We Americans have come to accept “regime change wars” as normal. But they aren’t. They are what the United Nations Charter and various UN resolutions define as wars of aggression.
I remember the Cold War and how we thought of the Soviet Union as the aggressor nation that scoffed at international law.
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Now our government is the one that thinks it has the right to attack or overthrow governments that displease us and improve our version of “democracy”—a democratic government being defined as one that supports U.S. policies.
The U,S. government is waging economic warfare against Venezuela and Iran while threatening military attack. The purpose is to make Venezuela accept a President chosen by the United States and to make Iran unilaterally disarm.
Neither government has threatened or harmed Americans. Their offenses are to oppose U.S. policy in Latin America and the Middle East, and to keep the world’s largest and third largest oil reserves from being controlled by the United States.
Yet this has somehow come to be accepted as normal. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is regarded as an eccentric, or worse, because she is one of the few who opposes making war against countries that haven’t harmed us.
The Charter of the United Nations, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1945, declares military aggression to be a crime. Article 2 said, “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat of force against the territorial integrity of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg stated that aggressive war was “the supreme international crime.”
In 1950, the UN General Assembly condemned “the intervention of a state in the internal affairs of another state for the purpose of changing its legally established government by the threat or use of force.” It also resolved the “any aggression, whether committed openly or by fermenting civil strife, in the interest of a foreign power or otherwise, is the gravest of all crimes against peace and security throughout the world.”
I think most Americans thought these resolutions were aimed at the Soviet Union, which we thought was the world’s main aggressor.
The two main wars fought by the United States during the Cold Wa era were in Korea, where U.S. forces defended the Seoul government against an attack from without, and in Vietnam, where U.S. forces defended the Saigon government against a revolutionary movement supported from outside.
Secretly, of course, and sometimes not-so-secretly, the Central Intelligence Agency plotted coups in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and many other countries.
Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna are among the few liberal Democrats who unequivocally oppose the Trump administration’s economic and covert war against Venezuela, but they are isolated.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many other top Democrats support Trump’s plan. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are on the fence. They oppose direct military intervention, but they accept the pretense is that the U.S. government is concerned about the democratic process in Venezuela.
In fact the U.S. gets on very well with the governments much less democratic than Nicolas Maduro’s. Only the naive think the U.S. government is concerned about anything except Venezuela’s oil.
I don’t have an intelligent opinion on how much of Venezuela’s plight current is due to bad policies of its government, and how much is due to continuing U.S. economic warfare and political subversion. The only way to find out would be to make the experiment of leaving Venezuela alone and seeing what happens. Venezuela is the responsibility of the Venezuelans.
Evidently the Trump administration’s demand for regime change in Venezuela was not a spur-of-the-moment decision.
It is part of a long-range plan to remake Latin America, along the lines of the failed plans to remake the Middle East. Other targets are Cuba and Nicaragua.
At best, this will result in increased misery for millions of people who have never harmed or threatened us Americans, and an increased flow of refugees.
At worst, it will result in all these things, plus an increased Russian and Chinese presence in Latin America.
By ‘deep state,’ I mean all the U.S. military, intelligence and covert action agencies that set their own policies and operate out of sight of the U.S. public.
Every time a U.S. President targets some nation as an enemy, and tries to drag other countries into the conflict, he creates the possibility of a backlash.
“You’re either for us or against us.” Say that too many times, and the answer is likely to be, “we’re against you.”
National Security Adviser John Bolton explains U.S. Venezuela policy.
I think I’ve seen this script before. The unpopular ruler of an oil-rich country cracks down on the opposition. The U.S. government sees an opportunity and tries to bring about a change in regime.
What can go wrong? In Iraq, this led to an inconclusive quagmire war in which thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives. In Libya, it led to the collapse of civil order, leaving Libyans worse off than before. In Syria, it led to another inconclusive war, benefitting no one. The chief result of these wars was the European refugee crisis.
Now the U.S. seems to be playing out the same script in Venezuela—doing the same as before and expecting a different result.
The Trump administration has recognized Juan Guaido, the leader of the National Assembly, as the legitimate president of Venezuela, and called for the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro. Guaido is indeed the leader, but that’s because the leadership is rotated among the parties, and the Trump administration’s decision happened on his watch.
To support Guaido, the administration has blocked Venezuela’s oil company from collecting revenue from its oil exports. Instead the money goes into a blocked account until Guaido takes power.
And if he doesn’t? “All options are on the table.”
As far as I’m concerned, this is a pass-fail test of political leadership. Only those who oppose intervention are lovers of peace. So far Bernie Sanders passes this test, as do Democratic Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
The U.S. government engages in regime change, which is much more than simply interfere in foreign elections. Just in the past 20 years, it has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, funded foreign fighters to attack governments of Libya and Syria, and supported military coups in Honduras, Ukraine and Venezuela. The coup in Venezuela failed, so the U.S. government uses economic warfare instead.
In 1996, the U.S. State Department engineered the election of the unpopular Boris Yeltsin. He disbanded the Russian parliament, took over Russian TV and used all the techniques later used by Vladimir Putin to stack elections in his favor. Time magazine actually ran a cover story hailing the U.S. success.
The results were that he crashed the Russian economy for the benefit of a few corrupt insiders, and destroyed the possibility of U.S.-Russian friendship for a generation, maybe longer.
Currently many foreign-backed NGOs operate in Russia. Their stated purpose is to promote democracy and freedom. Many get funds from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, which is funded by the U.S. State Department and private philanthropists. Some are supported by billionaire George Soros.
It is possible that most of them or maybe all of them, are doing things that I, as a believer in democracy, would approve of. If so, I can understand why Vladimir Putin might not think so.
I have no way of knowing what, if anything, the CIA is covertly doing to spread information or disinformation in Russia.
The Mueller indictments have convinced me that Russian intelligence services probably did disseminate confidential e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, that certain Russians used social media to comment on the election and that Russian intelligence agencies tried to gain access to voter registration rolls.
I think there are a lot of other things that had much more influence on the election that this. The question is: What happens if and when the Russian covert agencies try again?
I don’t believe in “moral equivalence,” if the meaning is that, just because the U.S. government has done bad things to other nations, we Americans should sit back and let them do bad things to us in return.
Neither do I believe that we get very far by saying “you are bad, we are good, so you should stop doing certain things while we keep on doing them ourselves.” It would be very interesting to see if U.S. intelligence agencies would be willing to sacrifice their manipulations of foreign politics if that would safeguard the integrity of our own.
Top members of the Trump administration have long been committed to overthrowing the Iranian government. But they’re not going to get the American public and Congress to support war with Iran.
What’s left is covert warfare, subsidizing dissidents and rebels in Iran, and economic warfare, using U.S. financial power to punish businesses that do business with Iran.
Because most international trade is done in U.S. dollars, and because most transactions in dollars go through U.S. banks, the U.S. government is in a position to do great damage to businesses and business owners that displease it.
This comes at a price, though. Each time the U.S. government forces foreign governments and businesses to sacrifice their own interest to do its bidding, it brings the day closer when foreigners unite to set up an alternative international financial system that doesn’t use the U.S. dollar or U.S. banks. That is the ultimate goal of China, aided by Russia. (more…)
the defeat of the so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh), because those fanatics cannot live in peace with anyone else
renunciation of “regime change” as a U.S. goal in Syria, because you can’t negotiate a peace with someone while you are openly bent on his destruction.
Secretary of State John Kerry has said some things that indicate the United States might be willing to work with Vladimir Putin for a negotiated peace. I hope this is so. U.S. policy under President Obama has been marked by a steady drift toward war, interrupted by sudden lurches toward peace, as with the Iranian sanctions negotiations.
Almost all the Democratic and Republican candidates are worse on this issue than the current administration. Hillary Clinton is a war hawk. Bernie Sanders says that the destruction of ISIS should take priority over removal of President Assad of Syria, but removal of Assad should remain as a long-term goal.
The Republican candidates are all over the map. I regret having given Donald Trump and Ted Cruz credit for certain glimmers of sanity when in fact they have no coherent policy. The one voice of sanity is Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is a clear and principled opponent of regime change, but has little chance of winning the GOP nomination.
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