Undermining our allies in the War Against Terror

We all heard Barack Obama flex his puny foreign policy muscles while threatening to attack Pakistan for not killing enough al Qaeda operatives to suit Obama, and, of course the Pakistanis criticized Obama for his indiscretion, and brave Obama stands by his comments. if only he could be that resolute over Iran and the support they give opposing forces in Iraq.

Well, I was reading my favorite writer on Latin American politics, Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal, and I’m starting to see a pattern here. O’Grady writes in her The Real Uribe Record;

Congressional Democrats out to quash the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement argue that the terror-torn South American country doesn’t adequately protect human rights and thus doesn’t deserve FTA status. In the Democrats’ book, the way to make Colombia more just is to deny it the chance to deepen its commercial relations with the U.S.

This is curious thinking, and all the more so coming from a party that also argues that the U.S. ought to lift its trade embargo on the Cuban dictatorship as a way to help the Cuban people. Given Cuba’s dismal track record on human rights and the hard work Colombia has done over the past six years to defend human life, it is hard to square that circle.

O’Grady goes on to recount that Uribe’s tactics in countering communist guerillas and terrorists in Columbia have driven their numbers down;

Mr. Uribe’s government has demobilized 43,000 illegal armed combatants. Some 33,000 were paramilitary members and 10,000 were guerrillas. But the president notes that the country started with some 60,000 “terrorists,” so there is still work to be done.

But Ms. O’Grady points out that Vermont Senator Pat Leahy is the major opponent of the the US-Columbia Free Trade Agreement;

 Funny enough, Mr. Leahy, like many of his colleagues — including New York Rep. Charles Rangel in the House — has no such qualms about trade with the despotic regime in Havana. The senator has said that the U.S. should seek engagement with Cuba by “lifting the embargo” and increasing “contact between Americans and Cubans — in other words, we should be tearing down the barriers between our countries not building them ever higher.”

The Cuba Mr. Leahy wants to get closer to isn’t simply accused of failing to prosecute human-rights violators, as is the case of Colombia. It is a human-rights violator. It is regrettable that the senator apparently believes that the murder of thousands of Cubans, the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of others, the exile of millions and the denial of all human rights, including the right to organize unions, is irrelevant.

So by these two examples, I see a pattern emerging – the Democrats are willing to throw our partners under the bus while rushing out to embrace the worst criminals the world has in it for purely political reasons. Sure Pakistan and Columbia aren’t paradise for the people living in them, but certainly those conditions were created by the criminals the governments have to deal with every day.

And while Leahy and Rangel engage in the old political  shuck and jive, Chavez is reaching out to the terrorists – I wonder who’ll get to the Columbian people first. I think Uribe has been very tolerant seeings how his father was killed by narco-terrorists. O’Grady ends her article;

Even if none of this progress had occurred, it would make little sense to reject the FTA. Colombia needs the free trade agreement, Mr. Uribe said in New York, because it’s how “we can generate more employment of a higher quality, send more of our products to the U.S. market and in this way we will have less illicit drugs, less terrorism, more peace, more security, more well-being for the Colombian people.” If only the government in Havana cared as much about the Cuban population.

Indeed. And if only our government, the one in DC, cared about people as much as they like to tell us they care.

Category: Economy, Foreign Policy, Politics, Terror War