The U.S. does not and have never supported democracy in the third world. Our third world model has been that of military dictatorship. We overthrew any attempts at democracy whever we could. That's not what you hear on television or read in the newspaper, but it's actually common knowledge. The indiginous populations have been trying to democratize all over the world for 50 years and we've been putting that down and propping up puppet dictators everywhere we could. Saddam Hussein is just a typical one of our creations actually, just one that got out of hand, but it's common knowledge that he was our SOB. As was Noreiaga, Marcos, Suharto, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, papa doc, Somoza, Mobutu, Batista, a whole line of butchers in Guatamala and El Salvador (mostly trained at Fort Benning in Georgia). The list can be expanded nearly indefinitely.. In fact we even loved Hitler until he got a bit carried away, he was Time Magazine man of the year in 1934, because he is exactly the US's kind of guy, one person with total power over the population that doesn't believe in any kind of social welfare, someone we can work with to corporate advantage much easier than a voting public who will have their own interests in mind. This has been standard forever.
 
You may find it hard to believe that people in control of our country could be so evil as to murder hundreds of thousands in order to destroy democracy to make the world a place friendly to explitation by U.S. corporations. But it is just greed run away with itself. Haven't you ever known somebody who got so greedy that they did horrible things and lied and rationalized to themselves and others to make it all sound okay, even though they were completley wacked out of all reality? We've all known such people, in fact sadly we have all seen it many times. Now extrapolate to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars and control of the worlds most vital resources. If you've been involved with investing and hard core investors you know that pretty much anything that happens in the world that adversely affects the outlook of the stocks and investments of the rich people is considered awful, horrible, evil and must be resisted. Anything that raises their outlook on their portfolio is fantastic. This even if it ultimately means overthrowing democracy and putting in a dictator and killing people by the hundreds of thousands in cold blood, as we do consistently. We justify it by calling it a fight for freedom and democracy, no matter what the facts. And that's generally how the media report it. And then the average person on the street tends to just accept it as fact because they never hear anything else.
 
What you hear on t.v. and in the newspapers about how we support freedom and democracy is just a wholesale lie ubiquitously painted in the corporate media, who are obediently serving their propaganda function that their masters insist upon when it comes to such issues - any issue that affects the bottom line of coporations basically (social lifestyle issues are allowed to be debated however). Did you see how fast they fired Peter Arnet? It showed in a shamelessly public example how easy it is to just eliminate anybody for what they report. So naturally it is easy for extreme bias to enter the media (the media sell audiences to corporations, the corporations are their customers who write their paychecks, and the stockholders care only about seeing those checks come in, no matter what sacrifice of truth is necessary. That's not to say some individual corporation cannot be attacked, they can, the cigarette industry got a beating, but overall corporate ideology that allows the raping and plundering of the planet and its people for our economy, at its core, must be strictly adhered to without deviation - which has resulted in a staggering and effective propaganda system - you will never believe it until you hear some of the missing parts of the story). There is a long filtering process to select the journalists for the corporate mainstream media, they are the most obedient and know exactly what to say and not to say and care only about keeping their high status job and not about reporting the truth. They have been filtered for that and rationalize it to themselves in all kinds of ways. They are the ones in that they figured out exactly how to flourish in that environment (and telling the truth about the world is not how you flourish in that environment).
 
And that is how we gained and maintain control of a large part of the rest of the world's resources and populations. Indeed it should be a very big suprise if we had gained and maintain control of people and their resources by being human rights supporters who support freedom and democracy and self determination.