Next time someone complains to you about the Liberal media, ask him to read the Washington Post editorial printed below. Some people condemn terrorists and dictators. Some people come to praise them. And some people say that he made the trains run on time.

The paradox of American foreign policy over the last several decades is that our government pretends to promote democracy and freedom around the world, but if you look at the evidence, an ugly picture emerges. Quite often, our government works to overthrow democratically-elected governments and replaces them with the most brutal dictators imaginable. That's what happened in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile and brutalized the country for two decades, killing and torturing thousands, ruining countless lives. Pinochet, who died this week, was the sort of killer that U.S. governments find it easy to wage war against. But as Franklin D. Roosevelt said about another Latin American dictator, "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Pinochet's death creates a problem for people who defend the American system. Here was a first-rate butcher whom the United States fully supported for years. We could have invaded Chile at any time from 1973 through 1988 (when he held power) and restored democratic rule, but we never did. Yet we invaded Iraq in 1991 to undo Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, a monarchy. Reagan invaded Grenada under the guise of freedom and anti-communism. An honest media would ask hard questions about why every U.S. President, from Nixon to Reagan, put up with Pinochet. The best the media can do is to bemoan Pinochet's human rights abuses while pointing out that he did help the economy there.

Imagine what would happen once Fidel Castro dies. Will anyone in American media defend him by saying that he may have been brutal, but everyone in Cuba had health care? He may have set up a gulag but all the children learned to read? Would anyone say that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was "stable" and that civil war only broke out once the United States overthrew him? Our political climate would never tolerate this kind of apologia. Yet, it's happening right now with the death of Pinochet, where editorial writers acknowledge that Pinochet killed and tortured thousands, but the economy thrived in Chile. Frankly, the Washington Post editorial reprinted below would be no less offensive if you replaced Pinochet's name with Adolph Hitler, or Benito Mussolino, who supposedly made the trains run on time (actually, he didn't). That the Post gets away with it says a lot about our political culture, and the false belief that our government only sets out to accomplish good things in the world, and that any problems flowing from our involvement are unintentional and unforeseen.

Indeed, the Post editorial actually suggests that some good things came out of Pinochet's leadership, in that today the country is run by a democratically-elected leader. Somehow this flows from the Pinochet dictatorship. Even sillier, the Post says that the Pinochet experience proves true the canard that authoritarian governments are sometimes worthy of American support over totalitarian governments. Only in America can you get away with this kind of argument.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that other commentators have also slammed this editorial.

A Dictator's Double Standard Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered. His legacy is Latin America's most successful country.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006; A26

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.

One prominent opponent, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated by a car bomb on Washington's Sheridan Circle in 1976 -- one of the most notable acts of terrorism in this city's history. Mr. Pinochet, meanwhile, enriched himself, stashing millions in foreign bank accounts -- including Riggs Bank, a Washington institution that was brought down, in part, by the revelation of that business. His death forestalled a belated but richly deserved trial in Chile.

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. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired. It also has a vibrant democracy. Earlier this year it elected another socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, who suffered persecution during the Pinochet years.

Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle -- and that not even Allende's socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.

By way of contrast, Fidel Castro -- Mr. Pinochet's nemesis and a hero to many in Latin America and beyond -- will leave behind an economically ruined and freedomless country with his approaching death. Mr. Castro also killed and exiled thousands. But even when it became obvious that his communist economic system had impoverished his country, he refused to abandon that system: He spent the last years of his rule reversing a partial liberalization. To the end he also imprisoned or persecuted anyone who suggested Cubans could benefit from freedom of speech or the right to vote.

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