No matter which instrument of regime change the U.S. has deployed, these U.S. interventions have not made life better for the people of any of those countries, nor countless others in the past. William Blum's brilliant 1995 book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, catalogues 55 U.S. regime change operations in 50 years between 1945 and 1995. As Blum's detailed accounts make clear, most of these operations involved U.S. efforts to remove popularly elected governments from power, as in Bolivia, and often replaced them with U.S.-backed dictatorships: like the Shah of Iran; Mobutu in the Congo; Suharto in Indonesia; and General Pinochet in Chile.
Even when the targeted government is a violent, repressive one, U.S. intervention usually leads to even greater violence. Nineteen years after removing the Taliban government in Afghanistan, the United States has dropped 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghan fighters and civilians, conducted tens of thousands of "kill or capture" night raids, and the war has killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans.
In December 2019, the Washington Post published a trove of Pentagon documents revealing that none of this violence is based on a real strategy to bring peace or stability to Afghanistan - it's all just a brutal kind of "muddling along," as U.S. General McChrystal put it. Now the U.S.-backed Afghan government is finally in peace talks with the Taliban on a political power-sharing plan to bring an end to this "endless" war, because only a political solution can provide Afghanistan and its people with the viable, peaceful future that decades of war have denied them.
In Libya, it has been nine years since the U.S. and its NATO and Arab monarchist allies launched a proxy war backed by a covert invasion and NATO bombing campaign that led to the horrific sodomy and assassination of Libya's long time anti-colonial leader, Muammar Gaddafi. That plunged Libya into chaos and civil war between the various proxy forces that the U.S. and its allies armed, trained and worked with to overthrow Gaddafi.
A parliamentary inquiry in the U.K. found that, "a limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change by military means," which led to "political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of Isil [Islamic State] in north Africa."
The various Libyan warring factions are now engaged in peace talks aimed at a permanent ceasefire and, according to the UN envoy "holding national elections in the shortest possible timeframe to restore Libya's sovereignty"the very sovereignty that the NATO intervention destroyed.
Senator Bernie Sanders' foreign policy adviser Matthew Duss has called for the next U.S. administration to conduct a comprehensive review of the post-9/11 "War on Terror," so that we can finally turn the page on this bloody chapter in our history.
Duss wants an independent commission to judge these two decades of war based on "the standards of international humanitarian law that the United States helped to establish after World War II," which are spelled out in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. He hopes that this review will "stimulate vigorous public debate about the conditions and legal authorities under which the United States uses military violence."
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