Outis

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that idealism and U.S. foreign policy apparently do not mix in hot climates, where the color of skin tends to be darker.

For more than a century, U.S. presidents have demonstrated that, like oil and water, the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and the morality of its military operations are seldom in harmonious union. As a result, human rights and wealth, democracy and peace, are often at odds in the exercise of U.S. power abroad.

By failing to recognize this historical fact — and, some would argue, this strategic imperative — idealists who rely on American power perpetuate a world of failed and failing states, of vast human suffering and gross injustices, all in the name of the highest ideals human civilization has ever ratified and upheld.

Of this costly idealism, no better example comes to my mind than the horrendous failure of the Cuban exiles in the U.S. to effectively counter and outwit the tyrant Fidel Castro. For years, it was enough simply to say, “We are successfully containing communism.” For the last decade, that pretext for the pitiful status quo has begun to ring as hollow as Castro’s megalomaniacal speeches.

Does anyone in their right mind still believe that there is a military solution to the totalitarian regime in Havana? Did sanctions promote the velvet revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia? And, yet, Cubans in the U.S. are all too happy to suck on these pacifiers, campaign tschotkes handed out by every Tom, Dick and Harry politician who needs a strong showing in Miami to win office.

If Castro receives a free pass everytime he trains a Latin American doctor for free, the United States of America should train 10 Latin American doctors for free.

That’s it. Butter is a gun.

Postscript: Next year in Miami?

“Iraqi-Americans demand U.S. pullout from homeland,” Associated Press, August 13, 2004.