More Pinochet: the right responds

Posters at The Corner have been publishing various ambivalent obits all day. Tim Graham's remarks on a mellowing Pinochet relaxing his grip causes him to sniff at the left's similar relief when Deng Xiaoping went to commune with his ancestors; it's a post which should please our colleagues at Babalu Blog.

I prefer this rather more sensible one by Goldberg:

I certainly think that supporting a Pinochet-type outside of the context of the Cold War would be much more difficult to defend and would ultimately probably be indefensible. And, even in such a context, I by no means think the US should have simply a blanket policy of my enemy's enemy is my friend. This is partly a moral point and partly a practical one. Our support of Saudi Arabia has proved that such logic carried on indefinitely creates very real problems, both morally and strategically.

(Somehow I don't want to drag Jeane Kirkpatrick's authoritarian vs totalitarian dictatorship meme into this all over again, although since she died recently too, why not...)

Finally, here's a essay by William Buckley himself, composed at the point at which Pinochet was about to be arrested by the World Court.