By
Philip Giraldi
Joe Biden should read up on
the history of American
political and military
interventions, regime changes
and electoral interference
worldwide.
July 03, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" -
- "SCF"
- After only five months in
office, President Joe Biden has already
become notorious for his verbal gaffes and
mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly
Republican-partisan physician has suggested
that he be tested to determine his cognitive
abilities. That said, however, there is one
June 16th tweet that he is responsible
for that is quite straightforward that
outdoes everything else for sheer mendacity.
It appeared shortly after the summit meeting
with Russian President Vladimir Putin and
was apparently intended to be rhetorical, at
least insofar as Biden understands the term.
It went: “How would it be if the United
States were viewed by the rest of the world
as interfering with the elections directly
of other countries and everybody knew it?
What would it be like if we engaged in
activities that he engaged in? It diminishes
the standing of a country.”
There have been various estimates of just
exactly how many elections the United States
has interfered in since the Second World
War, the numbers usually falling somewhere
between 80 and 100, but that does not take
into account the frequent interventions of
various kinds that took place largely in
Latin America between the Spanish-American
War and 1946. One recalls how the most
decorated Marine in the history of the Corps
Major General Smedley Butler declared that
“War is a racket” in 1935.
He confessed to having “…helped make
Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for
American oil interests in 1914. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenues
in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen
Central American republics for the benefits
of Wall Street. The record of racketeering
is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the
international banking house of Brown
Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to
the Dominican Republic for American sugar
interests in 1916. In China I helped to see
to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested.”
And there have been since 1900 other
regime change and interventionist actions,
both using military force and also brought
about by corrupting local politicians with
money and other inducements. And don’t
forget the American trained death squads
active in Latin America. Some would also
include in the list the possibly as many as
50 Central Intelligence Agency and Special
Ops political assassinations that have been
documented, though admittedly sometimes
based on thin evidence.
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That Joe Biden, who has been at a
reasonably high level in the federal
government for over forty years, including
as Vice President for eight years and now
President should appear to be ignorant of
what his own government has done and quite
plausibly continues to do is astonishing.
After all, Biden was VP when
Victoria Nuland worked for the Obama
Administration as the driving force behind
efforts in 2013-2014
to destabilize the Ukrainian government of
President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an
admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless
became Prime Minister after a free election.
Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs at
the State Department, provided open support
to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed
to Yanukovych’s government, to include media
friendly appearances
passing out cookies on the square
accompanied by Senator John McCain to
encourage the protesters.
A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé
who is married to leading neocon Robert
Kagan, Nuland openly sought regime change
for Ukraine by
brazenly supporting government opponents
in spite of the fact that Washington and
Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. As
Biden’s tweet even recognized in a
backhanded way, it is hard to imagine that
any U.S. administration would tolerate a
similar attempt by a foreign nation to
interfere in U.S. domestic politics,
particularly if it were backed by a
$5 billion budget, but Washington has
long believed in a global double standard
for evaluating its own behavior. Biden
clearly is part of that and also clearly
does not understand what he is doing or
saying.
Nuland is most famous for her
foul language when referring to the
potential European role in managing the
unrest that she and the National Endowment
for Democracy had helped create. The Obama
and Biden Administration’s replacement of
the government in Kiev was the prelude to a
sharp break and escalating conflict with
Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its
own interests in Ukraine, most particularly
in Crimea. That point of conflict has
continued to this day, with a U.S. warships
in the Black Sea engaging in exercises with
the Ukrainian navy.
Biden was also with the Obamas when they
chose to destabilize and destroy Libya. Nor
should Russia itself be forgotten. Boris
Yeltsin
was re-elected president of Russia in
1996 after the Clinton Administration pumped
billions of dollars into his campaign,
enabling him to win a close
oligarch-backed victory that had been
paid for and managed by Washington. Joe
Biden was a Senator at the time.
And then there is Iran, where
democratically elected Mohammed Mossadeq
was deposed by the CIA in 1953 and
replaced by the Shah. The Shah was replaced
by the Islamic Republic in turn in 1979 and
the poisoned relationship between Washington
and Tehran has constituted a tit-for-tat
quasi-cold war ever since, marked by
assassinations and sabotage.
And who can forget Chile where Salvador
Allende was removed by the CIA in 1973 and
replaced by Augusto Pinochet? Or Cuba and
the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 where the
CIA failed to bring about regime change in
Havana? Can it be that Joe Biden cannot
recall any of those “interventions,” which
were heavily covered in the international
media at the time?
And to make up the numbers, Joe can
possibly consider the multiple
“interferences in elections,” which is more
precisely what he was referring to. As a CIA
officer stationed in Europe and the Middle
East in and 1970s through the early 1990s, I
can assure him that I personally know about
nearly continuous interference in elections
in places like France, Spain, Portugal and
Italy, all of which had prominent communist
parties, some of which were on the verge of
government entry. Bags of money went to
conservative parties, politicians were
bribed and journalists bought. In fact,
during that time period I would dare to say
there was hardly an election that the United
States did not somehow get involved in.
Does it still go on? The U.S. has been
seeking regime change in Syria since 2004
and is currently occupying part of the
country. And of course, Russia is on the
receiving end of a delegitimization process
through a controlled western media that is
seeking to get rid of Putin by exploiting a
CIA and western intelligence funded
opposition. China has no real opposition or
open elections, nor can its regime plausibly
be changed, but it is constantly being
challenged by depicting it and its behavior
in the most negative fashion possible.
Joe Biden really should read up on the
history of American political and military
interventions, regime changes and electoral
interference worldwide. He just might learn
something. The most important point might,
however, elude him. All of the intervention
and all of the deaths have turned out badly
both for the U.S. and for the people and
countries being targeted. Biden has taken a
bold step to withdraw U.S. forces from
Afghanistan, though it now appears that that
decision might be in part reversed. Much
better to complete the process and also do
the same thing in places like Iraq, Somalia
and Syria. The whole world will be a better
place for it.