The WaPo has an epiphany

From The Washington Post:

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.

[. . .]

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.

This is not a mystery. To explain let me tell you a story. My cousin's wife developed cancer back around 12 years ago. It was a tumor in her throat about the size of her fist. To kill the tumor and save her life her doctors used radiation and chemotherapy.

The treatments were very hard on her. They left her sick as a dog, they compromised her immune system and made her hair fall out. She suffered greatly but had she not endured the treatment the cancer would have killed her.

Chile had the same problem as my cousin's wife. A cancer was growing within the nation and would have killed it if drastic and painful measures were not taken. Socialism and the political left which champions it are as deadly to a nation as cancer is to a human body. When it appears it must be rooted out with utter ruthlessness otherwise it will bring a nation and people to ruin, poverty and slavery.

The pain that Pinochet put Chile through was difficult to endure however it was necessary. For an example of what Chile would look like today had it not been for Pinochet one only need to look to Cuba.

As even the Post is forced to conclude:

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.

The earlier the cancer is diagnosed the less drastic the treatment need be. Last month America developed a small tumor. We can easily remove it in 2008, but if we wait much longer the US will need a convulsion like Chile's and I'm not sure that we have a Pinochet waiting in the wings to save us.