Rewarding dictatorships and Punishing democracies. I watched an interview with former Sudanese Prime Minister, Sadiq Al-Mahdi on Al-Jazeera's Ziyarah Khassah. He made an interesting point. He said that the US government gave generous economic and military aid to the dictatorship of Ja`far An-Numayri. But when Numayri was replaced with a democratic government, US aid was halted.