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But the newly acquired private fortunes needed freedom from the remnants of the Soviet-era legal and institutional "constraints" such as labor laws (that guaranteed life-time employment), universal healthcare, cradle-to-grave free education, and the like. To break free from these "restraining" laws and traditions, the oligarchs also needed political or state power that would go along with their economic power, i.e., would allow them to conduct their economic affairs according to unhindered market mechanism.
The oligarch's desire to bring about legal, political and institutional changes to better serve their nefarious economic interests coincided with the globalization designs of US imperialism to bring about "regime change" in those countries in order to carry out pro-American economic and foreign policies. This explains the convergence of the interests of the imperialist and the home-grown bourgeoisies on removing "undesirable regimes" from power.
Most commentators trace the origins of the US doctrine of "color revolutions," and the concomitant concept of "soft power" or "non-violent struggle," to the 1990s. But a number of political historians, including Thierry Meyssan, president of the Voltaire Network, trace it back to the 1970s:
This concept appeared in the 90s, but its roots lie in the American public debate of the 70s-80s. After a string of revelations about CIA-instigated coups around the world, as well as the dramatic disclosures of the Church and Rockefeller Senate Committees, Admiral Stansfield Turner was given the task by President Carter to clean up the agency and to stop supporting "local dictatorships.' Furious, the American Social Democrats (SD/USA) left the Democratic Party and sided with Ronald Reagan. . . . After Reagan was elected, he charged them with pursuing the American interference policy, this time using different methods. This is how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1982 and the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in 1984 [4].
Philip Giraldi, former officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, presently a partner in an international security consultancy (Cannistraro Associates), describes the US designs of "soft power" and/or "color revolutions" as follows:
Where regime change coming out of Washington might once have been done covertly by the CIA, it is now done openly by a number of organizations that are ostensibly "private" but are in reality funded by the government, the NGOs and others that Vladimir Putin and others have been complaining about. . . . The money and effort that is being channeled through NGOs is being used to change the way many countries are governed, to make them become more democratic or at least more cooperative with Europe and the United States.The countries on the receiving end are more often than not completely aware of what is going on.Frequently, the western media jumps on the band wagon to complete the job, hailing the arrival of democracy in yet another poor benighted land while carefully ignoring the corruption of the newly minted democratic leaders.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with its bipartisan International Republican Institute and its National Democratic Institute wings, is the chief culprit, but the US Agency for International Development also is involved, funded under the Freedom Support Act.The National Endowment for Democracy, which funds changing governments overseas and has virtually no oversight, would in any other guise be proscribed as a dangerous underground group. . . . What do these organizations do when they set out to overturn a government? They would not be so unwise as to appear adversarial or cast themselves as revolutionaries, so they instead describe themselves in the most benign terms while becoming enablers for others who wish to "create democracy." They understand above all that the ability to protest and force the change of governments is not new but that the new technologies have changed the entire game [5].
The degree and details of the US involvement in the Post-Soviet color revolutions may be debatable. There is no question, however, that the US money, media and "expertise" played a significant role in the success of those revolutions [6].
Briefly, here is how color-coded revolutions in Eastern Europe and for Soviet republics such as Georgia and Ukraine were carried out.
1. During the campaign season the oligarchs (in concert with the US media and other agents of "soft power" projection) started extensive and exaggerated negative campaigns against the targeted incumbents in their respective countries. This was designed to frighten the people of the prospects of the re-election of the incumbents.
2. Also prior to the election day, the oligarchs and their external allies circulated exaggerated projections of their candidates' chances for victory, portraying them as invincible, often with the help of self-serving pre-election polls. (US money, "experts" and media played important roles in conducting such convenient opinion polls.)
3. On the election day, the oligarch's candidates declared victory either before the polls were actually closed, or before the official accounts of the voting results were announced. This was designed to discredit the official count of the votes cast. The longer the time period between the opposition's premature, or preemptive, declaration of victory and the time of the official announcement of the voting results, the more plausible the opposition's claim that the government must have been "fixing" the votes.
4. As soon as the official results were announced, contradicting the opposition's premature victory announcement, the oligarchs and their candidate cried foul: "we told you they were stealing your votes."
5. Determined not to accept defeat, the opposition then called upon their supporters (and the public at large) to take to the streets to "defend democracy" and retrieve their "stolen votes."
If the scenario thus painted seems like a conspiracy theory, it is because those color revolutions were actually conspiratorial designs. "The main mechanism of the "color revolutions' consists in focusing popular anger on the desired target. This is an aspect of the psychology of the masses which destroys everything in its path and against which no reasonable argument can be opposed. The scapegoat is accused of all the evils plaguing the country for at least one generation. The more he resists, the angrier the mob gets. After he gives in or slips away, the normal division between his opponents and his supporters reappears" [7].
Just as the oligarchs in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics acquired their riches and resources by virtue of their positions within the state apparatus, so too the Iranian rich and powerful have gained their unearned assets by virtue of their positions within the state bureaucracy. Also like their post-Soviet counterparts in Eastern Europe, Iran's nouveau riche have gradually begun to view welfare-state programs, which were put in place immediately following the 1979 revolution, burdensome and constraining to the unhindered utilization of their ill-begotten capital. Not surprisingly, they too have acquired an appetite for a "color revolution" to unseat Ahmadinejad's government and remove the "constraints" of welfare-state to the "efficient" operations of unbridled market system.
