AM I MISSING SOMETHING...:

Zelaya-Micheletti Honduras Deal Risks Trouble for Obama (Tim Padgett, Nov 6, 2009, TIME)

When the U.S. last week finally brokered a deal between ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the man who replaced him following the June 28 coup, de facto President Roberto Micheletti, observers wondered how the Obama Administration had won Micheletti's agreement. That's because the pact allowed for Zelaya to be restored to office before Honduras' Nov. 29 presidential election - a prospect Micheletti had fiercely opposed. But as the dust settles, the more common question this week is, What was Zelaya thinking when he signed this accord?

The Oct. 30 agreement, in fact, leaves it to the Honduran congress to decide whether the leftist Zelaya should be restored before the presidential vote (in which he's not a candidate). But Zelaya, still holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa since sneaking back into the country from exile in September, appears to have grossly miscalculated the odds of the legislature voting in his favor, and that leaves a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the accord. On Friday, Zelaya told Radio Globo that the accord was "dead," adding that there was "no sense in deceiving Hondurans."

It ought to have been apparent to Zelaya that when the pact was inked, only a quarter of the chamber's 128 deputies backed his reinstatement - even his ruling Liberal Party is split on the issue - and the math has barely budged since then. U.S. officials say they hoped that four months after the coup, the congress would be less of an anti-Zelaya hothouse and therefore more amenable to letting him finish the last three months of his term as the democratically elected President.

...or isn't the gist here that Obama was duped, "observers" were duped, Mr. Padgett was duped...how could Zelaya have not realized he'd been duped!

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 6, 2009 7:18 PM