IMHO, Castro and Chavez need to go. For those about to flame me saying the U.S. should not intervene, it's not in the Constitution, etc...I say the following
1)That all flew out the window with uber liberal Wilson
2)The Monroe Doctrine. Yes I know what it reads. It requires reading between the lines.
3)We spent billions ousting Saddam so some muslims can be free and killed Christian Serbs to help out the heroin smuggling, muslim terrorists supporting KLA. Certainly we can make another two exceptions and insert a few special ops guys to drill a lead injection between Castro and Chavez's eyes. I don't think the spec ops guys mind. From what I know, they kind of enjoy that sort of stuff.
4)I don't like Communists on our doorstep
5)These a$$holes deserve it
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001309.html
All elected governments are not by nature good; likewise, all dictatorships are not inherently evil. When representative government becomes a conduit for evil, as it did in Republican Spain in the 1930s or in Chile in the 1970s, it sometimes falls to a nation's military to defend the nation (rather than the government) from its domestic enemies. Few come away with clean hands from such a war -- but the alternatives in such cases are usually even worse.
Such was the case in Chile, 11 September 1973. At the request of the judicial and legislative branches of the Chilean government, General Pinochet led a military coup that overthrew the nation's executive branch, and its chief, the communist dictator Salvador Allende. After destroying the communist government, Pinochet established a military dictatorship in Chile and conducted a protracted war against remaining communist insurgents who were waging a terror campaign in the streets of Santiago. At the same time, Pinochet's government dismantled the ruinous, highly centralized Soviet-style economic regime Allende had established (inflation rate: 1,200%!) and encouraged the development of a laissez-faire capitalist marketplace. Over the next decade the junta reorganized Chile politically, successfully negotiated peaceful resolutions to conflicts with Peru and Argentina, hosted His Holiness Pope John Paul II, and established a new constitution for the nation. In March of 1990, Pinochet voluntarily resigned his office and turned the reins of power over to an elected government. He retired from the army not long after, and was declared a Senator for life by the government of Chile in 1998.
Did Pinochet get his hands bloody in the process of saving his country? Yes. However, the forces acting against the peace and security of Chile were vicious terrorists on the scale of al-Qaida, and there is no completely "clean" way to fight such criminals. His regime used torture, brutality, and executions where necessary to ferret out and neutralize communist insurgents.
Occasionally brutal though it may have been, however, the Pinochet regime was never a cult of personality or an ideological dictatorship; the goal was always to win the war against the communists, not to build an edifice of personal power for the General. While harsh, the police state Pinochet headed was at least a true police state -- a state dedicated to maintaining order and enforcing the law, not merely a means of satisyfing the arbitrary whims of its leaders. Whatever its excesses, the Pinochet regime was far preferable to the inhuman communist gulag that Allende sought to establish.
The mark of the true patriot is his willingness to sacrifice his all -- health, wealth, reputation, and life -- to defend his homeland. This Gen. Pinochet has surely done; today he is an international pariah, pilloried and condemned by pampered Westerners who mostly have no experience in personal sacrifice. Instead of sitting back and watching as his homeland from becoming a Castroite nightmare, he took action -- and for his trouble he has been slandered, imprisoned, shot at, and all but damned by globalist busybodies, woould-be assissins, and the intelligentsia of the West. Without his intervention, Chile would have become another Cuba -- a prison state; as it is, Chile is peaceful, free, and relatively prosperous, the brightest light in the entire continent.
More: The Chiliean Anti-Communist League (all pinions expressed therein are not necessarily those of B-chan) .