SCF Editorial

American regime-change policy is not only destructive to the rest of the world – it attacks the fundamental rights of America’s own citizens

July I8, 2021 "Information Clearing House" - - " SCF" - There is little doubt that the civil unrest to hit Cuba this week has been instigated by the United States using “color revolution” tactics for regime change.

The Cuban government accuses Washington of trying to destabilize the island nation located about 150 kilometers from the Florida coast. Other Latin American countries have also condemned foreign interference in Cuban internal affairs. The dynamic of social media traffic just prior to the eruption of street protests last weekend points to a sophisticated, concerted operation to amplify discord. American corporate media also quickly published fabricated images aimed at promoting popular revolt.

Russia concurred with Havana and other Latin American countries that the events in Cuba were straight out of the playbook used by the United States for fomenting “color revolution” as seen elsewhere in countless other nations across every continent. The strategic process targets governments that Washington disapproves of and wants rid of, thereby installing a puppet regime malleable to its geopolitical interests. Typically, the tactics involve inciting internal unrest, undermining the authority of the targeted government, and unleashing chaos out of which, it is calculated, a U.S.-backed administration gains power.

Needless to say, the policy of regime change is utterly criminal. Of course, Washington rarely admits to it, as seen in denials this week concerning Cuba. But U.S. regime change exists nonetheless. It is an unspoken presumed “droit de seigneur” for imperial power. Even though such an assault on countries is a gross violation of the United Nations Charter and international law forbidding transgression of national sovereignty.

The United States stands alone as the biggest, most numerous offender for perpetrating regime change. Over the last century, literally, hundreds of nations have been violated – sometimes repeatedly – by Washington’s criminal machinations. Often the results are catastrophic for the indigenous populations, unleashing violence and economic misery at the expense of profiting American corporations and Wall Street. But even for American’s own interests, the results in the long term can be seen as self-defeating when taking into consideration transcontinental problems of mass migration, crime, poverty, human rights abuses, climate impacts, and generally unsustainable societies. The corrosive impact on moral authority is also deeply problematic and fatal.

Cuba has the dubious honor of being at the historical heart of U.S. imperial adventurism. It was the center of the Spanish-American War in 1898 which saw the United States emerging as an imperial power to rival older European counterparts. During the early 20th century, Washington’s regime-change forays in Latin America and the Caribbean were mostly in the form of large-scale military interventions. This was the period of Smedley Butler, the Marine Corps General who later deplored working as nothing more than “a henchman and racketeer” for the capitalist mafia of Wall Street.

After the Second World War, a new and more nefarious iteration of regime-change policy was engendered – the practice of which has evolved and expanded to this day. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in 1947 out of the Office for Strategic Services. Under the Machiavellian influence of its first director Allen Dulles and others who were impressed by Nazi fascism (see The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot), the CIA became a shadow government to the elected outward form. In many ways, the United States ceased being a democracy since power would henceforth reside in an unelected, permanent bureaucracy of imperial planners and ideologues whose function was to pursue the interests of the American oligarchy and military corporations. President Harry Truman who oversaw the creation of the CIA would years later lament that it had become out of control and a threat to American democracy.

During the 1950s, the CIA experimented with regime change using more clandestine methods of disinformation, psychological operations, subversion, proxy violence and assassination. In 1953, the agency pulled off regime change in Iran, ousting an elected leader who wanted to nationalize the oil industry, and installing the brutal Shah. Then in 1954, returning to Uncle Sam’s backyard, the agency disposed of an elected president in Guatemala who was implementing land reforms challenging the monopoly of U.S. fruit companies.

It was the same CIA team under Dulles who became embroiled in Cuba with the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 which attempted to overthrow the socialist government of Fidel Castro that had come to power in 1959 after kicking out an American-backed dictator.

Thus Cuba can in some ways be considered Ground Zero for U.S. regime-change operations over the past seven decades since the Second World War, along with Iran and Guatemala. In that era and up to the present, the policy has become more sinister, sophisticated and unaccountable. The American government is really a rogue regime or “deep state” that operates without the consent or oversight of its citizens, and not in their interests either. The baleful legacy is seen in contemporary disturbances and conflicts all around the world, from Haiti to the Ukraine. No nation is beyond the scope of Washington’s reckless ambitions, including Russia and China.

Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this imperial criminality was the audacious assassination of President John F Kennedy. JFK became increasingly opposed to the CIA and the military-industrial complex over clandestine operations in Cuba and over Cold War hostility towards the Soviet Union. The president wanted to normalize relations with both nations as well as avoid military entanglement in Vietnam. Nearly three years into his presidency, on November 22, 1963, the CIA assassinated Kennedy in Dallas in broad daylight deploying multiple covert shooters. The hapless Lee Harvey Oswald was framed as the lone gunman in what was a preposterous media campaign and later by an official coverup with the Warren Commission and its ridiculous “magic bullet” travesty. American film director Oliver Stone reminded of this heinous event in a media interview this week.

American regime-change policy happened in the United States in 1963 with the slaying of President Kennedy. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fact. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, gave the green light to the Vietnam War, as well as genocidal regime change in Indonesia in 1965 and many other imperial intrigues that the CIA and the military-industrial complex were desiring. Arguably, no president ever since has dared question the imperial policy as dictated by the deep state. The relentless and irrational aggression towards Russia and China by one Washington administration after another regardless of Republican or Democrat window-dressing in the White House is proof of that hideous reality.

Cuba has been strangled for six decades by an illegal U.S. trade embargo despite repeated appeals by a majority of nations at the United Nations general assembly for this blockade to be halted. The barbaric treatment of Cuba by Washington is a longtime expression of regime-change objective in the socialist country because it stands as an affront to Uncle Sam’s imperial arrogance. Disgracefully, President Biden this week had the temerity to slander Cuba as a “failed state”.

American regime-change policy is not only destructive and anti-democratic to the rest of the world. It attacks the fundamental rights of America’s own citizens who in reality are not living in a democracy but rather in an oligarchy that is unaccountably run by a tyranny of deep state. Understanding what is happening in Cuba is instructive in myriad ways to become aware of the systemic problem of U.S. power and how it needs to be defeated.