Thursday, December 31, 2015

Regime Change by America Goes to 1953 with the Coup in Iran

The overthrow of the legally-elected Salvador Allende of Chile in 1961 with active support from the CIA under Henry Kissinger's direction has been mentioned several times by Bernie Sanders in the context of a policy of regime change by the United States.  (WIKI:  Salvador Allende)

He correctly identifies that illegal action but there's one more much earlier in Eisenhower's administration.

Note specifically we regard Eisenhower as the second-best President of the 20th Century, only topped by FDR.  However, the policy of regime change was active and it started in 1953 in Iran with the overthrow of another legally-elected government for the purpose of bolstering the royal family and Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran.  (WIKI:  1953 Iranian coup d'état)

Note:  there may be additional examples of the regime change policy but we have not looked back beyond 1953 because we want to stay in the modern focus.


We see now how the interference in favor of the Shah failed and ultimately Iranians repossessed the government, resulting in being vilified by the West for it and both sides have had their daggers drawn ever since.

There are too many variables to say that action caused the present day conflicts in the Middle East but it sure as hell didn't mitigate any of them.


The consistent hallmark of these attempts at regime change has been failure with the most blazing example in Vietnam.  In that case the U.S. was trying to prevent a regime change but the attempt fails either way, that one spectacularly.

The conservative pitch is Vietnam should have been bombed harder, the U.S. wasn't committed to winning.  Yah, this is around the time some genius said, hey, I've got an idea.  Let's kill the jungle with Agent Orange and then maybe we can find those black pajama Viet Cong guys.  And the Air Force started doing that.


We want to hear Bernie Sanders hammering it even harder that the policy of regime change has been a catastrophic failure and massively expensive failure every single time.  The solution of huge military intervention has never worked since WWII as splitting Korea and constant occupation ever since was hardly a victory.


Support Bernie Sanders because all the others are just more of the same and Sanders is the only one who stands for honesty, free of corporate corruption.

No comments: