iving insofar as employment, food, health care, education, etc., without omnipresent Brazilian torture or Guatemalan death squads. At the same time, many of America's Third World allies in the cold war -- members of what Washington still likes to refer to as "The Free World" -- were human-rights disaster areas. Who could boast of little other than the 30-second democracy of the polling booth and a tolerance for dissenting opinion so long as it didn't cut too close to the bone or threaten to turn into a movement. Naturally, the only way to win cold-war propaganda points with team lineups like these was to extol your team's brand of virtue and damn the enemy's lack of it, designating the former "democracy" and the latter "totalitarianism". Civil liberties and elections are not trifling accomplishments of humankind. Countless individuals have suffered torture and death in their pursuit. In addition, despite the cold-war blinkers, this even today limits the United States' vision of this thing called democracy. There would still be ample credit due Washington if, in fact, in the post-World War II period, the US had been using its pre-eminent position in the world, its overwhelming "superpower" status, to spread these accomplishments -- to act as the unfailing global champion of free and fair elections. The historical record, however, points in the opposite direction....
