When the U.S. wants to start a new war — with Iraq, with Libya, with

 Syria, etc. — it accomplishes this by claiming that it is, at least in

 part, motivated by horror over the tyranny of the country’s leaders. 

 When it wants to engineer regime change or support anti-democratic

 coups — in Venezuela, in Iran, in Bolivia, in Honduras — it uses the

 same justification. When the U.S. Government and its media partners

 want to increase the hostility and fear that Americans harbor for

 adversarial countries — for Russia, for China, for Cuba, For North

 Korea — it hauls out the same script: we are deeply disturbed by the

 human rights violations of that country’s government.
 

 Yet it is hard to conjure a claim that is more obviously and laughably 

 false than this one. The U.S. does not dislike autocratic and repressive

 governments. It loves them, and it has for decades. Installing and 

 propping up despotic regimes has been the foundation of U.S. foreign 

 policy since at least the end of World War II, and that approach 

 continues to this day to be its primary instrument for advancing what 

 it regards as its interests around the world. The U.S. for decades has 

 counted among its closest allies and partners the world’s most barbaric 

 autocrats, and that is still true. 

 

What the U.S. hates and will act decisively and violently against is not   dictatorship but disobedience.

                                                                                       -glenn greenwald