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Opening Pandora's Box: The War on Terrorism

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Mohammad Mossadegh was democratically elected President of Iran in 1951 and was even voted Time Magazine's Man of the Year. To end the exploitation of Iran's oil by British Petroleum, he nationalized Iranian oil the same year. An outraged British Government requested assistance from the U.S. to recover its lost oil assets resulting in a CIA coup against Mossadegh. Following the coup, the U.S. installed and supported Mohammad Reza Shah, a brutal and repressive dictator, until 1979.

In 1954, the CIA organized the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, the President of Guatemala for forcing the United Fruit Company (UFC) to sell off one fifteenth of their land back to the Guatemalan Government to be distributed to landless peasants. The UFC only used ten percent of their land each year. By supporting brutal dictators for the next forty years, the U.S. is complicit in the deaths of 300,000 Guatemalans.

From 1954 to the mid-1970s, America ravaged Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in a merciless and viciously cataclysmic inundation of bombing, killing over three million people, the purpose of which was to prevent communist North Vietnam from overtaking South Vietnam led by an American supported dictator. Preventing a communist Vietnam was ostensibly the key to an inevitable takeover of Southeast Asia by communism. The Geneva Accords of 1954, called for elections in all of Vietnam, but the U.S. refused to sign it for fear that Ho Chi Minh, the leader in the North, might win.

Patrice Lumumba, democratically elected leader of the Congo, was left-leaning ideologically and refused to take sides in the Cold war. In less than 10 weeks, following a victory in democratic elections in 1960, he paid the ultimate price for his non-compliance with the U.S. agenda in a CIA-organized assassination. The United States supported brutal dictators in the Congo until 2002. Over five million people died during that period.

Nicaragua became a victim of U.S. foreign policy when Daniel Ortega overthrew the corrupt and cruel dictator Somoza in 1979 and won the presidency in democratic elections. Using surrogates, namely the Contras, the U.S. decided to crush the Nicaraguan people in a war of attrition. Finally, in 1990, the people voted with their stomachs and not with their hearts and chose the American-supported candidate to end the draconian attacks of the Contras.

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I have been a professor of political science at Seneca College in Toronto. I have published five books the last of which "Selling Out: Consuming Ourselves to Death" was released in May/08. As well, I have been featured in CounterPunch, Z (more...)
 
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