The United States of America is a huge superpower that has a wide variety of interests around the world and has intervened in many countries since World War II. It claims to represent freedom, human rights and democracy but in reality its main concerns are political, economic and military power. When it invades countries or overthrows governments in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, its main goal is to control the labor, raw materials and natural resources of those areas. Of course, it also has a very powerful media and propaganda machine that diverts people’s attention, deceives and misleads them, in order to conceal its true motives for intervening in places like Syria, Libya, Iraq and Kenya. American imperialism serves the powerful corporate and financial forces that really control the government, and has a long history of such actions, going back to the 19th Century. In short, the U.S. is just another empire like any other, no matter what it asserts in its public propaganda.
Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, was accused of terrorism and mass murder by the U.S. and its allies. Few people on earth ever heard of this “once-obscure Ugandan rebel leader alleged to have abducted, abused and killed thousands of children for more than two decades.” (O’Brien). Everyone thought that such and evil man deserved the death penalty for his crimes, but what the U.S. government failed to mention was that Kony had already been dead or missing for quite some time. Many of these crimes he was accused of happened over twenty years ago, but in recent times the U.S. has become more interested in Uganda because it has some of the largest oil reserves in Africa. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, self-interest is the enemy of all true affection, and the real question here is whether the U.S. suddenly became so interested in Kony’s human rights abuses because of Ugandan oil. American companies estimate that there is a tremendous amount of oil in Africa, perhaps one-sixth as much as Saudi Arabia’s reserves. It has always been very willing to take advantage of smaller and weaker nations to obtain control over the oil supply and other valuable natural resources.
While all this has been happening in Uganda, the U.S. and its allies have also been covertly intervening in Syria. Here again, they accuse the Syrian president Bashir Al-Assad of oppressing his own people and violating their rights, just as the rulers of Libya and Iraq were in recent years. This is not to deny that the dictatorships in all these countries were repressive, although Bashir was not nearly as harsh as ruler as Saddam Hussein or Muamar Kadifi. Syria has generally been considered a beautiful, peaceful and modern country under his rule, but when the U.S. accuses him of being an evil, corrupt tyrant, then that is the signal for his overthrow. Once this wonderful country is also destroyed then there will be no more Middle East. Syria is the only country still standing that has been allied with Iran, and that is one of the real reasons the U.S. has moved against it. Assad was interviewed by the popular American journalist Barbara Walters, who has also interviewed Hosni Mubarak and many other world leaders, and she said that he was nothing like Saddam or Kadafi, but rather that he is “calm, soft-spoken and articulate”, and that there is a real disconnect between what is seen and heard about him versus what he actually says. He denied that Syria ever had the kinds of human rights problems that were portrayed in the media, and claimed that it was not his own people rioting and rebelling but foreigners who were being paid by outside interests.
Why is the U.S. always sticking its nose in the Middle East?
A survey from Gallup Wellbeing showed that 43% of Americans were prejudiced against Muslims and that it was the religion they disliked the most. Does this really come back to Bashir being a bad president or is it all just a silly stereotype? According to the United Nations, this horrible, tyrannical regime has killed 40,000 of its own people, including women and children, while the U.S. media show videos of the riots ‘against’ Bashir and claim that he is a war criminal like Kadafi, Mubarak or Saddam. Yet from Bashir’s viewpoint, he is still in control of the situation and his people, and has even offered to hold elections in the near future. He is not concerned with public opinion outside of Syria but only in the peace and stability of his own country.
Many Arabs hope that Bashir will not be overthrown and that he must also fight Israel. They understand that once he is gone then the Middle East will not really exist any longer, expect as a colony of the U.S. and the other Western powers. It is important for Syria, as one of the last Arab countries, to take a stand against Israel. If Syria falls, it will be in the same condition as Iraq and Libya are now, with civil turmoil among various factions as to who should take power. Bashir is a smart man and will not permit this worst to happen to his country, no matter what the U.S. wants. Many Arabs know about the true history of the U.S. and what it is really up to. These types of covert and overt interventions have worked countless times before, all over the world.
Before World War II, American interventionism was often overt and direct, simply landing troops on the shores of some prospective banana republic and installing a ‘friendly’ government there. This is exactly what happened in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, in some cases more than once. Theodore Roosevelt was hardly shy about admitting that he sent troops to Puerto Rico and the Philippines, taking Panama from Columbia or landing in person with the army in Cuba in 1898. During the Cold War, overthrowing governments was more commonly done in the shadows through CIA covert operations, but once the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the U.S. increasingly reverted to the older methods of direct intervention. This phase of American overseas imperialism has much in common with the previous era of frontier expansion, wars against Native Americans and the annexation of half of Mexico in 1848. New Left and Revisionist historians of the 1960s and 1970s like William Appleman Williams (1972), Gabriel Kolko (1969) and Walter LaFeber (1963) all traced the roots of post-World War II imperialism directly back to this pre-1945 expansionist impulse (Colas 2008). Far from promoting democracy abroad, the United States has reacted many times against the threat that democracy poses to American trade, investments and corporate interests. In overthrowing democratic governments and supporting corrupt and pliable elites in Asia, Central America and the Caribbean, economics was almost always the real motivation. Corporations have been the dominant influence in U.S. politics since the late-19th Century, and foreign leaders who resist them often risk being overthrown. Secretaries of State like John Foster Dulles and Elihu Root have often been agents of Wall Street and large corporate interests within the American foreign policy establishment, which prefers to deal with ‘friendly’ dictators and corrupt oligarchs rather than nationalistic, populist or radical democratic governments in the developing world.
Unlike the British or Roman Empires, though, it preferred a policy of indirect control to the occupation of territory and direct administration of colonies, which had been the norm up to the 19th Century. Free trade was an important aspect of American hegemony, dating back to the time of Woodrow Wilson, although it also permitted its East Asian allies like Japan and South Korea remained largely closed to U.S. investments and exports until the 1990s, while being allowed an Open Door into the U.S. market. In this case at least, national security concerns in Asia did seem to trump economics, and did a great deal of damage to domestic American industries (Schmidt 2008). As the leading liberal-capitalist hegemon, the U.S. also organized multinational institutions to promote order and stability, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), renamed the World Trade Organization in 1995 (Ikenberry 2006). Viewed from this perspective, the Pax Americana was a global system of production that existed as a rival to Communist-style central planning or the state capitalism and corporatism of various nationalist and fascist regimes—although the American system also permitted the latter in many developing nations as well social democracy in Western Europe (Cox 1987).
Throughout the Cold War, from period of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in 1947 through National Security Memorandum 68 in 1950, the U.S. was attempting to expand its system worldwide, at least outside the Soviet Bloc and China, wherever such expansion was possible. In the Third World, as the periphery or developing world was described during the Cold War, it did attempt to promote capitalist economic development, particularly in East Asia. Latin American was always a lesser priority, unless covert or overt action was required against leftist governments such as Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1960-62 (where the CIA failed to dislodge Fidel Castro), Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In this region, however, the standard American foreign policy was to support friendly dictators and local oligarchs, and given the mass poverty and discontent in most of Latin American, it preferred authoritarian, anti-Communist regimes to democratic ones. Africa for the most part remained peripheral to U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War, given that it remained mostly a British and French sphere of influence. One notable exception was the Congo in 1960, in which the U.S. cooperated with Belgium in overthrowing as assassinating the leftist nationalist Patrice Lumumba and installing Robert Mobutu as a friendly dictator.
At times, of course, the friendly authoritarian regimes simply failed and no amount of American support could prop them up. South Vietnam was the most dramatic American failure of the Cold War, where not even 555,000 ground troops, massive bombing with everything in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons—more tonnage dropped on Indochina than during the entire Second World War—and unlimited economic aid, were able to salvage the client regime the U/S. had established there after the French withdrawal in 1954. Another major failure occurred in Iran, where the friendly dictator that the U.S. and Britain had first installed in 1941, and then preserved in power through covert action against a left-wing nationalist government in 1953, was finally overthrown in an Islamic revolution in 1979 (Hunter 2010). On other occasions, the U.S. even supported Third World nationalists against its European allies, most famously when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and Britain, France and Israel occupied Suez. To a surprising extent, the U.S. hegemony was able to accommodate non-Communist nationalism of the Nasserite variety, even when it proclaimed itself to be socialistic or corporatist. When Third World countries attempted to ally with the Soviets, however, the U.S. response was harsh, including covert and overt warfare. Iran was a vital American interest during the Cold War because of its strategic location and vast oil reserves. For this reason, the CIA overthrew the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 when he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (British Petroleum), and then supported the Shah until the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (Khan 2010).
In 1980-88, the U.S. and the Western powers all supported Saddam Hussein when he attacked Iran, no matter that Saddam had been a Soviet ally since 1968, although at the same time the Reagan administration attempted some unsuccessful secret negotiations with Iran that proved to be very unsuccessful and nearly brought down the government in the Iran-Contra Scandal (Hunter 239). In fact, no U.S. administration since 1979 has had any success in engaging the Iranian regime diplomatically, including Barack Obama, and the U.S. has had no formal diplomatic relations with the country since that time. In addition, the American public never forgot that the U.S. embassy was taken over in 1979 and its diplomats held hostage for over a year. From 1979 to the present, Iran has also been unwilling to “deal with the United States in an open manner”, mostly for ideological reasons (Hunter 240). Because of the American sanctions and embargos over the last thirty years, which are clearly designed to destabilize the country or even cause it to disintegrate, “Iran lags far behind Turkey in terms of economic and industrial development” despite its oil revenue (Hunter 241).
In Guatemala in 1954 the CIA launched Operation Success to overthrow the democratic reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. This operation was carried out on the instructions of President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA Director All Dulles on the false grounds that Arbenz was a Communist. In reality, the purpose of this coup was to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company and other foreign investors by eliminating land reform, labor unions, democratic elections and opposition political parties. In 1953, United Fruit Company (UFCO) owned 42% of the land in Guatemala, about three million acres, but only about 10% of this was actually planted with bananas. It also owned the electric company and the country’s only railroad and Atlantic port—Puerto Barrios, while its workers had a seven-day week, very low wages and no labor unions allowed. Arbenz had no choice whatsoever if compelling the company to hand over some of its land to about 100,000 peasant families. It was the largest employer, landholder and investor in the country and had usually acted as if it was above the law and the state, so his reforms would have had no meaning had UFCO been left untouched (Gleijeses 268).
President Dwight Eisenhower gave the order for the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1953, which he regarded as an offensive action against the Communists, but the Dulles brothers were most responsible to instigating and organizing it. CIA Director Allen Dulles had been on the board of United Fruit Company and his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented it as an attorney. Allen Dulles had originally intended to place Kermit Roosevelt in charge of Operation Success, since he had been pleased with his work in overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953 (Operation Ajax) and restoring the Shah to power. Dulles had listened to his briefing with “a catlike grin on his face” but Roosevelt refused the assignment (Schlesinger and Kinzer 55). He had enough knowledge of Latin American to realize that the Arbenz government had popular support and that Republicans like the Dulles brothers represented corporate interests with little concern for the interests of the common people in places like Guatemala. At first, the Dulles brothers approached General Ydigoras Fuentes to be head of the new government after Arbenz was overthrown, but when he refused the offer they turned to Col. Castillo Armas, who had already led a failed coup attempt against Arevalo in 1949. In Nicaragua, the notorious Somoza regime also assisted in the CIA operation as did the government of Honduras (Kinzer 58-59).
For over one hundred years, the U.S. government has often regarded democracy as a grave danger to its economic, political and military interests, and the historical record shows conclusively that it has intervened repeatedly against it. It followed the same policy in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and many other nations when they attempted to establish governments that might not have been under American control. So it did in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s when reformist governments appeared to be a threat to American investments and business interests, and so it continues to do today in Africa and the Middle East. This is not to idealize all the nationalist or radical leaders of the developing world, since they can also be quite corrupt and repressive, but these numerous examples of regime change do indeed reveal the motivations and priorities of American foreign policy in these regions over the last century.
WORKS CITED
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Gleijeses, P. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton University Press, 1999.
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LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1963.
Schlesinger, S. and S. Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. NY: Doubleday, 1892.
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