You may recall that a top leader for the terrorist group FARC was killed early this month during a raid by Columbian troops. They captured a laptop belonging to Raul Reyes and what they found was quite startling. They found connections between FARC and Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa. Records of a 300 million dollar gift from Hugo Chavez along with thank you notes dating all the way back from 1992 and Uranium purchasing records along with the directions on how to make dirty bombs.
Also found was the last letter from Raul Reyes to FARC which had this paragraph:
6. The gringos will ask for an appointment with the minister to solicit him to communicate to us his interest in discussing these topics. They say that the new president of their country will be Obama and that they are interested in your compatriots. Obama will not support “Plan Colombia” nor will he sign the TLC (Colombian Free Trade agreement). Here we responded that we are interested in relations with all governments in equality of conditions and that in the case of the US it is required a public pronouncement expressing their interest in talking with the FARC given their eternal war against us.
Obama gets in and they believe they will be sitting pretty.
What does Obama say about Hugo and the terrorists?
More recently, Obama as he traveled through Florida seemed to give some contradictory statements about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the Colombian terrorist group FARC.
On Thursday Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Chavez and “one of the obvious high priorities in my talks with President Hugo Chavez would be the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about.”
OK, so a strong declaration that Chavez is supporting FARC, which Obama intends to push him on.
But then on Friday he said any government supporting FARC should be isolated.
“We will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments,” he said in a speech in Miami. “This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation, and – if need be – strong sanctions. It must not stand.”
So he will meet with the leader of a country he simultaneously says should be isolated? Huh?
Obama said later that its not unusual to call for talks with a country that is being isolated, citing North Korea as an example. Only problem is that there is NO Presidential meetings going on with North Korea.
Jake updates:
So, I just spoke to an Obama campaign foreign policy adviser and this is how he explains any confusion.
Obama, he says, believes that Chavez is supportive of the FARC, both ideologically and tangibly. The Obama campaign disagrees that Obama’s language — “if, in fact, it (Chavez) is trying to ferment terrorist activities in other borders” — is hedging language at all. Obama has been very clear that he believes that Chavez is supportive of the FARC, the adviser says.
As to the question of whether one can pledge to isolate a country while also proposing a presidential-level meeting, the adviser says that I was inaccurate in characterizing Obama as proposing such a meeting — the reality was that Obama was merely acknowledging a willingness to meet.
But “if we are going to isolate the Venezuelans, it may be that we have to engage in a full-on diplomatic strategy with them,” the adviser says. Obama was not saying he, himself, would propose such a meeting, nor that he would necessarily participate in that meeting. When Obama referred to “my talks with President Hugo Chavez,” he did not mean “my talks,” literally (necessarily) — he meant his administration’s talks — “though it could be him engaging in this diplomacy directly and personally,” the adviser says. The point is, all the tools need to be in the diplomacy kit — isolation, willingness to hold presidential meetings, and everything in between.
Got it?
Yeah, I think we got it and it explains why that letter was found on the laptop. Obama gets into the White House Venezuela and the terrorists will in fact be sitting pretty.
He wants to talk with Iran without preconditions. He wants to talk with another terrorist sponsor in Venezuela without preconditions. Basically it comes down to replacing cowboy diplomacy with appeasement diplomacy.
These terrorists must be shaking in their boots.
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
-President George W. Bush
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