Prosecuting Pinochet might expand the ``rule of law''; it certainly would involve ideological willfulness tarted up in the trappings of law. Pinochet was a nasty ruler who mandated torture, hostage-taking, and murder -- probably including murder on Embassy Row in Washington. But he was, on balance, good for Chile, which emerged from his despotism as a prosperous democracy and might not yet have emerged from the tyranny that Salvador Allende planned.

Pinochet's 1973 military coup stopped Allende's government from screwing down the lid of a communist dictatorship. Yes, Allende's government was elected -- with approximately the percentage of the vote (36.3) that Hitler got in 1932 (37.3). But Pinochet's coup did not destroy democracy. Rather, it thwarted a government coup against democracy by Allende's Cuban-supported militia.

But Pinochet does not deserve moral amnesty because he was less awful than the Allende alternative, or because the human toll of Pinochet's rule did not rank him near the top of the list of the world's oppressors at that time, or because Chile now prospers. Unless -- conservatives rallying to Pinochet, please note -- President Clinton's culpability really does vary inversely with the Dow average.

Conservatives' selective indignation about tyranny -- Pinochet's tyranny largely escapes their censure -- is not more contemptible than that of those who warmly welcomed to Harvard a villain of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Liberals who consider Fidel Castro more avuncular than criminal also forget that Yasser Arafat's agents murdered two U.S. diplomats in Sudan. Arafat, whose hands are bloodier than Pinochet's, travels the world, periodically alighting at the White House, where he might bump into the IRA terrorist Gerry Adams.
By uprooting a Marxist regime, Pinochet became the bete noire of the international left: His coup refuted the faith that history is regulated by a ratchet that moves leftward. Furthermore, Tony Blair's vanilla government gives scant satisfaction to his Labor Party's unreconstructed left. Extraditing Pinochet would palliate the aging left's strongest remaining passion, which is for nostalgic vengeance. So ``progressive'' opinion and party calculations pressure Britain's government to forget how helpful Pinochet was during Britain's war against Argentine aggression in the Falklands.

Chile's democratic government has decided that the interests of national reconciliation take precedence over vengeance against Pinochet. The Nuremberg Tribunals were necessary to civilize a vengeance that could not, and should not, have been avoided. But the claims of vengeance are not always sovereign, as post-Franco Spain understood when it turned its gaze away from the past rather than pick at scabs of old wounds.

Britain should find a way to return Pinochet to Chile. This would give the world a breathing spell during which the United States might conclude that a permanent international criminal court, although it has a potential for capriciousness, would be preferable to improvised human-rights prosecutions by each nation's judiciary.

Some conservatives argue that prosecuting Pinochet might deter other dictators from surrendering power. However, those conservatives are conceding a deterrent effect: Such prosecutions might stay torturers' hands. If the peril in which Pinochet finds himself prevents electrodes from being attached to the genitals of political prisoners, Pinochet's hour of fear has served justice.
©1998 Washington Post Writers Group