He saw, or professed to see, a Honduras almost Scandinavian in its tranquillity, a place where there were no murderous generals, no death squads, no political prisoners, no clandestine jails or cemeteries. ...

In Honduras Negroponte exercised US power in ways that still reverberate throughout that small country. His most striking legacy, though, is the Honduras of his imagination. Most people who lived or worked in Honduras during the 1980s saw a nation spiraling into violence and infested by paramilitary gangs that kidnapped and killed with impunity. Negroponte would not acknowledge this. He realized that the Reagan policy in Central America would lose support if truths about Honduras were known, so he refused to accept them.

By nominating Negroponte as ambassador to the United Nations, the Bush administration is sending at least two clear messages. The first is addressed to the UN itself. During his years in Honduras, Negroponte acquired a reputation, justified or not, as an old-fashioned imperialist. Sending him to the UN serves notice that the Bush administration will not be bound by diplomatic niceties as it conducts its foreign policy.

Negroponte's nomination is also part of a concerted effort to rehabilitate those who planned and organized the Nicaraguan contra war of the 1980s. When last heard from, these men were objects of public opprobrium and, in some cases, criminal indictments. Bush administration officials believe that they were shamefully mistreated and that they ought to be honored for their much-maligned service. No one is more worthy in their eyes than Negroponte, whose work made it possible for the United States to turn Honduras into a staging area for the contra war. (my emphasis)

Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric ["axis of evil", etc.] seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.

The worst aspect of direct White House involvement in a covert action was the squandering of a president's political capital on a marginal issue. The prestige of the presidency, openly committed to an effort at the very margins of legality in international relations, left Ronald Reagan damaged. Project Democracy muddied the waters further by skirting the law of the land. There are many wise reasons for eschewing such a policy.

A great president and visionary, Woodrow Wilson advanced concepts that are still central to American policy almost a century later. The notion of making the world safe for democracy and the belief that peoples have the right to determine their form of government both flowed from Wilson's fertile mind. Internationalism - the idea that the United States should play an active role in world affairs - combined with the other elements to comprise Wilsonianism. In playing this international role America would advance the causes of democracy and self-determination. By 1918 President Wilson had put all those things on the table. In one sense the story of America since then has been the history of the waning and waxing of Wilson's ideas.

Washington missed a critical opportunity before the [Shah of Iran's] fall when a chance existed to gain credit in supporting the creation of a moderate Islamic democracy. In Guatemala the overthrow of Arbenz turned the country away from democracy, the averred aim of the covert action. Neither victory materially affected the balance in the Cold War while, disturbingly, failure would have triggered shifts by forcing those nations into the arems of the Soviet Union. In all cases the benefits were short term, the costs long term.

A paradigm case for this sort of failure has been Cuba. The vendettas conducted by Eisenhower and Kennedy radicalized Fidel Castro, necessitated Cuban reliance on the Soviets, and converted a traditional U.S. friend into a foe. The covert action also backfired by leading the Cubans and Soviets into nuclear missile deployments, creating a direct military threat to the United States and a crisis that brought this country to the edge of nuclear war. The Cuban-American hostility became entrenched, with further rounds of proxy or direct sparring in lands as distant as Bolivia, the Congo, Angola, Grenada, and Nicaragua.

After building a capability expressly to fight the Russians, secret warriors abandoned action in the denied areas [the Soviet bloc] in favor of interventions in the Third World. It took roughly until 1954 for the CIA to generate its global paramilitary capabilitiy; then no further paramilitary operations were attempted against the Soviet Union. With the exception of Afghanistan, this is especially true of the twenty-five-year period from 1960 to 1985 of which McGeorge Bundy writes, but it has remained true since. Covert operations have been and are a weapon against the weak. (my emphasis in bold)

At the strategic nuclear level, Eisenhower did much to resist a stampeding arms race, though his achievement has been tarnished in recent years by revelation of his delegations of authority to use nuclear weapons. But as the man who institutionalized covert operations, Ike does not emerge as the moderate, even liberal, Republican seen in historical reappraisals. It is apparent - and now largely accepted by historians - that Eisenhower relied upon covert operations instead of, and in preference to, conventional military force. He institutionalized covert operations precisely by creating mechanisms to manage them. The president did this even while the Indochina and Guatemala ventures were in progress, and he sustained the effort to control global clandestine operations.