What about them?
What dictators are in the habbit of supporting free countries?
I'm not an expert on U.S. Foreign Policy and I'm not trying to defend it's entire history. My philosophy is force is only OK in defense of yourself or your allies. (like England, Korea, Kuwait etc etc) It's not OK for dictators or totalitarian governments to use force ever. (because those governments are not "OK" from the get-go)
I don't support every U.S. War but it's certainly fine to support some bad governments against worse ones. For example, Iran had a pretty bad government in 1979 but the Ayatollah Khumayni's government is/was much worse. (for us and the Iranians)
I'll tell you what about them- They all had democratically elected governments toppled (or at the very least attempted to) by US intervention, followed by imposed autocratic militarist regimes (Guatemala in 1954 (success), Chile in 1973 (success), Nicaragua in 1984 (partly a failure), Venezuela in 2002 (failure)).
And I said free countries that support dictators, and dictators that further the interest of 'free countries' (simplified- by 'further the interests', I mean the interest of investors and corporations, or military interests.) Of these latter ones there's several examples- Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet in Chile, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, and so on so forth. These murderous regimes had two main 'constituencies', the domestic elite and the foreign elites of their patron countries, and so they basically had to cater to them to keep power at the expense of the vast majority of their own populations (sometimes they even had to be protected from their own populations).
You bring up the interesting example of Iran, but what a lot of people seem to forget is the backdrop to 1979, which was 1953. Iran did have a parliamentary democracy, obviously imperfect but far less so than the absolute dictatorship of the Shah. In 1953 US and British interests convinced their governments to covertly overthrow the Iranian parliament, chiefly due to the fact that the parliament and prime minister Mossadegh wanted to increase royalties to the government from the British-Iranian Oil Company, going so far as to want to nationalize it. Remember, this was before the evil fundamentalists were a real big part of the scene. Needless to say, the CIA operation was a big success, and the Shah was instituted as the brutal autocrat and sole ruler for the following 26 years, ample time for massive unrest to boil under the surface of his Rentier State, and of course to make the Islamic Revolution a reality.
Moral of the story, you gotta be real careful about the consequences. If you don't agree with some US foreign policy issues then speak out against them. You say that tyrannical governments should never use force, because they are illegitimate in the first place: that's true. So what about the fact that Saddam Hussein was the third largest recipient of US aid in the 1980s, when he was flagrantly displaying total abuse of power by gassing Kurds and Iranians. Because the Ayatollah was worse than Hussein? Then why invade Iraq NOW and not Iran? Iran's still ruled by basically the same group of people. Do the Ayatollahs weight heavier than Hussein on the 'bad' scale? Then why so cozy with the Saudi Autocrat Family? They're far more dictatorial and fundamentalist than Iran, so where are the threats to the Saudi monarchy? They're committing basically the same crimes that Iran's accused of, if not worse. So where is "moral equivalence"?
