Mourning Some More for Pinochet

Add The Washington Post editorial page to those like Maggie Thatcher who were a bit blue at the passing of the former Chilean dictator. Subscribing fully to the omelets and broken eggs school of foreign policy, Tuesday's editorial acknowledged a split of opinion in regard to Pinochet but quickly got around to talking up the positives.

Augusto Pinochet, who died Sunday at the age of 91, has been vilified for three decades in and outside of Chile, the South American country he ruled for 17 years. For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked. Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile.

Yeah, that might have something to do with his vilification.

It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved.

This blog has smart readers (it always pays to flatter one's audience), but it probably bears pointing out that the past 15 years have all been since Pinochet relinquished control of the country.

The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet's coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

It's pretty easy to see the flaw in this argument, but I'm not sure I could put it any more pithily than Spencer Ackerman over at TAPPED, The American Prospect blog:

Wow, what might be a counterexample to this. Oh, I don't know -- maybe all of formerly-communist-and-now-NATO'd-up Eastern Europe?

It's amazing how grief can cloud one's judgment.