This one wasn't a direct "shut up" quote, but the meaning is pretty much the same:
(Colored emphasis mine.)The peace-at-any-price crowd is outraged by the way Colombia's president yanked the right of Hugo Chavez to talk with terrorists. But all Alvaro Uribe did was signal that in diplomacy, results matter.
Middle East peace-process negotiators, take note.
Colombia's president, at the urging of France's Nicolas Sarkozy, last August gave Venezuelan dictator Chavez a chance to mediate the release of 45 hostages held in Colombia's jungle dungeons by FARC, a brutal Marxist narcoterrorist group at war with Colombia since 1964. The French wanted FARC hostage Ingrid Betancourt, a Franco-Colombian citizen kidnapped in 2002, freed. Three American contractors are also on the hostage list.
Who better than the thuggish Chavez? Or so the wisdom went. The radical Venezuelan leader is a hero to the narcoterrorists, who've festooned their Web site with praises for his "revolution." If anyone could persuade them to release hostages, it would be him.
But it didn't take long for Uribe to realize talks with terrorists would go nowhere. So instead of going along, Uribe pulled the plug.
Uribe's move offers lessons in how to deal with terrorists in an era when peace talks go on, emboldening terrorists to act out.
So, there we have it. Once again, Chavez has had an opportunity to do good, and when he couldn't or wouldn't deliver, he got told to be quiet.
It's also interesting, as I highlighted above, that Chavez is the poster boy for the kind of people who take hostages and keep them for years. Perhaps not the squeaky clean image some people have of him, but truth is truth.
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