriers, and getting rid of energy subsidies.

The most significant proposal, however, is the introduction of a flat tax which, if implemented, would make Panama the first country in the Americas to institute it. A flat tax would rid the country of the complexity of the current tax system, reduce incentives for tax avoidance and tax evasion, and boost its competitiveness.

The introduction of a flat tax in one Latin American country will likely trigger a domino effect in the region such as the one that took place in Eastern Europe after Estonia took the lead with this policy in 1994. A second flat tax revolution might thus be in the making in Panama, which is good news for Latin America where high tax rates and complex rules force large portions of the economy into the informal sector.

Finally, Martinelli is a staunch supporter of the free trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S. that is stalled in Washington's Congress. Current president Martin Torrijos made the strategic mistake of going alone in pursuit of an FTA with the United States, instead of joining other Central American countries in DR-CAFTA. The negotiations took longer than expected and an agreement was reached shortly after Democrats took control of Congress in November 2006. It's been stuck there ever since.

Now that President Obama has finally realized that the U.S. cannot take its friends in the region for granted, the administration has hinted at approving the FTA with Panama. However, leading Democrats in Congress, not satisfied with their efforts to rewrite the environmental and labor legislation of the countries that the U.S. signed trade agreements with, are now objecting to Panama's tax laws, in particular its banking secrecy provisions. Its liberal banking laws have made Panama a financial powerhouse in Latin America. Martinelli should resist any pressure from Congressional Democrats to rewrite Panama's financial and tax legislation so as to undercut this strength in exchange for a FTA with the U.S.

The next five years represent a magnificent opportunity for Panama to position itself as the hub of the Americas. The Obama administration is well aware that growth and economic opportunities are the best antidotes to populism in Latin America. That is why Washington should welcome the election of Ricardo Martinelli with the approval of the FTA with Panama.

Fidel himself, in a letter in the state-run Granma newspaper, saluted "this legislative group. The aura of Martin Luther King is accompanying them."

To others of us who honor King, there is a barely surviving black Cuban disciple of King (and Mohandas Gandhi) whom the caucus visitors did not meet because he has been in a Castro brothers' cage for many years and was off-limits to them. He is Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, and he is among those designated by Amnesty International as "prisoners of conscience" in Cuban gulags.

Another visiting caucus member, Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, was reported by the April 11 New York Post to have said, "We've been led to believe that the Cuban people are not free, and they are repressed by a vicious dictator, and I saw nothing to match what we've been told." A government tour can lead you to believe anything.

The same article quoted Mr. Cleaver as saying of Cuba's current president, Raul Castro: "He's one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met." The international human rights organizations - which have pleaded repeatedly with the Castro brothers to release the blind physician - also find Dr. Biscet amazing in a vitally different sense.

Before he was arrested during Fidel Castro's 2003 mass crackdown on dissenters (an event infamously known as "Black Spring") and sentenced to 25 years in prison, Dr. Biscet had been put away on occasion for planning to organize small groups in private homes to work nonviolently for democratic rights.

Since 2003, Dr. Biscet, often brutalized and denied medical care for digestive and other ailments, has occasionally been thrown into an unlit 3-foot-wide underground "punishment" cell with a toilet in the floor. His highest crime of caged disobedience against the state was to protest vicious treatment of fellow prisoners from his cell. Yet, in a message slipped out, he maintains: "My conscience and spirit are well."

In a cruel irony, the caucus visitors laying flowers at the King memorial appear utterly unaware of this inspiration to many silenced Cubans in Castroland, though Dr. Biscet has been internationally covered by reporters, including myself. Nor were these visiting admirers of Fidel and Raul Castro seemingly aware that a biography of King - seized during the 2003 crackdown raids on independent libraries - was, among other subversive books, ordered burned by Castro judges in one-day trials.

Another Cuban follower of King is Iris Garcia, founder of the Rosa Parks Women's Civil Rights Movement. She and her husband, Afro-Cuban dissenter Jose Luis Garcia Perez, are on a hunger strike trying to bring justice to a family member in a Castro cage.

Mr. Garcia, himself often assaulted for disloyalty, told The Washington Post on April 9: "The authorities in my country have never tolerated that a black person [could dare to] oppose the regime." As I and others have reported, this racism in Cuba is one of the forbidden topics among American idolaters of Fidel Castro.

New Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who has made 10 reporting trips to Cuba, wrote April 14 that the Congressional Black Caucus delegation was either naive or disingenuous "not to notice ... [or] acknowledge - that Cuba is hardly the paradise of racial harmony and equality it pretends to be."

If these caucus members - so lauded by Fidel Castro for being accompanied by King's "aura" - had asked him and Raul Castro for permission to look around Cuba on their own, they would have heard considerable evidence from Afro-Cubans about their lower status in Michael Moore's paradise.

However, Mr. Robinson adds, "maybe they were too busy looking into Fidel's eyes."

As for President Obama's changes of policy regarding Cuba, it is indeed long past time to remove travel restrictions to that land by Cubans and Cuban-Americans in this country. Keeping families apart so long has been of value to the Castros' national security rationale for internal repression against "plots" by American enemies - along with the U.S. embargo, which Mr. Obama also should end soon.

But when Dan Restrepo - our National Security Council's senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs - speaks (as reported in the April 14 New York Times) of Mr. Obama's moves "to extend a hand to the Cuban people [so that they can] work on the kind of grass-roots democracy that is necessary to move Cuba to a better future," he omits the continuing stocking of the Castro gulags with pro-democracy "criminals."

In the April 7 Miami Herald, Myriam Marquez reminded the caucus visitors of the 300-plus prisoners of conscience and "the hundreds of dissidents working from their homes under the watch of a totalitarian regime."

Raul Castro, following the black caucus visit and Mr. Obama's policy changes, said he is willing to talk with Mr. Obama on "anything," including human rights and prisons. Well, how about including Dr. Biscet in the conversation once he's released? And Raul, if Fidel agrees, isn't it time finally to let the International Committee of the Red Cross into your prisons?

In 2007, former President George W. Bush gave Dr. Biscet the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Mr. Obama, why not invite Dr. Biscet to the White House?

But if there is one immutable truth about the Summit of the Americas, it's that nowadays it is far more about the theatre than about the policy. The goal of the leftist heads of state at the summit was to make Obama and the U.S. look like Carrie at the prom. But Obama did the right thing — and a masterful job — in sidestepping the bloody rhetoric and refusing to be drawn into conflict. In reality, his performance was a long-term win for U.S. foreign policy.

Conservatives who have criticized the president fail to recognize that it is precisely confrontation what the Bolivarians want. Anti-Americanism is a building block of Latin American populism: blaming the U.S. for all of Latin America's problems has been a pastime for the region's leftists for many years. That is precisely the central theme of the book Chavez gave Obama: The Open Veins of Latin America. Fueling anti-American sentiment serves them well as a smokescreen for their own corruption, mismanagement and abuses of power.

In the last eight years, Chavez and his gang were able to easily focus their anti-Americanism on the person of George W. Bush. Now that he is gone, and a popular new U.S. president is in charge, they need to look harder for a scapegoat. That is why weeks before the summit Chavez called Obama an "ignoramus," and Morales even accused the U.S. last week of sponsoring an alleged plot to assassinate him. But it takes two to tango, and Obama rightfully avoided a public row with the populists. It was not a sign of weakness, but a display of smart diplomacy.

It is clear now that the Summit of the Americas is not the appropriate venue for the U.S. to launch any foreign policy initiative towards Latin America. Since the death of the Free Trade Area of the Americas in the summit of Mar del Plata in 2005, this forum has lost any useful collective purpose. Instead, it has been hijacked by populist leaders such as Chavez, Daniel Ortega and Evo Morales to rant against "U.S. imperialism" and "Yankee interventionism" in Latin America. This time around, the Bolivarian squad had announced that they would bring the "artillery" to attack Obama over the U.S. embargo on Cuba. By lifting travel and remittance restrictions on Cuban Americans and announcing his willingness to engage the island, Obama watered down the populists' aim to turn the summit into a minefield of rancor over U.S. Cuba policy.

However, the Obama administration should complement its good PR moves with sound policies towards Latin America. While avoiding fights with those leaders who antagonize the U.S., Obama should engage those countries that want to do business with America. President Obama saw first hand this past weekend that friends in the region should not be taken for granted. That is why he should push for the approval of two pending free trade agreements, with Colombia and Panama.

Also, Obama should press on for comprehensive immigration reform that allows undocumented foreigners to legalize their status in the U.S. and grants enough visas for temporary guest workers. This would consolidate the goodwill he has received so far from many Hispanics, especially in Mexico and Central America.

Finally, Obama should be even bolder in his engagement of Cuba than he has thus far. While still condemning human rights violations and the lack of political and economic freedoms on the island, and asking other countries in the region to do the same, he should move towards lifting the embargo and the travel ban altogether. That would leave no opportunity whatsoever for the Castro regime to blame the U.S. for the dilapidated state of the Cuban economy, and it would pull the rug from under those in Latin America who prefer to criticize the U.S. rather than repression in Cuba.

Obama's trip to Trinidad and Tobago should be lauded. But now he needs to match his diplomatic skills with effective policies that benefit the U.S. and Latin America alike.