OPINION: Mr Liam Quaide of Co Limerick has complained on this newspaper's letters page that my "second eulogy in a week to Ronald Reagan addresses none of the main charges against the former president" writes Mark Steyn
There then follows a somewhat lengthy list, and, alas, a columnist can't write about everything.
But for the sake of argument let's take the first of my omissions from the Reagan record: "The oppression and poverty inflicted on Central America as a direct result of his foreign policies."
A few months before 9/11 I went to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, a rather somnolent affair, aside from the anti-globalisation mobs hurling concrete across the perimeter fence.
The assembled heads of government were there to plan for a hemispherical free trade area, and I spent a catatonic 48 hours listening to eminently reasonable foreign and finance ministers eager to explain at length why Costa Rica and Bolivia were now open for business.
The summit was attended by every president and prime minister in the region except one: Fidel Castro. Comrade Fidel had been ruled ineligible to attend because Cuba was not a democracy. Everywhere else was.
One can argue that things have slipped a little in the last three years: fiscal woes in Argentina; the grubby thug Chavez in Venezuela. But still, even by the most pessimistic reading, an area that 30 years ago was wall-to-wall dictatorships is now overwhelmingly democratic.
Whatever the continent's fate, it won't include a return of the puffed-up bemedalled El-Presidentes-For-Life, strutting tinpots such as Gen Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, who abolished Christmas and banned Donald Duck.
That's what makes Latin America relevant to the Bush project in the Middle East. For much of the last century, the region was mired in the same dead-end victim complex as the Arab world.
The celebrated Brazilian sociology professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a famous proponent of "dependency theory", which blamed the woes of everybody south of the Rio Grande on Uncle Sam, in much the same way that Arab regimes, invited to explain why they're sewers of corruption and brutality, bore on about the Great Satan and the Zionist Entity.
In the 1970s the west's foreign-policy elites were happy to take the losers at their own estimation: just as the so-called "realists" insist today that Islam is incompatible with liberty, so three decades ago there were wise old birds who said the same thing about Catholicism.
Easy to scoff now, but back then the dictators ruled not just Latin America but also Spain and Portugal. Cultures can change.
Pre-Reagan, nobody thought much about this. The defeatist Democrats of the Carter era took it for granted that Communism would advance across the hemisphere, and some of them frankly found it a bit of a turn on: dig out that old picture of a starry-eyed Senator Kerry with Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.
Twenty years ago, the Commie cutie was the darling of the salons of the west. On one memorable occasion, he turned up in Holland Park, in his best-pressed Sandinista fatigues, to take tea with Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser, plus Salman Rushdie, Melvyn Bragg, etc.
Meanwhile, the more subtly defeatist Republicans of the Nixon era thought the best bulwark against Communism were strongmen of various degrees of unsavouriness.
This is the doctrine to which John Kerry, having gotten over his crush on Comrade Ortega, now subscribes to for the Middle East: he may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch. And, as I've been saying since 9/11, the opposite is more to the point: he may be our sonofabitch, but he's still a sonofabitch.
I remember years ago hearing some CIA guy talking about Washington "getting in bed with Noriega". You wouldn't be so blasé with your metaphors if you'd literally had to get into bed with him: for 30 years he routinely raped prisoners of both sexes.
More to the geopolitical point, in most cases you were trying to prop up the unprop-upable.
The Latin American state existed strictly for the enrichment of the extended family of whoever was President-for-Life that week.
So they had bloated bureaucracies and oversized militaries that had to be supported by almost wholly unproductive economies.
The classroom with no desks and the hospital wards with no beds were common features, regardless of whether the passing dictatorship was of left or right.
If Mr Quaide seriously believes "oppression and poverty" were "inflicted" on Central America by President Reagan, I highly recommend Manual del Perfecto Idiota Latinoamericano (Manual for the Perfect Latin American Idiot), an entertaining round-up of the good old days by three reformed lefties, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Alvaro Vargas Llosa.
"I confess here that I only have one pair of shoes," the corrupt Peruvian President Alan Garcia touchingly declared. "I really do not need more." A casual glance at the week's official photographs revealed that his footwear inventory was as unreliable as the rest of the government statistics.
What changed the dynamic in the region? Two things: Mrs Thatcher's Falklands War, which was a decisive defeat for Latin-American macho militarism; and Ronald Reagan's determination to roll back Communist expansion, at a time of Castro-friendly coups in Grenada and elsewhere.
After the 1982 US-backed elections in El Salvador, Reagan addressed Parliament in London and committed America to a "campaign for democracy". This was as big a break with the realpolitik crowd on Central America as last year's Bush speech - also at Westminster, also on liberty - was with the realpolitik crowd on the Middle East.
If you think the democratisation of Arabia is a long shot, so was the democratisation of Latin America. But it happened. And the only thing to argue about is how much credit you want to give the Reagan doctrine.
You want to blame the US for acts of genocide against the Mayans by the Guatemalan military? As you wish. But that, in fact, is an example of what happens when Washington is absent.
The Guatemalans reckoned they could handle the insurgency and buy arms on the international market, so they set to it, without any pesky foreigners around to complain about human-rights abuses (unlike, say, the Balkans, where the atrocities occur in plain sight of the UN peacekeepers).
But anyone who thinks Reagan wanted to oppress Central Americans and keep them in poverty doesn't understand his profound belief in economic prosperity as the engine of peace and freedom.
Central America in the first half of the 1980s had negative GDP growth, minus one per cent. In the second half, there was annual GDP growth of 2 per cent; in the 1990s, 5 per cent.
Throughout Latin America, voters turned to parties which promoted privatisation, free trade, hard currencies - or, in a word, Reaganomics. Ask yourself this: does today's Latin America incline closer to western values or Che and Fidel's?
Fernando Henrique Cardoso knew the answer. He wound up as president of Brazil, abandoned "dependency theory", embraced globalisation, and advised his people to "forget everything I wrote".
They did. Maybe the West's dewy-eyed liberation theologists still mooning for Daniel Ortega should do the same.