Subject: This is why they hate us: The real American history neither Ted Cruz nor the New York Times will tell you - Salon.com
In the debate, Sanders addressed three examples of U.S. regime change. There are scores of examples of American regime change, yet these are perhaps the most infamous instances.
What happen to Iran’s democracy? The U.S. overthrew it in 1953, with the help of the U.K. Why? For oil.
Mohammad Mosaddegh may be the most popular leader in Iran’s long history. He was also Iran’s only democratically elected head of state.
This is why they hate us: The real American history neither Ted Cruz nor the New York Times will tell you
The soi-disant Land of the Free and Home of the Brave has a long and iniquitous history of overthrowing democratically elected leftist governments and propping up right-wing dictators in their place.
U.S.
politicians rarely acknowledge this odious past — let alone acknowledge
that such policies continue well into the present day.
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In
the second Democratic presidential debate, however, candidate Bernie
Sanders condemned a long-standing government policy his peers rarely
admit exists.
“I think we
have a disagreement,” Sanders said of fellow presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton. “And the disagreement is that not only did I vote
against the war in Iraq. If you look at history, you will find that
regime change — whether it was in the early ’50s in Iran, whether it was
toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, or whether it was overthrowing the
government of Guatemala way back when — these invasions, these toppling
of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences. I would say
that on this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the
secretary.”
“I am not a great fan of regime changes,” Sanders added.
“Regime
change” is not a phrase you hear discussed honestly much in Washington,
yet it is a common practice in and defining feature of U.S. foreign
policy for well over a century. For many decades, leaders from both
sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, have pursued a bipartisan
strategy of violently overthrowing democratically elected foreign
governments that do not kowtow to U.S. orders.In the debate, Sanders addressed three examples of U.S. regime change. There are scores of examples of American regime change, yet these are perhaps the most infamous instances.
Iran, 1953
A tank in the streets of Tehran during the 1953 CIA-backed coup
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)
Iran
was once a secular democracy. You would not know this from contemporary
discussions of the much demonized country in U.S. politics and media.(Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)
What happen to Iran’s democracy? The U.S. overthrew it in 1953, with the help of the U.K. Why? For oil.
Mohammad Mosaddegh may be the most popular leader in Iran’s long history. He was also Iran’s only democratically elected head of state.
In
1951, Mosaddegh was elected prime minister of Iran. He was not a
socialist, and certainly not a communist — on the contrary, he repressed
Iranian communists — but he pursued many progressive, social democratic
policies. Mosaddegh pushed for land reform, established rent control,
and created a social security system, while working to separate powers
in the democratic government.
In the Cold War, however, a leader
who deviated in any way from free-market orthodoxy and the Washington
Consensus was deemed a threat. When Mossaddegh nationalized Iran’s large
oil reserves, he crossed a line that Western capitalist nations would
not tolerate.
The New York Times ran an article in 1951 titled “British Warn Iran of Serious Result if She Seizes Oil.”
The piece, which is full of orientalist language, refers to Iranian oil
as “British oil properties,” failing to acknowledge that Britain, which
had previously occupied Iran, had seized that oil and claimed it as its
own, administering it under the auspices of the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company, which later became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and
eventually British Petroleum and modern BP.
The Times article
noted that the U.S. “shares with Britain the gravest concern about the
possibility that Iranian oil, the biggest supply now available in the
Near East, might be lost to the Western powers.” The British government
is quoted making a thinly veiled threat.
This
threat came into fruition in August 1953. In Operation Ajax, the CIA,
working with its British equivalent MI6, carried out a coup,
overthrowing the elected government of Iran and reinstalling the
monarchy. The shah would remain a faithful Western ally until 1979, when
the monarchy was abolished in the Iranian Revolution.
Guatemala, 1954
A CIA cable documenting Guatemalan dictator Castillo Armas’ plan to overthrow the elected government (Credit: CIA FOIA)
Less
than a year after overthrowing Iran’s first democratically elected
prime minister, the U.S. pursued a similar regime change policy in
Guatemala, toppling the elected leader Jacobo Árbenz.
In
1944, Guatemalans waged a revolution, toppling the U.S.-backed
right-wing dictator Jorge Ubico, who had ruled the country with an iron
fist since 1931. Ubico, who fancied himself the 20th-century Napoleon,
gave rich landowners and the U.S. corporation the United Fruit Company
(which would later become Chiquita) free reign over Guatemala’s natural
resources, and used the military to violently crush labor organizers.
Juan
José Arévalo was elected into office in 1944. A liberal, he pursued
very moderate policies, but the U.S. wanted a right-wing puppet regime
that would allow U.S. corporations the same privileges granted to them
by Ubico. In 1949, the U.S. backed an attempted coup, yet it failed.
In
1951, Árbenz was elected into office. Slightly to the left of Arévalo,
Árbenz was still decidedly moderate. The U.S. claimed Árbenz was close
to Guatemala’s communists, and warned he could ally with the Soviet
Union. In reality, the opposite was true; Árbenz actually persecuted
Guatemalan communists. At most, Árbenz was a social democrat, not even a
socialist.
Yet Árbenz,
like Mosaddegh, firmly believed that Guatemalans themselves, and not
multinational corporations, should benefit from their country’s
resources. He pursued land reform policies that would break up the
control rich families and the United Fruit Company exercised over the
country — and, for that reason, he was overthrown.
President
Truman originally authorized a first coup attempt, Operation PBFORTUNE,
in 1952. Yet details about the operation were leaked to the public, and
the plan was abandoned. In 1954, in Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA and
U.S. State Department, under the Dulles Brothers, bombed Guatemala City
and carried out a coup that violently toppled Guatemala’s democratic
government.
The U.S. put into
power right-wing tyrant Carlos Castillo Armas. For the next more than
50 years, until the end of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1996, Guatemala
was ruled by a serious of authoritarian right-wing leaders who brutally
repressed left-wing dissidents and carried out a campaign of genocide
against the indigenous people of the country.
Chile, 1973
Pinochet’s soldiers burning left-wing books after the 1973 U.S.-backed coup in Chile (Credit: CIA FOIA/Weekly Review)
September
11 has permanently seared itself into the memory of Americans. The date
has also been indelibly imprinted in the public consciousness of
Chileans, because it was on this same day in 1973 that the U.S. backed a
coup that violently overthrew Chile’s democracy.
In 1970, Marxist leader Salvador Allende was
democratically elected president of Chile. Immediately after he was
elected, the U.S. government poured resources into right-wing opposition
groups and gave millions of dollars to Chile’s conservative media
outlets.
The CIA deputy director of plans wrote in a 1970 memo, “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup… It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [U.S. government] and American hand be well hidden.” President Nixon subsequently ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile, to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”
Allende’s democratic government was violently overthrown on September 11, 1973. He died in the coup, just after making an emotional speech, in which he declared he would give his life to defend Chilean democracy and sovereignty.
Far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet, who combined fascistic police state repression with hyper-capitalist free-market economic policies, was put into power. Under Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship, tens of thousands of Chilean leftists, labor organizers, and journalists were killed, disappeared, and tortured. Hundreds of thousands more people were forced into exile.
One of the most prevailing myths of the Cold War is that socialism was an unpopular system imposed on populations with brute force. Chile serves as a prime historical example of how the exact opposite was true. The masses of impoverished and oppressed people elected many socialist governments, yet these governments were often violently overthrown by the U.S. and other Western allies.
There are scores of other examples of U.S.-led regime change.
The CIA deputy director of plans wrote in a 1970 memo, “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup… It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [U.S. government] and American hand be well hidden.” President Nixon subsequently ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile, to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”
Allende’s democratic government was violently overthrown on September 11, 1973. He died in the coup, just after making an emotional speech, in which he declared he would give his life to defend Chilean democracy and sovereignty.
Far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet, who combined fascistic police state repression with hyper-capitalist free-market economic policies, was put into power. Under Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship, tens of thousands of Chilean leftists, labor organizers, and journalists were killed, disappeared, and tortured. Hundreds of thousands more people were forced into exile.
One of the most prevailing myths of the Cold War is that socialism was an unpopular system imposed on populations with brute force. Chile serves as a prime historical example of how the exact opposite was true. The masses of impoverished and oppressed people elected many socialist governments, yet these governments were often violently overthrown by the U.S. and other Western allies.
The
overthrow of Allende was a turning point for many socialists in the
Global South. Before he was overthrown, some leftists thought popular
Marxist movements could gain state power through democratic elections,
as was the case in Chile. Yet when they saw how the U.S. violently
toppled Allende’s elected government, they became suspicious of the
prospects of electoral politics and turned to guerrilla warfare and
other tactics.
Modern example: Egypt, 2013
Protesters
in the August 2013 Raba’a massacre, carried out by Sisi’s U.S.-backed
coup government (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Flickr/Mosa’ab Elshamy)
These
are just a small sample of the great many regime changes the U.S.
government has been involved in. More recent examples, which were
supported by Hillary Clinton, as Sanders implied, include the U.S.
government’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Qadhafi in
Libya. In these cases, the U.S. was overthrowing dictators, not
democratically elected leaders — but, as Sanders pointed out, the
results of these regime changes have been nothing short of catastrophic.
The U.S. is also still engaging in regime change when it comes to democratically elected governments.
In
the January 2011 revolution, Egyptians toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, a
close U.S. ally who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for almost 30 years.
In
July 2013, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed
Morsi, was overthrown in a military coup. We now know that the U.S. supported and bankrolled the opposition forces that overthrew the democratically elected president.
Today,
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a brutal despot who is widely recognized as even
worse than Mubarak, reigns over Egypt. In August 2013, Sisi oversaw a
slaughter of more than 800 peaceful Egyptian activists at Raba’a Square.
His regime continues to shoot peaceful protesters in the street. An
estimated 40,000 political prisoners languish in Sisi’s jails, including
journalists.
In spite of his obscene human rights abuses, Sisi
remains a close ally of the U.S. and Israel — much, much closer than was
the democratically elected President Morsi.
In
the second Democratic presidential debate, when Sanders called Clinton
out on her hawkish, pro-regime change policies, she tried to blame the
disasters in the aftermath in countries like Iraq and Libya on the
“complexity” of the Middle East. As an example of this putative
complexity, Clinton cited Egypt. “We saw a dictator overthrown, we saw
Muslim Brotherhood president installed, and then we saw him ousted and
the army back,” she said.
Clinton failed to mention two crucial factors: One, that the U.S. backed Mubarak until the last moment; and two, that the U.S. also supported the coup that overthrew Egypt’s first and only democratically elected head of state.Other examples
The political cartoon “Ten Thousand Miles from Tip to Tip,” published in the Philadelphia Press in 1898 (Credit: Public domain)
- In 1964 the U.S. backed a coup in Brazil, toppling left-wing President João Goulart.
- In 1976, the U.S. supported a military coup in Argentina that replaced President Isabel Perón with General Jorge Rafael Videla.
- In 2002, the U.S. backed a coup that overthrew democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Chávez was so popular, however, that Venezuelans filled the street and demanded him back.
- In 2004, the U.S. overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
- In 2009, U.S.-trained far-right forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Honduras, with tacit support from Washington.
The list goes on.
Latin
America, given its proximity to the U.S. and the strength of left-wing
movements in the region, tends to endure the largest number of U.S.
regime changes, yet the Middle East and many parts of Africa have seen
their democratic governments overthrown as well.
From 1898 to 1994, Harvard University historian John Coatsworth documented at least 41 U.S. interventions in Latin America — an an average of one every 28 months for an entire century.
Numerous
Latin American military dictators were trained at the School of the
Americas, a U.S. Department of Defense Institute in Fort Benning,
Georgia. The School of the Americas Watch, an activist organization that
pushes for the closing of the SOA, has documented many of these regime changes, which have been carried out by both Republicans and Democrats.
Diplomatic cables
released by whistleblowing journalism outlet WikiLeaks show the U.S.
still maintains a systematic campaign of trying to overthrow Latin
America’s left-wing governments.
By
not just acknowledging the bloody and ignominious history of U.S.
regime change, but also condemning it, Sen. Sanders was intrepidly
trekking into controversial political territory into which few of his
peers would dare to tread. Others would do well to learn from Bernie’s
example.
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