Throughout the Middle East and going back 70+ years, the genuine opposition was, for the most part, led by moderate and sometimes largely secular Muslim groups and leaders that sought to establish a 'pan-Arab' front and to unite Arab nations. For the US and Israel (like the British before them), the triumph of a secular pan-Arab movement in the 19th or 20th centuries was the worst case scenario because progressive, enlightened secular governments tend to put the interests of their people first, or at least above the interests of foreign powers. US global hegemony was founded on the control of the resources of other nations by US 'interests'. Without that control, the US would be forced to relinquish its role of 'world leader' and the US economy would quickly collapse because the one thing that has been propping it up - the petrodollar - would be no more.
American and Israeli interests were therefore always best served by the rule of corrupt, authoritarian, fundamentalist (if only in name) Muslim leaders who would happily suppress any protests movements and play ball the American way, and history shows that it was these kinds of regimes and individuals that received funding and promotion from Western governments. Consider Saudi Arabia's fundamentalist, Sharia law-practicing, police state, for example. It is heralded in the West as a 'stabilizing force', while largely secular and somewhat 'socialist' governments like those of Iraq, Libya, Syria and Lebanon were, and are, condemned as 'terrorist regimes'. Then again, the US strategy of hoodwinking the world into accepting US global domination and plunder as 'free', 'democratic' and 'civilized', was always going to require an inversion of logic and subversion of reality, and a few hundred tons of bombs for good measure.
