Spain’s King Juan Carlos won praise back home on Sunday after telling Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to “just shut up” before storming out of an Ibero-American summit.
Seems like a fun summit.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jRV9BQppSHTkw7DzwfFauINrYcCg
Must be that Latin temperament. I dont mind Chavez, hes better than a lot of tinpot dictators and something different in politics is that he says what he likes. How often would we like our Leader to just say bugger off, or indeed, how often would we like our Royalty to just say shut up to some jumped up ponce.
Love it…
I hear that…There are plenty of Country’s that I wish my Government would tell them to " Pound Sand "
Yea very funny summit.
Shavez who previously declared the USA as the “world first imperialist- terrorits” ,now make a fun with King.
He’s still one of a long line of corrupt, crackpot, posturing South American dictators and probably deserved what he got.
digger
i think mate you are right.
However Shavez loudly tells about things that the other Latin Americans prefer to think;)
He together with his friend Kastro has focused the all anti-american feelings and tends of the Latin America.
In fact today the manies are discontented of US policy in the Latin America.
I’m not sure what US policy is for Latin America. They have certainly had a lot of US aid in the past and Im sure it continues today. The US must like the Latin Americans a lot as in my recent trip to the Southwest USA I saw more Latins than Americans…
Well true ,if to mean the American military invasions to the Latin american states and supportion of different pro-american dictators (OUR bastards) as the “US aid”.
Yeah, Chavez really shows America his contempt, by selling most of his oil to the US via Citgo. Oooof! We’ve been “told.”
In September, 1986, Southland sold a 50 percent interest in CITGO to Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. PDVSA acquired the remaining half of CITGO in January, 1990. With a secure and ample supply of crude oil, CITGO quickly became a major force in the energy arena.
In any case, the American right has demonized him way out of proportion to his actual importance and sins --because yes. He’s an ardent leftist that loves to poke his fingers in the Bush Admins eyes. the CIA aided an attempted military coup against him, an elected leader, so obviously he’s a good case. But his darling status with the anti-Bush American left (like myself) is waning.
He’s just another fundamentally anti-democratic tin pot megalomaniac projecting the image of revolutionary reformer --as he’s busy changing the constitution to allow him to be president indefinitely and he’s silencing any opposition media - all while doing little but spouting rhetoric for his support base in the Venezuelan underclass…
Care to provide an example?
Hmm Grenada and Panama, were these invasions or liberations?
Both…
Please expand my friend. Im not too clued up on Panama [US colony at the time?] and under the impression that Grenada was a lot to do about nothing [ UK as I recall may have opposed this].
Well, most of this is off the top of my head. The positive view of the American invasion of Panama, or Operation Just Cause, is that “Gen.” Manuel Noriega (AKA Pineapple Face) was a notorious prick. For he had used murder, goon squads posing as a militia, small “commando” units in the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) to assassinate his opponents (F-8), and had a long series of secret deals with criminals, terrorists, and dictators both hostile and friendly to the US and was up to his neck in the cocaine trade and gun running. Elections were held in which he clearly lost, but either he refused to acknowledge them or faked the results in his favor. I can’t recall exactly, but he roughed up the winning candidate and showed him publicly beaten on TV. He was also making some critical errors which would give the US a nice pretext to invade. As he “turned” on the US and the US turned on him (largely over drugs), he began to intimidate US military personnel and several were roughed up. And one man, a US citizen living in Panama, was arrested after PDF teams zeroed in on his transmissions (he was later rescued by the Delta Force).
In any case, the US invasion deposed Noriega and brought actual democracy to a nation that knew little of it.
A more skeptical view was that the US indeed was supporting dictators there, including Manuel’s predecessor, Torrijos, and that the US, specifically the CIA, had cozied up to Noriega during the Nicaraguan War and dolts like Oliver North were almost falling in love with him (This is in the 1980s, right before Marine COL North would be caught up in the Arms for Hostages Scandal that plagued the final years of the Reagan Administration). And that the CIA had a long file on what a sick bastard Noriega was and the methods he used to quell not only communists, but members of the democratic opposition to his rule. For instance, it’s rumored that he was a pedophile that raped children, and that his F-8 unit would torture their victims by severing their tendons, then sodomizing them before death. His prisons were also notorious for meeting out special punishments to political prisoners.
The US invasion was also not tidy. While most of the dead were PDF, civilians were also killed. I heard the US Army Rangers also had numerous “problems” and several were killed in friendly fire incidents as the trigger happy dipshits fired on each other shortly after landing at night. Some also object to the way that the PDF barracks were pretty much disintegrated by fire from “Spectre” C-130 gunships, probably killing hundreds with no chance of surrender. But all in all, I think it’s hard to say that Panama was not better off with Manuel sitting in a Florida penitentiary, until recently when he was sent to France to answer for money-laundering charges. He unsuccessfully fought extradicion on the grounds that he was considered a “POW” by the US. But the court found against him and now he’s going to live out his life there, but not on the French Riviera. 
As far as “Urgent Fury,” the invasion took place ostensibly when the Grenadian Army staged a communist coup, supposedly with the help of the Cuban intelligence service, and overthrew the elected president. They later killed him and seemed to become increasing violent and unstable. This of course gave the US a pretext to invade since hundreds of US students attended medical schools there as they often do in the Caribbean and Latin America. Of course, the real reasons (and I’m not saying that US students weren’t in danger, but I’m not sure any real evidence existed that they were) is that the Cuban “construction workers” were building a large airfield said to be designed to extend Cuban influence in the region, and the Beirut barracks were bombed inflicting over 300 Marine deaths, which was both catastrophic and embarrassing. Mainly because the Reagan Admin never really retaliated against the parties involved and there’s a conspiracy theory put forth by an ex-CIA agent that his inquiry was deliberately squashed, and he was falsely charged with murder in order to cover up a bizarre, unlikely cabal of Iran (via Hezbollah), a Lebanese Christian Militiaman (who allegedly died under CIA custody), and even Israel - as none of the above parties wanted the US in Lebanon and all basically collaborated to one form or another to get rid of the US.
In any case, the US invasion of Grenada was marred by a tragic chopper crash due to jittery pilot nerves, hard fighting by Cuban ‘construction workers’ that acted more like combat engineers, four SEALs drowning while another SEAL team that ignominiously ditched their gear and went “escape and evasion,” and other problems resulting from a hastily thrown together plan. Both operations were a double-edged swords as they were both marred by poor intelligence, inter-service rivalry, and the Pentagon’s propensity to “showcase” their commando “superstars,” which in both cases led to needless deaths. For instance, the US Army’s elite surgical counter-terrorists in 1st Special Operations Force Delta were sent in to take the Grenadian airport which was like asking a surgeon to use his scalpel to cut down a tree. They were not armed for such a mission and were out of practice for such light infantry roles. The SEALs in Panama also had problems attacking an airport (you think they might have learned! :D) as the supposed lightly defended aerodrome actually had armor and infantry --dug in…
On the plus side, the US military did learn some valuable lessons on command and control, planning and intell, and communications as a Ranger unit had to call in air-strikes using a lieutenant’s credit card because no one thought the Army needed to talk to the USAF in 1983 apparently. Also, doctrine was revised and some confidence was regained after the Vietnam nightmare was finally put behind the all volunteer military…
Cheers for the nice summation.
Do you have more detail on this?
Information Technology in Perspective
The 1983 Operation in Grenada, “Operation Urgent Fury,” is
a dramatic example of the technological challenge the military
services faced when they tried to fight jointly. The lack of
interoperable communications and systemic command and control
problems, in the end, provided us with some hard lessons.
There were several examples of the Services’ inability to
operate and communicate jointly, but none as unsettling as the
report of the warrior who, pinned down by enemy forces, could
see the friendly gun-ships circling above but couldn’t
communicate with them to signal for help. In desperation, he
used his personal phone card to place a call via a commercial
telephone system back to Fort Bragg where the operations
commander in turn radioed the gunship to provide fire-support
for his beleaguered troops.
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/testimony/research/kdslaght020220.txt
The final challenge to invading forces was the lack of a fully integrated, interoperable communications system. Unlike the fighting elements which were organized to conduct operations independent of one another, communications systems were not allowed such freedom. Communications was to have been the glue that would tie together the operation of the four independent United States military service elements. Unfortunately, communications support failed in meeting certain aspects of that mission. It cannot be said that communications capability itself was abundant. Several participants cite shortages of communications.
Shortages were not the only communications problems found during the invasion of Grenada; interoperability was another. For example, uncoordinated use of radio frequencies prevented radio communications between Marines in the north and Army Rangers in the south. As such, interservice communication was prevented, except through offshore relay stations, and kept Marine commanders unaware for too long that Rangers were pinned down without adequate armor. In a second incident, it was reported that one member of the invasion force placed a long distance, commercial telephone call to Fort Bragg, N.C. to obtain C-130 gunship support for his unit which was under fire. His message was relayed via satellite and the gunship responded.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/829758/posts (this link provides a nice overview)
And oh yeah, the incident is also recalled in the Clint Eastwood film “Heartbreak Ridge,” only they change the men to Marine Force Recon and they call for Naval air support…
No problems. But my left hand went numb writing that.
A video of the incident:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUZxlXkbaxM
¡ Porque no te callas ! , why you dont shut up.
Given the Chavez big mouth that is a good advice.
That just confirms my opinion that, in that case at least, he is a good king.
And that Chavez is a dangerous idiot.
Which is odd, because usually I’d probably be taking the opposite view, on both of them.