Lost in the shuffle of our fiasco in Iraq and the presidential campaigns was the death of President Suharto of Indonesia. His death made news and he got the obligatory full-page obituary in the New York Times, but, once again, his death reveals quite a bit about how Americans view our foreign policy and the sleights of hand that accompany the death of a vicious dictator who once served as a close American ally.

It's an open secret that our government routinely supports the worst of the worst around the world. This topic usually surfaces when we go to war against these very same people. The list is endless, but recall in 1989 when the first President Bush invaded Panama to take out Manuel Noriega, a former CIA asset who ruled that small country with an iron fist and was the Saddam Hussein of the late 1980's, when the United States turned against him and declared Noriega public enemy number 1. No one could really explain why our government declared Noriega the enemy after he had committed his worst crimes as a close U.S. ally, but then again, no one cared. Of course, Saddam Hussein was a close American ally during the 1980's, until it was time for a new enemy in 1990, when he invaded Kuwait and the first President Bush compared Saddam to Hitler. We didn't call him Hitler, though, when Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people in 1988, though. No matter. When Son of Bush went to war in Iraq in 2003, our close relationship with Saddam was simply not an issue. War was back in style and, God-dammit, we're taking out Saddam!

President Suharto of Indonesia made Saddam look like Mary Poppins. When he took control over Indonesia in the 1960's, he orchestrated the deaths of half-million political opponents, designated "communists" back when communists were the enemy and the justification for American foreign policy. Then, in 1975, Suharto invaded nearby East Timor, killing up to one-third of the population of that small country. That invasion was comparable to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but the comparisons were lost on 98 percent of the American people who thought that Saddam's aggressive act justified all out war.

Suharto's violent acts of mass murder were particularly compelling because they happened with the full support of the United States. Much has been written about Suharto's relationship with the United States, most of it under the radar, kept from an American public which prefers to think that our government only promotes democracy and freedom around the world and tries its best to spread the love to countries that need it. Few Americans know anything about Indonesia and its location half-way around the world makes that country even less newsworthy.

So when Suharto died a few days ago and the New York Times ran his obituary, it glossed over our government's decades-long support for this son of a bitch who killed people for fun and profit. That's the pattern. It happened when Gen. Pinochet of Chile died in 2006. Pinochet, a close ally of the United States, killed thousands with the full bi-partisan support of our government. The Times glossed over that inconvenient fact in his obituary, making Pinochet out to be a rouge leader. He was not.

Suharto's obituary certainly makes reference to his mass killing and violent leadership. But it says precious little about the American complicity in these horrible acts. Here is the extent of the U.S. relationship with Suharto in the obitiary:

Whether it was those forces or his timing, good fortune came to him. Just as the United States was becoming embroiled in Vietnam, he stood as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. The United States rewarded him with a foreign aid program that eventually amounted to more than $4 billion a year. In addition, a consortium of Western countries and Japan established an aid program that in 1994 alone totaled almost $5 billion.

In doing so, the United States, along with much of the rest of the world, showed a willingness to overlook the corruption, favoritism and violations of human rights, including the disappearance of opposition politicians, that came to characterize Mr. Suharto’s rule.

For a lengthy obituary, the above paragraphs do not do justice to our dirty hands in the widespread killing in Indonesia or East Timor. We know damned well that when Fidel Castro dies, a good portion of his obituary and commentary about his life will concern his close relationship with the former Soviet Union. Why not the same treatment when a close U.S. ally dies? The answer to that questions says quite a bit about our own hypocricy and failure to come to terms with our own crimes and duplicity.