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Yet somehow I am sure that some people will twist this into some evil diabolical scheme, with half-baked conspiracy theories
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We're too busy being horrified by what the US-backed Stalinist regime in Uzbekistan is doing to its own people with security forces backed with US money. I'd be very interested in how that counts as spreading democracy and freedom across the world, and why the US thinks the regime only needs to improve rather than need kicking out.
On a slightly related topic:
Peter Preston in the Guardian has a *very* interesting article today which makes the point that spreading democracy and freedom US style has a very nasty package underneath the glitter, that the neo-liberal economic principles that go along with it reduce the power of governments to govern, and thus democracy becomes a way of choosing the best government for the small amount of power that remains to them, while the majority of decisions that actually affect people are taken by people who aren't elected at all.
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...the economic order that goes with democracy renders freedom to choose, to change course profoundly, an illusion. Success (or failure) is handing political power to a central bank. Make Alan Greenspan or Mervyn King monarchs of the market and your vote inevitably loses force, the parts it can influence shrunk to opaque pledges about tax and pleas to nurses to wash their hands.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists...484778,00.html