Images of US puppets in the Middle East

"King Abdullah II, popularly perceived in the West as being among the most enlightened Middle East leaders." Now this statement by Slackman in the article requires further elaboration and explanation. He is right of course that the Jordanian king enjoys an image of a supporter of democracy and human rights in the West. But there is no mystery there at all. His father enjoyed that image while his regime was cracking down brutally in the 1950s and 1960s, and while he was massacring Palestinians in Black September. In fact, if you go back to the 1960s and look at official US rhetoric on the Middle East during the Cold War, you will find that US predicated its support for some of the most brutal dictators, like the Shah or King Faysal or Shaykh Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi or Sultan Sa`id bin Taymur or the Jordanian king, in the name of "freedom". So this is not new. The labels that the US (and its submissive unquestioning mainstream media) accords to dictators around the region is based on two criteria only (and they are related): 1) the extent to which those regimes please Israel and its interests; 2) the extent to which those regimes follow US dictates. Look at Libya: the tone and textures of articles about the Libyan regime changed markedly only because he changed his foreign policy, but not else. If the Syrian regime were to sign a peace treaty with Israel tomorrow, the New York Times will carry a front page article about the reformist agenda of Bashshar. And this hypocrisy in US media coverage explains why most Arabs who consume Western media have no respect for the journalistic standards of those media. I can go on on this but you get the point.