The banking holiday was declared in Cyprus, banks and ATMs shutodnw, everyone local is locked out completely, meanwhile deposits were drained by the rich international depositors thru oversease branches that remained open.

Why do you love defending the indefensible so much? Take the L and move on.

Was what happened the best possible result - probably not. But I would say that goes for all European responses to the financial crisis then - but that is not the same as being totally indefensible. The question has to be: what outcome could we have now that would be better and what should we have done then and could that have been done? And with Cyprus one issue is the smallness of the economy, which meant what a US might be able to do might not be possible for them on their own.

EDIT: and one of the issues in Europe certainly seems to be that broad, untailored measures are not very popular even though ex-post they appear to perform better - so popular opinion does matter