Western-Backed Regime Change Is Bad Actually
I don't care who your preferred leaders are, the U.S. is only capable of evil, so keep your nosy guns out of other people's countries.
I’m shocked, shocked! to find out that ISIS and Al-Nusra taking over Syria has led to a rash of beheadings, and gang-style beatings, and collective punishment, and incredibly dehumanizing rhetoric, and the massacre of Alawites, ethnic minorities, and soldiers, and brutal summary executions of unarmed people on the street and in hospitals (seriously, do not click on any of those links unless you already have a high tolerance for watching grisly murders).
I am telling you straight up, despite what all the liberal regime change propagandists tell you, that a secular anti-American dictator like Bashar al-Assad is far better than a theocratic death cult which, by the evidence so far, is totally obsequious to Israel and the West and has not moderated their history of violence one bit. And as I constantly have to remind people, we’ve seen all this before. This is the same playbook that happened in Libya, a country that used to have the highest Human Development Index score in Africa but since the Western overthrow of Gaddafi is now a failed state with people being sold into slavery; it’s the same thing that happened in Iraq, where at least a million people were killed by the U.S. and ISIS was birthed; it happened in Afghanistan, where the U.S. imported jihadism in order to kill socialist leaders and destabilize the U.S.S.R., thus giving birth to the Taliban and later Al-Qaeda; it happened in Indonesia, where the U.S. stoked and facilitated an anti-communist genocide on behalf of a military which used the language of Islam to murder over a million godless socialists; it happened in revolutionary Spain, where U.S. oil companies gave material support to Catholic fascists in order to overthrow the secular Spanish Republic. And on and on and on.
The U.S. has never let up on its regime change efforts. This is not some relic of the Cold War-era CIA. It’s still happening, every day. U.S. officials have openly said they want to overthrow the Iranian government, the Russian government, the Sri Lankan government, the Haitian government (which already suffered two U.S.-backed coups just in the last 30 years). In 2019, the U.S. succeeded in overthrowing the leftist indigenous peasant president of Bolivia, Evo Morales (thankfully his party came back to power shortly thereafter). The U.S. capitalized on the Maidan protests in 2014 to place a subservient government in Ukraine. The list is enormous.
I have no patience for anyone who says that overthrowing another county’s leaders is a good thing for the U.S. to do. We are not the good guys. Our government always lies. Our country’s motivations for regime change will always be dastardly so long as we live under an undemocratic capitalist yoke. We overthrew Patrice Lumumba for daring to create a sovereign Congo. The U.S. invaded Grenada, a small island nation, after communists took over in 1983. We invaded Panama in 1989 in order to overthrow Noriega, who before then we were happy to support on the CIA payroll for hundreds of thousand of dollars because he opposed the leftist Sandinistas. The only principle America serves is that of power.
And you think you’ll be safe from the inevitable results of this kind of cynical meddling in other people’s countries? What was 9/11 if not a long overdue slap in the face for an empire that felt so smug and secure about its place in the world? This is what happens when you play with fire. This is what happens when you crush nascent movements for freedom and justice in the Third World. This is what happens when you make bedfellows with religious extremism. Your efforts at regime change produce untold monsters for generations. The latest U.S.-backed violent toppling in Syria by Al-Nusra’s Mohammad al-Julani, the results of which are chaos and sectarian bloodshed in the short term and a weakened resistance to Israel in the long term, can in fact be traced with a direct line back to one of the West’s most prominent regime change efforts: the overthrow of Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Let’s trace that line.
Mossadegh was a secular leader, remember that, who instituted leftwing social programs in Iran like progressive taxation, unemployment benefits, and land reforms (the kinds of New Deal-esque programs which today the IMF and the World Bank always force countries to get rid of in order to have the privilege of indebting themselves to international capital). Mossadegh’s most grievous sin, however, was to nationalize Iran’s oil fields, wresting ownership away from Britain which had been given carte blanche by Iran’s Shah to exploit Iran’s most valuable natural resource. This went about as you’d expect it to. British intelligence and the CIA swiftly drew up plans to overthrow Mossadegh, and he was put under house arrest for the rest of his life. What Iran got in his stead was the reinstitution of the brutal and corrupt regime of the Shah, characterized by widespread torture, surveillance, and oppression. And what did the unbearable rule of the Shah beget? The 1979 Iranian Revolution that imposed the theocratic rule of the Ayatollahs. This then led to increased tensions between Iran and Iraq, which the U.S. was very happy to stoke by giving weapons and intelligence to both sides during the horrific and protracted Iran-Iraq war, where millions were killed (including Iraqi Kurds who were killed by Saddam Hussein using U.S.-supplied chemical weapons). After this disastrous war, Iraq invaded Kuwait (under what it thought was a tacit imprimatur of the U.S.) in order to get some more resources for itself. This led the U.S. to invade Iraq, with troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, and also hit the country with sanctions that killed perhaps a half million Iraqi children. Those things were explicitly cited by Osama bin Laden as some of the motivations for 9/11. The 9/11 terror attacks were then used by the Bush administration to carry out a full on invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretenses (that Bin Laden was still in Afghanistan — he wasn’t — and that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — he didn’t). The destruction of Iraq, characterized this time by U.S.-led theft, torture, massacres of civilians, and rape, led to a years-long insurgency which morphed into the dreaded ISIS. The Islamic State swept through the region, entering into Syria where a decades-long civil war ensued characterized by massacres of ethnic and religious minorities by ISIS and Al-Nusra, an Al-Qaeda cutout. And oh by the way, seeing an opportunity to destabilize the pro-Iran, anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, the U.S., through the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore, gave tens of millions of dollars in weapons and equipment to these jihadist groups in Syria. These jihadists, with additional support from NATO ally Turkey, maintained a consistent presence in the north of Syria, thus keeping Kurdish militant groups at bay. With Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s debilitating attacks on Hezbollah, and the election of a moderate president in Iran, the Assad regime could no longer rely on steady support from these three main allies in the region. With a steady Western.-backed buildup of forces and fighting capacity, these jihadist groups were given the go-ahead to take Damascus. And now, nearly thirteen years since the start of this war in Syria, Israel and the U.S. have finally got what they wanted — a compliant “moderate” rebel sitting in the former house of Assad, whose troops just so happen to be lopping off heads at an alarming rate.
This, all of this, is unspeakably evil. For reasons of greed and power, the West has murdered millions of people in the Middle-East, destroyed nationalist, leftwing movements that threatened its hegemony, and stoked fundamentalist Islam. And at every step of the way, the U.S. has dressed up its regime change efforts in the language of democracy and freedom and human rights and the rule of law. It’s sickening. The deadly, chaotic, unpredictable blowback from all this was in fact very predictable.
Out of the violent quashing of the Arab Spring and the calamitous U.S. invasion of Iraq, the grotesque beast that is ISIS came roaring, riding roughshod throughout the region. Seeking to institute a new caliphate, harkening back to the years of the Ottoman Empire, ISIS carved out a bloody path of destruction and desecrated important historical and religious sites. The Iranian journalist and novelist Salar Abdoh writes in his book Out of Mesopotamia about being imbedded with the coalition of Iranian, Afghan, Syrian, and Kurdish forces who fought back against ISIS:
In this war, nothing — nothing at all — made sense. People appeared and disappeared, ancient animosities suddenly boiled over, heads were cut off with such fierce regularity that it made you doubt the proper digits of your century, and there were so many sides and fronts and realignments that when you managed to grab a sliver of reliable Internet long enough to read a foreign paper, where they referred to the simple men you marched alongside as men who committed atrocities, you began to doubt everything, especially yourself: Am I a part of some beastliness?
When ISIS was at its height, it was paying its fighters good monthly wages and distributing its plunder throughout the rank and file. Young men, faced with dwindling prospects, living under constant warfare, subjected to the deathly vicissitudes of their corrupt governments, having witnessed the failures of the Arab Spring, and having vanishingly few ways left to affirm themselves, found purpose and a kind of security within the extremist ideology of ISIS, an ideology that the West deliberately made sure would take hold in the region.
One cannot fully understand the enduring power and attraction of Islamic extremism in the Middle East today without apprehending how and why the Western powers purposely cultivated this ideology for their own short-term interests. The world that each and every one of us lives in today was forged in the fires of the Cold War. But what was a “cold” war for the United States was, in fact, an unbearably hot war for the Third World. There are multiple categories of horrors that were bequeathed to the world by America’s ideological adherence to capitalism throughout the post-WWII era. The horror that is perhaps the least understood by those in the West, precisely because it has hit us so close to home, is America’s bolstering of jihadism.
In the mid-20th century, fanatical anti-Communists in the U.S. saw the religions of the Third World, particularly Islam, as an effective bulwark against the materialist ideology of Marxism. Socialism was ascendant in places such as Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala — all of which, amongst others, experienced U.S. invasions or CIA-backed coup d’états in response to their attempts at freedom from Western control. U.S. officials were so worried about other countries not obeying U.S. dictates that nothing was off the table when dealing with them. The West, overestimating both the military and diplomatic influence of the Soviet Union, assumed that any vaguely leftist nation must be in the pocket of the dreaded Kremlin and therefore an existential threat. The U.S. used different means to handle each country that made the mistake of putting a socialist in charge. CIA-backed death squads and military coups were the most frequent choice, used heavily in Latin America. In the Middle East, seeing a short-term advantage for their Cold War tinkerings, the U.S. found Islam to be the ideal unifying anti-communist force.
In the 1950s and 60s, the ascendant political movement in the Arab world was pan-Arabism, a solidarity movement whereby peoples of Arab nations could band together to assert their collective interests regionally and in opposition to Western control. The Middle East, suffering from ongoing sectarianism caused largely by the Sykes-Picot Treaty (which was a Western invention that drew the borders of Arab nations after WWI not based on any existing ethnic divisions or cultural history but instead seemingly at random by two White guys), found the hope of pan-Arabism to be electrifying. For the West, this would simply not do. As journalist Abdel Bari Atwan explains:
The United States, UK, and European powers were also deeply troubled by the cohesive potential of Arab Nationalism, a hugely popular movement led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his (at that time) mighty allies in Iraq and Syria. The idea of these three huge, left-leaning regional powers becoming politically and militarily united was unacceptable in the Cold War context and remained so after the fall of the Soviet Empire because of the regional threat to Israel. To counteract the rise of pan-Arabism, the West began to support Islamist tendencies within each country…
The rise of nationalists in figures such as Nasser and Mossadegh scared Washington spooks half to death. Later, having effectively quashed pan-Arabism and the Soviet Union through mass subterfuge and violence, the United States found that not only had it menaced millions of people who knew very well the depths of Western interference in their lives, but that many of these people had now been radicalized along religious lines.
As journalist Murtaza Hussain explains:
Islamists…long ago took note of how successful the United States had been at crushing secular nationalist and leftist movements in their countries. As a result they’ve girded themselves for much more suffering and a much longer fight. “We are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the C.I.A. can snuff out,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once said about the clerical-led Islamic Republic he leads. After four decades, there’s reason to consider that he might be right.
The U.S. saw Saudi Arabia as key to its efforts in stoking Islam as a way to undermine a broader Arab identity. Saudi Arabia, controlled by its royal family, exported its own form of radical Islam, known as Wahabism, by giving material and ideological support to extremist groups. The Saudi royals are concerned chiefly with their own perpetuation of power and wealth, and are happy to quash any form of secular pan-Arabism, communism, or even a differing Islamism that threatens their royal status. The country is well known for its rampant public beheadings and suppression of dissidents. Despite their many human rights violations, the U.S. remains boson buddies with the House of Saud through thick and thin because, other than the hold that their massive oil reserves have on the West, the regressive royal family serves as a factionalizing force in the Middle East. When Egypt’s Nasser cracked down on the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the CIA assisted Brotherhood members in moving to Saudi Arabia and continued funding the group.
“The CIA nudged Saudi Arabia to create the Muslim World League in 1962 as a way to organize people in the Third World on the basis of religion,” writes Vijay Prashad in Washington Bullets, “and to suggest the dangerous foreignness of communism, left-wing nationalism, trade unionism and even anti-clericalism.”
Some Western leaders were quite naked about their tactics in the Middle East. The Ice Queen herself, Margaret Thatcher, once said, “It is in our own interest that [Arab Nations] build on their own deep religious traditions. We do not wish to see them succumb to the fraudulent appeal of imported Marxism.” Prashad spoke to one U.S. official who said, “Pan-Islam was not, to us, seen as a strategic threat. There were bad guys doing bad things to people on the Left, to Nasser. They were fighting the pinkos. So, we didn’t see pan-Islam as a threat.”
Better to have a radical Islamist than a radical communist. Then, once the predictable reactionary terror starts against Western meddling and oppression, you can blame it on a backwards religion, rather than a forward-thinking socialist revolution. “Backwardness was better than communism, and backwardness could be sold ideologically as authentic to the cultural world of Asia,” Prashad writes. “It was communism that was foreign; backwardness was indigenous.”
Our funding of Islamic extremists in opposition to communists was seen perhaps most troublingly in Afghanistan throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Seeing an opportunity to draw the Soviet Union into a costly, drawn out conflict, the U.S., through the CIA, began arming, training, and funding the anti-Soviet mujahedeen to the tune of billions of dollars. As the late journalist John Pilger summarizes:
For 17 years, Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the most brutal men on earth — with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in a futile war. One of them, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly favoured by the CIA, received tens of millions of dollars. His speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. In 1994, he agreed to stop attacking Kabul on condition that he was made prime minister — which he was.
As is well understood today, elements of the mujahedeen morphed into Al Qaeda. Their members benefited from some of the best U.S. special forces training. “More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6,” Pilger writes, “with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.”
After 9/11, once the U.S. saw fit to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan to stop the threat it had created, the impoverished country devolved into a 20 year nightmare. Hundreds of thousands of lives were violently taken and trillions of dollars were wasted. For what? With the taste for the American Forever Wars beginning to sour back home, in 2021 the U.S. finally retreated with its tale between its legs. Afghanistan swiftly fell back again to the Taliban, surprising only those who knew nothing of the corruption and mendacity of the U.S. efforts to “rebuild” the country, or of the litany of U.S. war crimes committed against innocents in Afghanistan which drove many civilians into the arms of the Taliban. The Taliban, despite, or perhaps because of, their strict enforcement of religious pieties, were able to maintain before the U.S. invasion a minimal level of order and safety compared to the ravages of tribal warlords who were bought and paid for by the CIA and dominated the countryside during the U.S. occupation — kidnapping and raping children and ransoming them from their families.
Pilger interviewed one Afghan woman who described these horrors:
Last month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. For America, it's a Frankenstein story — you make a monster and the monster goes against you. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have attacked the master on September 11, 2001.
The Islamic terror that could have been predicted began arriving at our gates. Embassies, warships, and New York’s World Trade Center were all targets that preceded the 9/11 attacks. America, looking for the next good war after the demoralizing horrors of Vietnam, was ready for a new total evil to combat. Radical Islam was only too ready to provide.
Lacking a deep understanding of the complex political and cultural history of the Middle East, the U.S. made the galling claim that the we — bruised as we were from the 9/11 attacks, a comparatively tame event to the horrors unleashed by the U.S. throughout the world — were ordained by virtue of our “values” to control the fates of millions of Muslims, millions who had tried again and again, whether through the progressive nationalism of Mohammed Mossadegh or through the uprisings of the Arab Spring, to secure their own liberation but had been routed at every turn by Western imperialists and their puppet regimes. That some of these disillusioned people, apprehending the astounding moral hypocrisy, cultural vapidity, obscene decadence, and spiritual wasteland of the Western “democratic” powers, instead found meaning and purpose in the dangerous utopian illusions of radical Islam, abetted for decades by the West, is as understandable as it is frightening.
The violence we teach to the rest of the world comes back to haunt us. The language we speak is the language our children talk back to us with. To hide from this fact is to deny history, and to therefore have history be ever chasing you, hounding you, demanding the bill to be paid, as any hope of peace is lost, for memory is long indeed. The United States cannot be said to be a moral nation because it so clearly has disregarded the well-being of its own children — to say nothing of the world’s children, our very future. We have bequeathed unto them a hell-scorched earth. To confront this fact would mean confronting death itself, a concept which America is quite uncomfortable with, for the nation wishes to keep going and going and going, staying one step ahead of the ghosts at its heels.
Is it any wonder that, as we continue to ravage the Holy Lands, watering the sand with blood, murdering Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem on Christmas day, giving arms and propaganda to useful jihadists branded with a new regime, that these children — representing at once our shameful history, our very living issue, and our future legacy — are running up behind us with a knife aimed squarely at our back?
I am astonished to read an honest appraisal of the West's behaviour in the Middle East ! I hope this stays up and many read it .