They do not understand nor care how other countries are governed. China is more democratic and fair than the US but we never hear anything about their process for selecting leadership or party officials. It doesn't "count" because it isn't liberal bourgeois democracy.

Furthermore, the issue is fundamentally not authoritarianism or dictatorships but who the regime benefits. Campaigns of slaughter or support hinge on whether they cooperate with western Capital. Oppress your populace, sell off all their resources and enslave them, and the West will support you indefinitely. Remove the colonialists, compradors, and foreign influence, then the bombs will begin falling.

The citizens in the West are racist too, of course, and that helps alleviate the moral quandary of indiscriminate death (they aren't real people dying.)

South Vietnam was a dictatorship. South Korea was a dictatorship. Almost every country in South and Central America has suffered this phenomenon. Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, the list goes on and on.

Liberals nominally care about the illusion of democracy, but their one true God will always be capitalism and private property.