![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
27-07-2022, 11:47 AM
Belen Fernandez
16 Jul 2022
There is an old joke about why there are never coups d’état in the United States of America: because there is no US embassy there.
Granted, the joke’s foundations have been somewhat shaken now that former President Donald Trump stands accused of inciting an “attempted coup” in January 2021.
......
In a recent interview with CNN about the congressional investigation into the matter, longtime US diplomat and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton
......
according to Bolton, Trump was simply too incompetent to pull off something of that magnitude: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état – not here, but, you know, other places – it takes a lot of work.”
......
US involvement in foreign coups is not exactly a news flash, and plenty has been written on the subject. See, for starters, former New York Times bureau chief Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq – or the Washington Post’s finding in 2016 that “the US tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War”.
But the nonchalance with which Bolton delivered his admission just serves to underscore the United States’ rather casual approach to upending nations and wrecking lives en masse. This institutionalised lack of empathy is, to be sure, also on display in regular international episodes of sustained US military slaughter.
......
the only specific point Bolton cared to highlight on his own coup-planning curriculum vitae was that of Venezuela in 2019, which “turned out not to be successful”. Not to be confused with the 2002 US-backed coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, the 2019 operation entailed efforts to replace elected president Nicolás Maduro with a right-wing character named Juan Guaidó, who had spontaneously auto-proclaimed himself interim president of the country.
......
Venezuela has long been a thorn in the side of contemporary American empire on account of its refusal to submit to Washington’s hemispheric designs, but it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to coup-happy US interference in Latin America and beyond.
Back in 1954, for example, the CIA orchestrated a coup against Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, who had proven himself to be irritatingly attentive to the needs of the country’s peasantry and unwilling to permit the predatory US-based United Fruit Company to continue exploiting Guatemalan land as though it was a God-given right.
The coup against Árbenz paved the way for a brutal civil war in which more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared over 36 years.
......
at the time of the coup, key members of the Dwight D Eisenhower administration harboured close personal ties to the United Fruit Company. To hell, then, with the separation of corporation and state.
The previous year, in August of 1953, the CIA “overthrew Iran’s democracy in four days”
......
elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had been insufficiently subservient to the economic preferences of the powers that be. There ensued a long-term reign of torture by the shah of Iran, an avid consumer of US weaponry.
......
There was the 1964 US-backed coup against Brazilian President João Goulart, the 1991 US-backed coup against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the 2004 US-backed coup against again President Aristide, and the 2009 US-backed coup against Honduras’s Manuel Zelaya – which plunged the country into more or less apocalyptic violence.
Rewind again to 1960 and the US-supported coup against Patrice Lumumba – hero of Congolese independence and the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo – whose assassination the following year was significantly facilitated by the CIA. Then there was the US-supported November 1, 1963 coup against South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated the next day.
And there was US support for tyrannical Cuban dictator and coup-monger Fulgencio Batista, who was himself deposed by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959 – after which the CIA busied itself devising a dizzying variety of plots to kill revolutionary leader ...... Fidel Castro
......
Cuba continues to occupy a special place on the appointed nemeses list of none other than John Bolton. In 2002, in his capacity as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security under “war on terror” chief George W Bush, Bolton had the honour of officially adding the diminutive Caribbean island to the “axis of evil”.
Fast forward to 2019, and Bolton warned that the Cuban government would “be next” in line after the demise of Maduro.
And while US malevolence clearly does not always go according to plan, this has not stopped the global hegemon from making life a nightmare for people across the world via military bombs, death squads, crippling embargoes, and other measures
.......
2016 Washington Post report on the United States’ 72 attempts at regime change during the Cold War, “meddling in foreign elections is the most successful covert tactic”. Furthermore, the report’s author notes, “covert regime change can devastate the target countries”, rendering them “more likely to suffer civil war, domestic instability and mass killing”.
.......
at the end of the day, it’s not really about Bolton at all; it’s about the casual, morally deranged imperialism that he happens to represent.
Much better to read full opinion here: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/...s-misdeeds
16 Jul 2022
There is an old joke about why there are never coups d’état in the United States of America: because there is no US embassy there.
Granted, the joke’s foundations have been somewhat shaken now that former President Donald Trump stands accused of inciting an “attempted coup” in January 2021.
......
In a recent interview with CNN about the congressional investigation into the matter, longtime US diplomat and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton
......
according to Bolton, Trump was simply too incompetent to pull off something of that magnitude: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état – not here, but, you know, other places – it takes a lot of work.”
......
US involvement in foreign coups is not exactly a news flash, and plenty has been written on the subject. See, for starters, former New York Times bureau chief Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq – or the Washington Post’s finding in 2016 that “the US tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War”.
But the nonchalance with which Bolton delivered his admission just serves to underscore the United States’ rather casual approach to upending nations and wrecking lives en masse. This institutionalised lack of empathy is, to be sure, also on display in regular international episodes of sustained US military slaughter.
......
the only specific point Bolton cared to highlight on his own coup-planning curriculum vitae was that of Venezuela in 2019, which “turned out not to be successful”. Not to be confused with the 2002 US-backed coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, the 2019 operation entailed efforts to replace elected president Nicolás Maduro with a right-wing character named Juan Guaidó, who had spontaneously auto-proclaimed himself interim president of the country.
......
Venezuela has long been a thorn in the side of contemporary American empire on account of its refusal to submit to Washington’s hemispheric designs, but it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to coup-happy US interference in Latin America and beyond.
Back in 1954, for example, the CIA orchestrated a coup against Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, who had proven himself to be irritatingly attentive to the needs of the country’s peasantry and unwilling to permit the predatory US-based United Fruit Company to continue exploiting Guatemalan land as though it was a God-given right.
The coup against Árbenz paved the way for a brutal civil war in which more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared over 36 years.
......
at the time of the coup, key members of the Dwight D Eisenhower administration harboured close personal ties to the United Fruit Company. To hell, then, with the separation of corporation and state.
The previous year, in August of 1953, the CIA “overthrew Iran’s democracy in four days”
......
elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had been insufficiently subservient to the economic preferences of the powers that be. There ensued a long-term reign of torture by the shah of Iran, an avid consumer of US weaponry.
......
There was the 1964 US-backed coup against Brazilian President João Goulart, the 1991 US-backed coup against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the 2004 US-backed coup against again President Aristide, and the 2009 US-backed coup against Honduras’s Manuel Zelaya – which plunged the country into more or less apocalyptic violence.
Rewind again to 1960 and the US-supported coup against Patrice Lumumba – hero of Congolese independence and the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo – whose assassination the following year was significantly facilitated by the CIA. Then there was the US-supported November 1, 1963 coup against South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated the next day.
And there was US support for tyrannical Cuban dictator and coup-monger Fulgencio Batista, who was himself deposed by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959 – after which the CIA busied itself devising a dizzying variety of plots to kill revolutionary leader ...... Fidel Castro
......
Cuba continues to occupy a special place on the appointed nemeses list of none other than John Bolton. In 2002, in his capacity as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security under “war on terror” chief George W Bush, Bolton had the honour of officially adding the diminutive Caribbean island to the “axis of evil”.
Fast forward to 2019, and Bolton warned that the Cuban government would “be next” in line after the demise of Maduro.
And while US malevolence clearly does not always go according to plan, this has not stopped the global hegemon from making life a nightmare for people across the world via military bombs, death squads, crippling embargoes, and other measures
.......
2016 Washington Post report on the United States’ 72 attempts at regime change during the Cold War, “meddling in foreign elections is the most successful covert tactic”. Furthermore, the report’s author notes, “covert regime change can devastate the target countries”, rendering them “more likely to suffer civil war, domestic instability and mass killing”.
.......
at the end of the day, it’s not really about Bolton at all; it’s about the casual, morally deranged imperialism that he happens to represent.
Much better to read full opinion here: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/...s-misdeeds
