Some Things I Meant to Mention Before

I enjoyed this profile of Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's UN ambassador and author of the recent book,The Dictator's Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet as well as A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons, his account of his experience on the UN Security Council during George Bush's reckless run to implement the Iraq War.

What convinced him to write the book was this:

He overcame his initial reluctance to write the book, he said, when he realized that General Pinochet had affected an entire generation in Chile and all around the world — prominent leftist politicians and advocates told him the fight over Chile had inspired them to enter public life and still shaped their outlook.

It took him two years of writing evenings and weekends to finish the work. In addition, Mr. Muñoz wanted to examine the question of whether Chile’s free-market economic miracle was really the fruit of the Pinochet period — as General Pinochet’s die-hard supporters still claim — or whether it might have occurred without such a brutally anti-Socialist regime.

 Although General Pinochet unleashed free-market policies inspired by the “Chicago boys,” young Chilean disciples of Milton Friedman and other economists of the Chicago School, the dictator was forced to retrench and even to nationalize much of the banking sector with a $7 billion bailout in the early 1980s.

It was only after the defeat of General Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite and the establishment of democracy that the real economic boom occurred, Mr. Muñoz argues in the book, with the poverty level in Chile dropping to 13.7 percent in 2007 from 40 percent in 1990.

This last part I believe is especially important. Pinochet's defenders have argued ad nauseam that Chile's economic successes are a result of his policies. This is patently untrue and given the fact that Pinochet and his family apparently turned themselves into millionaires while on a public servant's salary and aggressively tried to hide their ill-gotten gains, one wonders how thoroughly demented or how deeply in denial anyone would have to be to defend Pinochet.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Judith Apter Klinghoffer's race-baiting comments about Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama and Reg mentioned David Remnick's New Yorker article about the Obama campaign. It's time to put the lie to Dr. Klinghoffer's slur of Powell. She made the following comment:

To be honest, I never liked the man. He struck me as a coward. Yes, he was a general but he let fear of assassination prevent him from running for the presidency and he betrayed those who gave him a seat at the table in ill timed books.

From the Remnick article:

For a few weeks, as his book sat atop the best-seller list, Powell discussed a run for the 1996 Republican nomination with his family and his inner circle of aides and friends. Bill Clinton, political tacticians told them, lacked Powell’s particular strengths: his maturity, his solidity in foreign affairs; in a center-right country, the scenario went, Powell might beat the incumbent.

“Some in my family, in my circle of acquaintances, were concerned that, as a black person running for office, you’re probably at greater personal risk than you might be if you were a white person,” Powell told me. “But I’ve been at risk many times in my life, and I’ve been shot at, even.” Powell thought about the question for a few weeks and then, he said, he realized, “What are you doing? This is not you. It had nothing to do with race. It had to do with who I am, a professional soldier, who really has no instinct or gut passion for political life. The determining factor was I never woke up a single morning saying, ‘Gee, I want to go to Iowa.’ It was that simple. So the race thing was there, and I would’ve been the first prominent African-American candidate, but the reality is that the whole family, but especially me, had to look in the mirror and say, ‘Is this what you really think you would be good at? And do you really want to do it?’ And the answer was no.”

His heart wasn't in it. That's all. Mores the pity that someone as blindly reactionary as Klinghoffer - arguably the only coward here - is unable to consider that policy. One can only hope that the hate geenrated from the reactionary right will cause it's own self-immolation.