While we have significant relations on almost every level with Communist countries 10,000 miles away such as China and Vietnam, we have almost no rel… - Lawrence Wilkerson

He (Colin Powell) walked into my office, and he said to me... 'I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground, and scour Iraq from one corner to the other, and find no weapons of mass destruction?' And he left that rhetorical question hanging in the air as he went back into his office.

A single senator’s ability to effect such holds is lunacy gone amuck in any regard; but Jim DeMint gives that state of affairs new meaning altogether. He is holding up a refurbishment of U.S. foreign policy in our own hemisphere–and in the name, he says, of a coup d’etat in Honduras, a coup that he apparently supports... that, according to him and not the people of Honduras, brought a better leader to the helm of Honduras. In defense of his position, Senator DeMint writes in the Wall Street Journal that “America’s Founding Fathers–like the framers of Honduras’s own constitution–believed strong institutions were necessary to defend freedom and democracy from the ambitions of would-be tyrants and dictators.” I do not believe that the likes of George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin would have included coup d’etats in their listing of “strong institutions.” And, of course, nothing is said in DeMint’s article about the real reason for his (Senator Jim DeMint) and other politicians’– including some Democrats–reasoning with regard to (supporting the coup which ousted Zelaya in) Honduras. In their reasoning, AT&T and other U.S. business interests play heavily, perhaps even more heavily than democracy? Likewise for long-standing and nefarious U.S. ties to the Honduran military establishment.

A rapprochement with Cuba would create the same opening in Latin America that a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian situation would create in the Middle East. I am not sufficiently naïve to believe that either development would meet all regional challenges or solve all problems, but both would be a dramatic and effective start. Both would give America a decisive leg-up on regaining some of the prestige and power we have squandered in the past seven years.