Leadership: The U.S. put on a halo of global citizenship in joining the OAS to condemn Honduras for its "coup." But it was an ill-advised move that will undercut American interests and democracy. Advantage: Hugo Chavez.

Never has the U.S. bent over so far backwards to accommodate a tyrant. After Honduran President Mel Zelaya was thrown out June 28 for trying to make himself dictator for life, the U.S. showered him with solicitude and support for his reinstatement. It even voted with the crowd Sunday to suspend Honduras from the Organization of American States, all in the interest of supposedly defending democracy against coups d'etat.

Zelaya's response was to blame the U.S., which shows how badly America is misreading events. Going along with the OAS crowd, it's in reality empowering Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator who is driving the entire circus.

His agenda is to reinstate Zelaya, blame the U.S. and extend his influence as hemispheric leader. And with the Obama administration going along and accommodating his every step, Chavez has a clear shot at succeeding.

Zelaya's blame of the U.S. is echoed in Caracas. On Saturday, Chavez loudly condemned the U.S. as responsible for the "coup" and blasted it for not pulling its ambassador and aid. He spread strange claims about a tiny military training base on Honduran territory being the root of the "coup."

It's not the first message Chavez has twisted. That was defining the constitutional action in Honduras on June 28 as a "coup d'etat." Chavez had gotten out front early with that semantic manipulation, using the term well before the court acted to remove Zelaya.

Chavez has also showered Zelaya with material support. First, he paid for and transported the ballot papers to be used in the attempted illegal Honduran referendum that Zelaya attempted to bull through even against a court order.

He also provided the PDVSA Venezuelan state oil company jet to Zelaya to use on his travels to the U.S. and the United Nations seeking support. Chavez controlled the media access to Zelaya on his weekend travels, with his state propaganda organ TeleSur monopolizing the televised news coverage.

But Chavez is at his most insidious in using international bodies to advance his own interests. These pawns are proving his most potent weapons. Chavez has caught on that Obama has delegated most of his foreign policy to the multilateral consensus, making groups such as the OAS and U.N. perfect instruments for neutralizing the U.S. as a global leader.

By nature, these groups seek to preserve the status quo, something that bodes ill for anyone trying to change a tyranny into a democracy. But it's worse because there's a leadership problem, and the heads of both organizations are Chavez pawns.

Chavez's man at the OAS is Jose Miguel Insulza, a leftist Chilean politician who won election in 2005 after a bitter battle with the Bush administration. His cat's-paw at the United Nations General Assembly is Miguel d'Escoto, a communist priest who was once part of Nicaragua's Sandinista oligarchy.

Insulza and d'Escoto have since proved their worth to Chavez by imposing the harshest penalties on Honduras for its resistance to Chavista tyranny.

D'Escoto directed a 192-member U.N. condemnation of the tiny state, and Insulza threw Honduras out of the OAS, refusing even to allow it to resign. Both acts open Honduras to sanctions and isolation.

They also stand out for hypocrisy: More than half the U.N. states that condemned Honduras are not democracies themselves. Meanwhile, coups have been numerous since the 2001 democracy charter. The OAS did nothing after Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia experienced real coups d'etat.

Worse still, the OAS has sat silent as democracies have been destroyed from within by the Chavista caudillos — in Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela.

In the absence of U.S. leadership, Chavez has an open field to maneuver the U.S. into a corner, leaving it floundering around on the definition of democracy as forces that don't respect law advance.

This bodes ill for the future of the hemisphere and amounts to an abdication of U.S. leadership. The Obama administration needs to take a second look at what's happening and recognize who's driving events. If it doesn't, Hugo Chavez wins.