Joe Lauria: The Three Types of U.S. ‘Regime Change’ / Andrew Bacevich: Why Washington Has Learned Nothing From Vietnam to Afghanistan

By Dilip - Thursday, January 27, 2022

Throughout the long, documented history of the United States illegally overthrowing governments of foreign lands to build a global empire there has emerged three ways Washington broadly carries out “regime change.”

From Above. If the targeted leader has been democratically elected and enjoys popular support, the C.I.A. has worked with elite groups, such as the military, to overthrow him (sometimes through assassination). Among several examples is the first C.I.A-backed coup d’état, on March 30, 1949, just 18 months after the agency’s founding, when Syrian Army Colonel Husni al-Za’im overthrew the elected president, Shukri al-Quwatli.

Chilean presidential palace during U.S.-backed coup, Sept 11, 1973. Library of the Chilean National Congress/Wikipedia)

The C.I.A. in 1954 toppled the elected President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, who was replaced with a military dictator. In 1961, just three days before the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, who favored his release, Congolese President Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with C.I.A. assistance, bringing military strongman Mobutu Sese Seko to power. In 1973, the U.S. backed Chilean General Augusto Pinochet to overthrow and kill the democratically-elected, socialist President Salvador Allende, setting up a military dictatorship, one of many U.S.-installed military dictatorships of that era in Latin America under Operation Condor.

From Below. If the targeted government faces genuine popular unrest, the U.S. will foment and organize it to topple the leader, elected or otherwise. 1958-59 anti-communist protests in Kerala, India, locally supported by the Congress Party and the Catholic Church, were funded by the C.I.A., leading to the removal of the elected communist government. The 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was a combination of bottom-up C.I.A. (and MI-6)-backed street protests, and top-down conservative clergy and military to destroy democracy and return a monarch to the throne. The U.S.-backed Ukrainian coup of 2014 is the latest example of the U.S. working with genuine popular dissent to help organize and steer the overthrow, in this case, of an OSCE-certified elected president.

Through Military Intervention. If a coup is not feasible, the U.S. turns to indirect or direct military intervention. One of earliest examples was the U.S. expeditionary force that invaded Russia in 1918 during the civil war in an attempt to help overthrow the new Bolshevik government. More recently, in 1983 the U.S. military invaded Grenada to overthrow a Marxist president; in 1989 the U.S. invaded Panama to overthrow former C.I.A. asset Manuela Noriega.

Another hybrid operation was the U.S. bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the State Department funding of the opposition group Otpor!, which led to the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. The most prominent recent examples of direct military invasion to overthrow governments are the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Indirect military intervention through proxies to overthrow governments happened in the 1980s Contra war against Nicaragua; and the 2011 to present jihadist war to overthrow the Syrian government. …

https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/22/the-three-types-of-u-s-regime-change/

Andrew Bacevich: Why Washington Has Learned Nothing From Vietnam to Afghanistan

In the long and storied history of the United States Army, many young officers have served in many war zones. Few, I suspect, were as sublimely ignorant as I was in the summer of 1970 upon my arrival at Cam Ranh Bay in the Republic of Vietnam.

Granted, during the years of schooling that preceded my deployment there, I had amassed all sorts of facts, some of them at least marginally relevant to the matter at hand. Yet despite the earnest efforts of some excellent teachers, I had managed to avoid acquiring anything that could be dignified with the term education. Now, however haltingly, that began to change. A year later, when my tour of duty ended, I carried home from Vietnam the barest inkling of a question: How had this massive cockup occurred and what did it signify?...

https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/25/why-washington-has-learned-nothing-from-vietnam-to-afghanistan/

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