Honduras Defends Its Democracy

Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Hugo Chávez's coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation's constitution.

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya's abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

Associated Press

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya's next move will be. It's not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating "the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter" and said it "should be condemned by all." Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya's foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. "We won't go backwards," one sign said. "We want to live in peace, freedom and development."

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

For Hondurans who still remember military dictatorship, Mr. Zelaya also has another strike against him: He keeps rotten company. Earlier this month he hosted an OAS general assembly and led the effort, along side OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, to bring Cuba back into the supposedly democratic organization.

The OAS response is no surprise. Former Argentine Ambassador to the U.N. Emilio Cárdenas told me on Saturday that he was concerned that "the OAS under Insulza has not taken seriously the so-called 'democratic charter.' It seems to believe that only military 'coups' can challenge democracy. The truth is that democracy can be challenged from within, as the experiences of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and now Honduras, prove." A less-kind interpretation of Mr. Insulza's judgment is that he doesn't mind the Chávez-style coup.

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.

Chavez partner Overthrown in Honduras

Hurricane Charlie

The Republican Barney Frank.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist is running for the U.S. Senate next year, and we wonder if one reason is that he doesn't want to be in Tallahassee when the next hurricane hits his state. His veto of a hurricane insurance reform bill last week all but guarantees a state disaster on top of any wrought by Mother Nature.

The bill would have trimmed the cost of a state-run enterprise that insures homeowners against storm damage. The program has an $18 billion unfunded liability and has taxpayers on the line for tens of billions in property losses from the next major hurricane. The Republican legislature tried to reduce those future losses, but Mr. Crist sounded like Barney Frank rolling the dice on Fannie Mae in declaring there's nothing to worry about.

By way of background, two years ago Mr. Crist gave a big gift to coastal property owners by converting the state of Florida into one of the world's largest property insurers. The Citizens Property Insurance Corporation provides below market-rate insurance policies directly to homeowners. Meanwhile, the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund (CAT) regulates how much private insurers can charge homeowners and requires companies to purchase low-cost reinsurance from the government. Mr. Crist didn't invent these programs, but he vastly expanded their reach -- to about one million policies today. He transformed Citizens from insurer of last to first resort.

Here's the problem: This system isn't even within a coastal mile of being actuarially sound. The state government acknowledges that in many high-storm risk areas the premiums are from 35% to 65% below what is needed to cover potential claims. That subsidy has made Mr. Crist popular with many coastal residents even as the state plays Russian roulette with the weather.

The reform, which passed with wide margins, would have allowed large private insurers to compete with Citizens and charge whatever premiums they wish. This would give homeowners a wider range of choices, and it would let private insurers spread hurricane risk around the world through reinsurance. The big and well-capitalized insurers -- including Allstate, Nationwide and most recently State Farm -- have either curtailed operations or withdrawn from the Sunshine State because they can't make money charging subsidized rates. The companies could be bailed out under the CAT reinsurance program, but the fund may run out of money when a big one hits.

Mr. Crist and the media portrayed the reform as a giveway to the big insurers, and the Governor claims people can't afford "large and unpredictable" increases in premiums. The truth is large increases are precisely what is sometimes needed to cover the risk of living on coastal property. Mr. Crist's program makes the long-term losses much more severe because cut-rate insurance has encouraged overbuilding in coastal areas that are historically in the path of hurricanes. "We are one major hurricane away from an economic disaster in this state," says House bill sponsor William Proctor.

Mr. Crist is also pushing a federal disaster-insurance fund, probably because he knows the risks he's taking and wants all American taxpayers to bail out his Florida schemes when future hurricanes hit. Meantime, he continues to perpetuate the myth that Florida property owners can have billions of dollars of subsidized insurance at little expense or risk. It's this kind of something-for-nothing economics that gave us the debacle of Fannie Mae. With that philosophy, Mr. Crist would feel right at home in Washington.

What If Obama Did Want to Help Iran's Democrats?

The CIA is no longer in the business of influencing politics abroad.

GABRIEL SCHOENFELD

Thus far, debate over American policy toward Iran has revolved around President Barack Obama's various responses. When Iran's electoral crisis first erupted, he downplayed its significance, calling the two rival candidates, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir Hossein Mousavi, "tweedledum and tweedledee." A week later, he sharply condemned the Islamic regime, describing himself as "appalled and outraged" by the government's actions.

But are presidential pronouncements -- however pusillanimous or intrepid -- the limit of American power?

The ayatollahs' nuclear ambitions make Iran one the most critical countries for the future of U.S. foreign policy. Beyond the immediate problem of nuclear proliferation, there is the broader issue of Iranian influence spreading via proxy forces in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. And even beyond that, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 is the original wellspring of the Islamic fundamentalism that has swept the world over the past three decades.

In a better world, toppling this vicious regime and altering the tide of history would be a primary objective of U.S. foreign policy. Yet even if President Obama miraculously came to that conclusion, how could he realize such an objective? This is a useful question to ask because it reveals how much the United States has disarmed itself in the vital realm of intelligence.

In the late 1940s through the late 1950s, the U.S. faced similar problems in various locales around the world. One of them was Italy, where there was a very real danger that the highly organized Italian Communist Party -- benefiting from huge covert subsidies from the Kremlin -- would come to power via the ballot box. Soviet funds had enabled that party to build a dense network of paid organizers that operated in every region and created front groups in every sector of society, from farmers to veterans to students.

The prospect of Italy becoming the first country in Europe to fall to Communism via subversion rather than direct force of Soviet arms was not, at the height of the Cold War, something the U.S. could abide. So the CIA was instructed, first by Harry Truman and then by Dwight Eisenhower, to stop it. It was the challenge presented by Italy's vulnerability in its 1948 election that prompted the fledgling spy agency to create its Office of Policy Coordination. The banal-sounding name was a cover for what was an aggressive tool of covert political propaganda and paramilitary operations.

Over the course of the 1950s, the CIA secretly funneled money to forces in Italy's political center. This enabled democratically oriented parties to match the Italian Communist Party activist for activist. When revealed years later, the policy was subjected to scathing criticism. But it had worked. Fragile Italy remained democratic in the 1950s and is a stable democracy today.

Harsh criticism of such operations -- beginning in the 1970s when all the CIA's secrets spilled out -- is what prompted the U.S. to dismantle its capabilities in covert political action. Interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, legions of agency critics said, was both immoral and illegal.

As a matter of law, the critics are right. Such covert action is indeed illegal. But legality is beside the point. Espionage is by definition illegal and yet all countries engage in it. This is what the Soviet Union did in Italy, and it is what Iran, by organizing terrorist structures in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere, has been doing intensively for 30 years.

As for the moral issues involved in covert operations, they are the standard ones of balancing means and ends. Self-defense is the basic right of every state; open warfare is certainly permitted to uphold it. Covert warfare, so long as it is similarly defensive, is no different. Yet throughout our history, a higher moralism has periodically come along and led us to shun intelligence operations, as when Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson famously declared that "gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail." Stimson then shuttered his department's code-breaking operation just as terrible storms were beginning to gather across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Today, as a breaking point in the Islamic Republic appears to recede from view as a result of brutal violence, the U.S. appears utterly powerless to influence the course of events. Yet how much better off both Iran and the world would be if the CIA, operating covertly through local friendly forces, could have helped, say, to spark a general strike to topple the ruthless regime of the ayatollahs.

The great irony in all this is that even as the U.S. seeks to claim the moral high ground by not "meddling" -- to use Mr. Obama's term -- we and our allies are getting blamed all the same. "There are riots and attacks in the streets that are orchestrated from the outside in a bid to destabilize the country's Islamic regime," says Sheikh Naim Qassem, a ranking figure of Hezbollah, Iran's obedient instrument in Lebanon.

We are thus paying the price of running covert operations even as we gain absolutely none of the benefits. Rebuilding our capacity in this area cannot be accomplished overnight. Meanwhile, as Iran's nuclear ambitions continue unabated, we may in the end have to pay a high price in treasure and blood for having declined to pay the relatively low cost of mounting secret warfare.

Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and a resident scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., is the author of "Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law" to be published by W.W. Norton in 2010.

Obama and Cyber Defense

Government should protect our e-infrastructure.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

In a Monty Python skit from 1970, the Vercotti brothers, wearing Mafia suits and dark glasses, approach a colonel in a British military barracks. "You've got a nice army base here, Colonel," says Luigi Vercotti. "We wouldn't want anything to happen to it." Dino explains, "My brother and I have got a little proposition for you, Colonel," and Luigi elaborates, "We can guarantee you that not a single armored division will get done over for 15 bob a week."

If the idea of the military having to pay protection money to the mob seems silly, imagine what Monty Python could do with last week's White House decision on security. It announced a new "Cyber Command" to protect information infrastructure, but stipulated that the military is allowed to protect only itself, not the civilian Internet or other key communications networks. When President Barack Obama announced the plan, he stressed that it "will not -- I repeat -- will not -- include monitoring private-sector networks or Internet traffic." It's like telling the military if there's another 9/11 to protect the Pentagon but not the World Trade Center.

The announcement shows that our political system is still ambivalent about how to defend communications networks such as the Internet. We expect privacy, but we know that intrusive techniques are required to protect the system from cyber attacks. How to balance privacy with preventing attacks that would undermine the system altogether?

It's an open secret that the National Security Agency (NSA) must operate through civilian networks inside the U.S. in order to prevent millions of cyber attacks every year by foreign governments, terror groups and hackers. Likewise, the NSA must follow leads through computer networks that run through innocent countries. "How do you understand sovereignty in the cyber domain?" asked James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a recent speech. "It doesn't tend to pay a lot of attention to geographic borders."

The risks are real. Cyber attacks on Estonia and Georgia by Russia in recent years forced government, banking, media and other Web sites offline. In the U.S., the public Web, air-traffic control systems and telecommunications services have all been attacked. Congressional offices have been told that China has broken into their computers. Both China and Russia were caught having infiltrated the U.S. electric-power grid, leaving behind software code to be used to disrupt the system. The risk of attacks to create massive power outages is so serious that the best option could be unplugging the U.S. power grid from the Internet.

The military is far ahead of civilian agencies such as Homeland Security and is now focused on cyber offense as well as defense. Cyberspace, says Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, is the new "domain," joining the traditional domains of air, land and sea. Each is a focus for both defense and attack. The U.S., a decade behind China, is now officially focused on using cyber warfare offensively as well as defensively.

The U.S. is an inventive nation, so we'll get to the right answer on security if we ask the right questions. What if the only way the military can block a cyber attack is to monitor domestic use of the Web, since foreigners use the Web to launch cyber attacks? What is a "reasonable" search in a virtual world such as a global communication network? What's the proper response to cyber attacks?

If cyber war is a new form of war, wouldn't most Americans adjust their expectations of reasonable privacy to permit the Pentagon to intrude to some degree on their communications, if this is necessary to prevent great harm and if rules protecting anonymity can be established? Finally, wouldn't it be better for politicians to encourage a frank discussion about these issues before a significant attack occurs instead of pretending there are no trade-offs?

Only the NSA, which operates within the Defense Department, has the expertise to protect all U.S. networks. It has somehow found ways to mine needed data despite pre-Web rules that restrict its activities domestically. But the question remains: How can the military get enough access to private, domestic networks to protect them while still ensuring as much privacy as possible? One logical approach is for Homeland Security to delegate domestic defense to the NSA, but for the domestic agency to maintain enough responsibility to have political accountability if privacy rights get violated in the process.

We'll look back on the current era, with the military constrained from defending vital domestic interests, as an artifact of an era when it was easy to point to what was foreign and what was domestic. In the digital world, as the cyber threat shows, physical distinctions such as political borders are unhelpful and can be dangerously confusing.

Oil Prices Help Boost Stocks

By PETER A. MCKAY

Energy stocks led the market higher Monday, boosted by rising oil prices, as investors cautiously returned to making bets on an economic recovery.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is coming off its first two-week losing streak since early March, recently was up 81 points, or 1%, trading at 8519.40.

Market Data Center >

The two biggest contributors to the average's point move were Exxon Mobil and Chevron, up 2.1% and 1.3%. Other big winners among the blue chips included American Express, Boeing, Merck and Microsoft. Each rose more than 2%.

The S&P 500 rose 0.9%. All of its sectors traded higher, led by energy, up 1.5%; industrials, up 1.3; and basic materials, up 1.4%.

Oil futures rose $1.73 to $70.89 a barrel in New York amid continued violence in Nigeria's main oil-producing region. Traders also digested reports that Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the European Union had agreed in talks that the weakened global economy could support crude prices between $70 and $80 a barrel.

Despite a bullish outlook from many oil traders lately, gasoline prices have been under pressure as U.S. refineries have ramped up to full-scale summer production. That has translated into some relief at the pump for everyday consumers, whose purchases of other goods are often crimped at times when they have to pay more to fill up.

According to the driving club AAA, the average U.S. price of regular-grade gasoline fell every day last week and was down a fraction of a penny at 2.639 a gallon on Monday, though it still remains up 6.1% from a month ago.

Eric Marshall, portfolio manager at Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, said his firm remained out of consumer-discretionary stocks for the most part in 2008, but it has recently been buying a few names in the sector, including Liz Claiborne and Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, as early bets that a rebound is on the way in the U.S.

"We've actually been narrowing down the total number of names that we own in our portfolios," from 100 last year to about 50, said Mr. Marshall. "But if we see a company with a good balance sheet that has some staying power to get to the other side of the valley in the recession, we are willing to put some money to work."

Elsewhere, oil-services provider Enterprise Products was in focus after announcing plans to buy Teppco for $3.3 billion. Enterprise slipped 0.6% in recent action, while Teppco was up 6%.

Though no major economic releases are scheduled for Monday, several important announcements are due later in the holiday-shortened week. They include the June employment report, which will be announced earlier than usual on Thursday, as U.S. markets will be closed Friday in recognition of Independence Day in the U.S.

The Nasdaq Composite Index was little changed, up 0.4%. Its components Oracle and Sun Microsystems posted gains of more than 2% each despite increased scrutiny by the Justice Department of Oracle's proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun.

The dollar was stronger against the yen and weaker against the euro. Treasury prices were mixed. The 10-year note gained 13/32 to yield 3.481%.

Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years

Supreme Court Rules on Voting Rights Act Case

Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years

CHAD BRAY

Bloomberg News

Ira Sorkin, an attorney who represents Bernard Madoff, arrives to federal court in New York June 29.

NEW YORK -- Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison Monday, meaning he will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars after admitting in March to running one of the largest and longest financial frauds in recent memory.

At a packed hearing Monday, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan ordered Mr. Madoff, 71 years old, to serve the statutory maximum sentence in prison. Applause briefly broke out after the sentence was announced.

Bernard Madoff

Late Friday, Judge Chin signed a preliminary forfeiture order against Mr. Madoff for more than $170 billion, leaving the one-time chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market penniless.

"Here the message must be sent that Mr. Madoff's crimes were extraordinary evil," Judge Chin said.

On March 12, Mr. Madoff was ordered directly to jail after pleading guilty to 11 criminal counts, including securities fraud, mail fraud and money laundering, in a decades-long Ponzi scheme that bilked thousands of investors out of billions of dollars.

"I'm sorry; I know that doesn't help you," said Mr. Madoff, briefly turning to face his victims at the hearing prior to the judge's sentence.

He had run the scam for years through the investment advisory arm of his business, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, by promising steady returns and by presenting an air of exclusivity by not taking all comers and recruiting investors via friends and associates.

Madoff Fraud Case

Video

The scheme defrauded a wide range of investors, including individuals, hedge funds, charities and trusts, such as a charitable trust established by Boston Properties Inc. Chairman and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman.

When the fraud was revealed in December, some individuals went from being millionaires to being nearly destitute overnight.

Mr. Madoff claimed to have as much as $65 billion in his firm's accounts at the end of November, but prosecutors said the accounts only held a small fraction of that.

So far, the court-appointed trustee for Mr. Madoff's firm has identified about 1,341 accounts holders who suffered estimated losses of $13.2 billion. The trustee has recovered more than $1.2 billion for investors.

Last week, Mr. Madoff's lawyers asked for a sentence of as a little as 12 years, citing his life expectancy of about 13 years. Instead, Mr. Madoff received one of the stiffer sentences handed out to a white-collar defendant in New York federal court in recent years.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

The coming days

The week ahead

Bernard Madoff is sentenced for a massive fraud, and other news

• America's Supreme Court will hold its last session this week before it breaks for a summer holiday. This is usually the moment when the court hands down decisions in cases that have attracted the most controversy. This year it is expected to rule on whether the appeals court was right in upholding the constitutionality of a firefighters' test in Connecticut, in which white firemen were denied promotion because no black candidates did well enough in the test to warrant consideration. The case is particularly contentious because one of the appeals-court judges who delivered the ruling is Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee to sit on the Supreme Court. The Senate starts deliberating over her nomination in mid-July.

• Bernard Madoff, who has pleaded guilty to running a gigantic Ponzi scheme of unprecedented boldness, faces sentencing on Monday June 29th. His $65 billion fraud, dating at least as far back as the 1980s, used money from new investors to cover redemptions for old ones. Mr Madoff’s lawyers suggest that 12 years inside is a fair punishment for the 71-year-old financier. Many of his victims are pressing for a far harsher sentence, perhaps even 150 years in prison.

• American combat troops are set to hand over control of the country’s towns and cities to Iraqi security forces on Tuesday June 30th. Though some advisers will remain most of America’s 130,000 troops will stay in their bases until the end of 2011, the date set for a full withdrawal. Iraq’s government has declared a national holiday in celebration but fears remain that the absence of American forces could allow the insurgency to become more intense once more.

• The Lisbon treaty to reform the European Union's institutions faces another hurdle on Tuesday June 30th. Germany’s Constitutional Court is set to rule on whether the treaty is compatible with the country’s constitution. Though the court is unlikely to reject it the treaty must clear more obstacles. The Irish hold another referendum later this year, after voters rejected the treaty in 2008.

• Diners and quaffers in France will get a welcome boost on Wednesday July 1st when VAT on bills in restaurants and cafes is slashed from 19.6% to 5.5%. France hopes to encourage tourists and locals to dine out more bringing extra employment to the catering industry.

Our Decaying Nuclear Deterrent

The less credible the U.S. deterrent, the more likely other states are to seek weapons.

JON KYL RICHARD PERLE

A bipartisan congressional commission, headed by some of our most experienced national security practitioners, recently concluded that a nuclear deterrent is essential to our defense for the foreseeable future. It also recommended that urgent measures be taken to keep that deterrent safe and effective.

Unfortunately, President Barack Obama has adopted an agenda that runs counter to the commission's recommendations.

Consider the president's declaration, in a major speech this spring in Prague, of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." Will such a world be peaceful and secure? It is far from self-evident.

David Klein

In the nuclear-free world that ended in 1945 there was neither peace nor security. Since then there have indeed been many wars but none has come close to the carnage that occurred regularly before the development of nuclear weapons, and none has pitted nuclear powers against each other.

Consider also that while the administration accepts the urgency of halting the spread of nuclear weapons, the policies it has embraced to reach that goal are likely to make matters worse.

Thus, in his Prague speech, Mr. Obama announced that the U.S. would "immediately and aggressively" pursue ratification of the comprehensive ban on the testing of nuclear weapons. The administration believes, without evidence, that ratification of the test-ban treaty will discourage other countries from developing nuclear weapons.

Which countries does it have in mind? Iran? North Korea? Syria? Countries alarmed by the nuclear ambitions of their enemies? Allies who may one day lose confidence in our nuclear umbrella?

There are good reasons why the test-ban treaty has not been ratified. The attempt to do so in 1999 failed in the Senate, mostly out of concerns about verification -- it simply is not verifiable. It also failed because of an understandable reluctance on the part of the U.S. Senate to forgo forever a test program that could in the future be of critical importance for our defense and the defense of our allies.

Robert Gates, who is now Mr. Obama's own secretary of defense, warned in a speech last October that in the absence of a nuclear modernization program, even the most modest of which Congress has repeatedly declined to fund, "[a]t a certain point, it will become impossible to keep extending the life of our arsenal, especially in light of our testing moratorium." Suppose future problems in our nuclear arsenal emerge that cannot be solved without testing? Would our predicament discourage nuclear proliferation -- or stimulate it?

For the foreseeable future, the U.S. and many of our allies rely on our nuclear deterrent. And as long as the U.S. possesses nuclear weapons, they must be -- as Mr. Obama recognized in Prague -- "safe, secure and effective." Yet his proposed 2010 budget fails to take the necessary steps to do that.

Those steps have been studied extensively by the Perry-Schlesinger Commission (named for co-chairmen William Perry, secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, and James R. Schlesinger, secretary of defense under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford). Its consensus report, released in May, makes numerous recommendations to increase the funding for, and improve the effectiveness of, the deteriorating nuclear weapons laboratory complex (e.g., the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico, the Pantex plant in Texas, and the dangerously neglected Y-12 plant in Tennessee) that has become the soft underbelly of our deterrent force.

The commission also assessed the nuclear weapons infrastructure that is essential to a safe, secure and effective deterrent and declared it "in serious need of transformation." It looked at our laboratory-based scientific and technical expertise and concluded that "the intellectual infrastructure" is in "serious trouble." A major cause is woefully inadequate funding. The commission rightly argued that we must "exercise the full range of laboratory skills, including nuclear weapon design skills . . . Skills that are not exercised will atrophy." The president and the Congress must heed these recommendations.

There are some who believe that failing to invest adequately in our nuclear deterrent will move us closer to a nuclear free world. In fact, blocking crucial modernization means unilateral disarmament by unilateral obsolescence. This unilateral disarmament will only encourage nuclear proliferation, since our allies will see the danger and our adversaries the opportunity.

By neglecting -- and in some cases even opposing -- essential modernization programs, arms-control proponents are actually undermining the prospect for further reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As our nuclear weapons stockpile ages and concern about its reliability increases, we will have to compensate by retaining more nuclear weapons than would otherwise be the case. This reality will necessarily influence future arms-control negotiations, beginning with the upcoming Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty follow-on.

For these negotiations, the Russians are insisting on a false linkage between nuclear weapons and missile defenses. They are demanding that we abandon defenses against North Korean or Iranian missiles as a condition for mutual reductions in American and Russian strategic forces. As the president cuts the budget for missile defense and cedes ground to the Russians on our planned defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, we may end up abandoning a needed defense of the U.S. and our European allies from the looming Iranian threat.

There is a fashionable notion that if only we and the Russians reduced our nuclear forces, other nations would reduce their existing arsenals or abandon plans to acquire nuclear weapons altogether. This idea, an article of faith of the "soft power" approach to halting nuclear proliferation, assumes that the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces -- or that India, Pakistan or China would respond with reductions of their own.

This is dangerous, wishful thinking. If we were to approach zero nuclear weapons today, others would almost certainly try even harder to catapult to superpower status by acquiring a bomb or two. A robust American nuclear force is an essential discouragement to nuclear proliferators; a weak or uncertain force just the opposite.

George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn have, on this page, endorsed the distant goal -- about which we remain skeptical -- of a nuclear-free world. But none of them argues for getting there by neglecting our present nuclear deterrent. The Perry-Schlesinger Commission has provided a path for protecting that deterrent. Congress and the president should follow it, without delay.

Mr. Kyl is a Republican senator from Arizona. Mr. Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

Honduras Defends Its Democracy

Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Hugo Chávez's coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation's constitution.

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

Associated Press

Honduran President Overthrown

Coup Rocks Honduras

Army Exiles President, a Chávez Ally, Stoking Regional Tension

PAUL KIERNAN JOSE DE CORDOBA JAY SOLOMON

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- Honduran soldiers rousted President Manuel Zelaya from his bed and exiled him at gunpoint Sunday to Costa Rica, halting his controversial push to redraw the constitution but spurring fresh concerns about democratic rule across Latin America.

View Slideshow

Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters

Honduran soldiers blocked a street near the residence of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in Tegucigalpa on Sunday.

"I was awakened by shots, and the yells of my guards, who resisted for about 20 minutes," Mr. Zelaya said, describing the predawn raid of his home to reporters at the San José airport in Costa Rica, where he was flown against his will. "I came out in my pajamas, I'm still in my pajamas....When (the soldiers) came in, they pointed their guns at me and told me they would shoot if I didn't put down my cellphone."

Mr. Zelaya called the action a kidnapping, and said he was still president. The U.S. and other countries condemned the coup. President Barack Obama said he was "deeply concerned" and called on all political actors in Honduras to "respect democratic norms." Venezuela President Hugo Chávez, a close ally of Mr. Zelaya and nemesis of the U.S., said he would consider it an ''act of war" if there were hostilities against his diplomats. "I have put the armed forces of Venezuela on alert," Mr. Chávez said.

Central American leaders called a summit including the ousted president for Monday in Managua, Nicaragua to deal with the crisis, and the U.N. General Assembly planned to meet.

In Honduras, television stations were off the air, electricity was out in parts of the capital, and military jets streaked overhead, recalling Latin America's long history of military coups and dictatorships.

Honduras's Supreme Court gave the order for the military to detain the president, according to a former Supreme Court official who is in touch with the court.

Later, Honduras's Congress formally removed Mr. Zelaya from the presidency and named congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as his successor until the end of Mr. Zelaya's term in January. Mr. Micheletti and others said they were the defenders, not opponents, of democratic rule.

View Full Image

Associated Press

Supporters of Honduras's President Manuel Zelaya demonstrate in front of a tire bonfire in Tegucigalpa.

THE LIBERTARIAN

Monday, June 29, 2009

Honduras Defends Its Democracy

Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Chavez partner Overthrown in Honduras

Hurricane Charlie

The Republican Barney Frank.

What If Obama Did Want to Help Iran's Democrats?

The CIA is no longer in the business of influencing politics abroad.

GABRIEL SCHOENFELD

Obama and Cyber Defense

Government should protect our e-infrastructure.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

Oil Prices Help Boost Stocks

By PETER A. MCKAY

Market Data Center >

Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years

Supreme Court Rules on Voting Rights Act Case

Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years

CHAD BRAY

Madoff Fraud Case

Video

Sunday, June 28, 2009

The week ahead

Bernard Madoff is sentenced for a massive fraud, and other news

Our Decaying Nuclear Deterrent

The less credible the U.S. deterrent, the more likely other states are to seek weapons.

JON KYL RICHARD PERLE

Honduras Defends Its Democracy

Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Honduran President Overthrown

Coup Rocks Honduras

Army Exiles President, a Chávez Ally, Stoking Regional Tension

PAUL KIERNAN JOSE DE CORDOBA JAY SOLOMON

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