[link|http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/columnists/story.html?f=/stories/20011009/726950.html|The National Post boldly goes there].

Excerpt:

But in the Arabian peninsula, the Ottoman vacuum was filled not with colonies but with "spheres of influence," a system that continues to this day. Rather than making Arabia a Crown colony within the Empire, sending out the Marquess of Whatnot as Governor, issuing banknotes bearing the likeness of George V, setting up courts presided over by judges in full-bottomed wigs and introducing a professional civil service and a free press, the British instead mulled over which sheikh was likely to prove more pliable, installed him in the capital and invited his sons to Eton and Sandhurst. The French did the same, and so, later, did the Americans. This was cheaper than colonialism and less politically prickly, but it did a great disservice to the populations of those countries. The alleged mountain of evidence of Yankee culpability is, in fact, evidence only of the Great Satan's deplorable faintheartedness: yes, Washington dealt with Saddam, and helped train the precursors of the Taleban, and fancied Colonel Gadaffi as a better bet than King Idris, just as in the Fifties they bolstered the Shah and then in the Seventies took against him, when Jimmy Carter decided the Peacock Throne wasn't progressive enough and wound up with the Ayatollahs instead.

This system of cherrypicking from a barrel-load of unsavoury potential clients was summed up in the old CIA line: "He may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch." The inverse is more to the point: He may be our sonofabitch, but he's a sonofabitch. Some guys go nuts, some are merely devious and unreliable, some remain charming and pleasant but of little help, but all of them are a bunch of despots utterly sealed off from their peoples. As we now know, it was our so-called "moderate" Arab "friends" who provided all the suicide bombers of September 11th, just as it's in their government-run media -- notably the vile Egyptian press -- that some of the worst anti-American rhetoric is to be found. The contemptible regime of President Mubarak permits dissent against the U.S. government but not against its own, licensing the former as a safety valve to reduce pressure on the latter. This is a classic example of why the sonofabitch system is ultimately useless to the West: the U.S. spends billions subsidizing regimes who have a vested interest in encouraging anti-Americanism as a substitute for more locally focused grievances. As a result, the West gets blamed for far more in a part of the world it never colonized than it does in those regions it directly administered for centuries.