President Bush's 'freedom and democracy' rhetoric appears to have found a gullible listener in David Aaronovitch (Comment, last week). American governments of both parties have routinely supported convenient tyrants, using such rhetoric. They have not hesitated to overthrow democratic regimes (generally described as dangerously leftist) and install reactionary dictators (generally described as 'preparing for free elections').
Genuinely free elections have often been seen as too dangerous, as when President Eisenhower in an unguarded moment said flatly that Vietnamese elections promised at Geneva had not been held as everyone knew that Ho Chi Minh would score a landslide.
Archbishop Romero pleaded with President Carter to stop supplying weapons to the Salvadoran death squads; days later he was shot down at the altar.
The US embassy in Honduras was headquarters for the war which President Reagan pursued against the elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Ambassador/Proconsul John Negroponte will now fly the flag of 'freedom' over the largest embassy in the world, in Baghdad.
Jeremy Scanlon
Lapworth Warwickshire
There's also an article on the ISM's Tom Hurndall here.
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