U.S.-Chilean history haunts Rice visit, New president is a symbol of the end of the rule of generals backed by Washington

WASHINGTON - With photographers snapping away, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared last summer that decades of American foreign policy toward the oil-rich Middle East had been a failure.

For 60 years, she told a Cairo audience, the U.S. "pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region," achieving neither. It was a candid confession, one that remains emblematic of a Bush administration foreign policy that supporters contend is now placing the long-term benefits of "spreading of freedom" ahead of the once-perceived short-term advantages of embracing despots.

But today Rice will pose for pictures at another event — one that will undoubtedly evoke a tableau of America's far longer history of embracing brutal regimes in its own backyard. She will attend the inauguration of Chile's president-elect Michelle Bachelet, who in her youth was tortured and exiled at the hands of a military junta backed by Washington.

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Chile remains, in the words of author and national security historian Peter Kornbluh, the "ultimate study of morality — or the lack of it — in American foreign policy."