A rchive Date
[ 07-02-2019 ]
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[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Venezuela ]
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[https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/fatah-will-venezuela-become-the-latest-in-a-long-list-of-u-s-disasters
Will Venezuela become the latest in a long list of U.S. disasters?
Tarek Fatah
Published: February 5, 2019
The list of U.S. interventions gone bad in the ‘Third World’ is long, but unfortunately our memories are short. For example, how many of us know that the original ‘9/11’ was not the date in 2001 when Islamic terrorists attacked the United States, but rather the date in 1973 when the Americans backed a military coup in Chile to oust duly-elected President Salvador Allende and replace him with dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet?
Long before Chile in 1973, the United States had a chequered record of disrupting democratically elected governments that were seen as not sufficiently anti-communist or who did not want their sovereignty in the hands of Western multinational mining corporations.
Here is a list of the chaos American interventions have left behind:
Syria – 1949: The CIA was instrumental in the March 1949 coup that installed a military government in Damascus after overthrowing the elected government of President Shukri al-Quwatli. Syria has never found stability since that day.
Iran – 1953: Mohammad Mossadegh was Iran’s elected prime minister who sought to take control of the country’s oil industry operated by British companies, which he nationalized. In 1953, after nearly two years of Mossadegh’s premiership, the CIA staged a coup that overthrew the elected government and brought Raza Shah Pahlavi as the monarch dictator of Iran, leading to thousands of deaths and imprisonments conducted by the SAVAK secret service. Iran has never recovered and has slipped from bad to worse after the West flew in Ayatollah Khomeini from France to hijack the revolution that overthrew the Shah.
Guatemala – 1954: When President Jacobo Árbenz attempted a series of land reforms that threatened the holdings of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company, the U.S. staged a coup that forced Árbenz from power, allowing a succession of juntas in his place.
Congo – 1960: The country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba was overthrown by U.S.-supported Belgian military intervention in the country in an effort to maintain Belgian business interests after the country’s decolonization. Foreign Policy magazine documents that “after an aborted assassination attempt against Lumumba involving a poisoned handkerchief, the CIA alerted Congolese troops to Lumumba’s location and noted roads to be blocked and potential escape routes. Lumumba was captured in late 1960 and killed in January of the following year.”
After Congo in 1960, it was the Dominican Republic in 1961, South Vietnam in 1963, and Brazil the year after. And who can forget the bloodbath that killed a million in Indonesia in 1965? The examples continue, including Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua, Salvador and even Mexico. The results have at best been a disaster everywhere America has intervened.
As for American-sponsored regime changes in Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011, only dinosaurs’ fossils have not heard the resulting calamity.
To the men and woman on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela, I would like to share the words of the Senegal-based philosopher Samir Amin, who said that the armies of the North can never bring freedom to the people of the South.
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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