When the US president or secretary of state talks about helping the Iraqi (Afghan, Colombian, Kosovo Albanian…you name it) people in their struggle to build freedom and democracy, they make an effort to paint a picture of smiling families with their kids, a local teacher or a doctor, not unlike what you see on those sales posters for Target or Walmart.

They are friends in need, natural allies struggling under whatever threat or yoke.

But when the speeches are delivered and televised, when the orders are issued and it is now a job for commanders, diplomats and spooks on the ground to identify and deal with those allies, the picture changes dramatically.

Low and behold, it soon turns out that smiling Iraqi or Afghan doctors and teachers either do not exist or refuse to be of any help in fighting "evil" locals. So commanders on the ground have to narrow down the definition of ally to "somebody who is willing, ready and able to shoot our enemies."

Such was Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Subhi al-Fahal who met his death in a suicide bombing in Tikrit last week.

The killed man's official title, Director of the Anti-Riot Department for Salahuddin province of Iraq, does not translate well from Arabic and does an even worse job of describing what kind of person he was.

A local strongman with a huge grudge against the Islamic extremist of the Sunni variety. A man ready to shoot.

And ready to shoot he was.

"Fahal claimed he killed more than 250 Al-Qaeda terrorists: 200 Iraqis and 50 Arab foreign fighters" the Associated Press discreetly advises in his obituary.

Such was the level of trust between Fahal and US officers that the latter allowed him and his team (private army?) to operate from their impregnable fortress – formerly Saddam's palace complex.

"It is better to kill al-Qaeda's members because it is no use to reform them," al-Fahal said in interview shortly before his death.

Not exactly the Miranda Rights reading from an Iraqi cop, but war is war and somebody has got to wage it, no?

It just should not be done in front of reporters' TV cameras and telephoto lenses.

Nguyễn Ngọc Loan learned this a rather hard way.

Remember that famous AP photo of Loan, then-Brigadier General of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, executing a handcuffed Vietcong prisoner who allegedly attacked (or didn't – it's all obscure now) US solders?

A picture is worth a thousand words, and that one caused such an outcry the world over that the career of the South Vietnamese general took a serious hit.

General Loan still managed to die of old age in his new home of Virginia, after evacuating on the last chopper from Saigon. See, the Vietcong did not believe in individual vengeance and the US government did not feel like going after him.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once famously said (or is believed to have said) about a tough Nicaraguan dictator "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Good old FDR – in that age of political innocence he could afford to be frank.

That's a luxury Defense Secretary Robert Gates cannot afford in our times.

As the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence, he was the man directly responsible for doling out vast financial and military assistance that Carter and then, with gusto, Reagan decided should be given to whoever was willing to shoot the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980's.

Enter Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the man who started his career by leading the gang throwing acid onto the faces of Afghan women should they happen to be unveiled.

To call a man like that "darling" is not an easy task – but that's precisely what he became to the CIA operatives.

He was the first and by far the biggest receiver of US money, weapons and other aid, totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.

And he was an effective commander – effective in the sense that when he needed to blow up a Soviet Army patrol, nearby civilians became simple collateral damage.

Just in case you forgot – Hekmatyar is the most skilled and daring enemy of the US in Afghanistan now, 25 years on, operating in concert with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

But Hekmatyar was by no means the only sour apple.

Take Abdul Haq, the English-speaking, pro-Western former mujahideen commander, whom the US allegedly groomed to become the new leader of Afghanistan once the Taliban was deposed.

But the Taliban got to Haq first, capturing and publicly hanging him in 2001. That spared a succession of secretaries of state from the awkward necessity to explain why the US is supporting a man whose urban guerrillas in the 80's bombed and torched not just Soviet troops and their Afghan allies, but schools and bazaars as well.

Nobody can win a war by waving a love & peace flag. Some choices are difficult to make.

But hardly anybody wants to be Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, who, speaking to the French Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, famously engaged in the following Q&A:

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

The WTC towers would fall in three and half years….

­The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.