Taipei Times

In El Salvador, for the first time ever in Latin America, a former political-military organization that tried to gain power through the barrel of a gun has achieved its aims through the ballot box.

Although the Sandinista Front in Nicaragua did win a semi-legitimate election in 1984, it had reached power five years earlier by overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship. By 2006, when Daniel Ortega was finally re-elected, the old Sandinista Front of 1979 was unrecognizable.

Why should Goldman Sachs and George Bush expect Japan to reconcile its financial accounts and non-performing loans when it is clear that Japan's political architecture inhibits accountability on any front, particularly in matters of Japan's historical memory? Official Japan cannot bring itself to apologize to the "comfort women" who were forced to act as sex slaves for Japan's soldiers; it cannot manage either empathy or the national will to call for a different arrangement for American forces channeled into its… more