“So, at the end of the day, you see little alternative to a series of brutal thugs clamping a lid on things?” We could have helped if, prior our military intervention, we didn’t help the dictators to get rid of their opposition.
We trained the dictators’ police against the “Communists” (I use communists in a broad sense, as communists were from farmers protesting against the land grabbing, unionists asking for pay rise to real communists, even if democratically elected), we helped all the wars against movement requesting little autonomy from Central government from Indonesia to Guatemala. We invaded without any thinking any country that didn’t line-up with our policy, or resisted against our interests. In the name of anti-communism, we forgot that the 1st enemy of communism are Nazism and fascism.
So, the only way, path, road for protest in dictatorships was the one we didn’t see as dangerous: religious. We thought that Islam could melt in democracy as Christianity did, like the good Social Democrats Parties in Europe.
In clamping the wheel of democracy by fear of unwanted political developments, we just created a monster, and as the Dr Frankenstein, we don’t know how to stop our creature.

"The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies" Maximilien Robespierre, 2 January 1792, opposing the Revolutionary Wars in order to free the rest of Europe from Tyranny.