A Modern History Of U.S. Regime Change Efforts.

A look at recent U.S. regime change efforts.

With Trump’s recent regime change in Venezuela , the subject of American regime change is back in the mainstream conversation.

This marks the perfect time to note that the long-running hybrid regime change war on Venezuela is not unique to the country and is a repeat of similar regime change campaigns that Washington has unleashed around the world.

In this article, I will review the recent history of U.S. regime change operations.

Reshaping The Middle East.

In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected as Prime Minister of Israel, and a group of American Zionist Neo-conservatives came up with a plan sent to him to have Israel dominate the Middle East.

These Neo-conservatives such as, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, laid out this plan in a letter sent to the newley elected Benjamin Netanyahu titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” which called for him to abandon the prospect of a two state solution and instead overthrow governments in the Middle East that were seen as too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, first and foremost though, “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”.

When George W. Bush was elected president of the United States in 2000, many of the authors of this document filled up high ranks in his administration, Richard Perle was “A key advisor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld”, Douglas Feith was, “Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005” and David Wurmser was “Middle East Adviser to then US Vice President Dick Cheney”.

After 9/11, these Neo-cons saw it as the perfect opportunity to carry out the “important Israeli strategic objective” of overthrowing Saddam Hussien.

The Pentagon created a Office of Special Plans, which funnelled fabricated intelligence from the U.S’s Iraq puppet Ahmad Chalabi, and a secret rump unit created by then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction.

Similarly, the UK’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair fabricated intelligence claiming Iraq had WMDS and spread the claim through a dossier, despite the fact- as the British Chilcot report later found- “the original reports said that intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy’ and ‘remains limited’ and that ‘there was very little intelligence relating to Iraq’s chemical warfare programme’”, all of which was left out of the UK dossier.

Based on this mass fabrication, the U.S. and UK launched a criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and removed the Saddam Hussein-led regime, which killed 1.03 million people by 2008.

For the U.S, Israel, and the UK, this regime change war was only the beginning of a grander plan to “reshape the Middle East” through regime change.

The U.S. General Wesley Clark said that after 9/11, when he went to the Pentagon and met with “Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz” he learned they came up with a plan to, “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and, finishing off, Iran.”

Clark later revealed that this plan came from a study which was “paid for by the Israelis” which expanded on the clean break document, saying, “if you want to protect Israel, and you want Israel to succeed… you’ve got to get rid of the states that are surrounding”.

The plan was later continued by the Obama administration when the Arab Spring protests erupted across the Middle East, to carry out the already planned regime change in Libya and Syria.

To take out Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the Obama administration organized a bogus humanitarian intervention through NATO, claiming that Gaddafi was about to slaughter civilians.

Based on this false claim, the U.S. and allied NATO states intervened in Libya and bombed the way for “rebels” to take out Muammar Gaddafi.

But in 2015, a UK Parliament Inquiry into the regime change operation found that the claim Muammar Gaddafi was massacring civilians was fabricated, writing, “The Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011”, and “The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians”.

It added, “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”.

Furthermore, it noted that the rebel force backed by NATO, which was presented as moderate and pro-democracy, in reality was largely made up of, “militant Islamist militias” including branches of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The regime change in Libya, was used by the U.S. advance the next regime change war in Syria.

Following the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA established a rat line to, “funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition” adding, “Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida”.

The CIA’s rat line to Al-Qaida linked rebels fighting the Bashar Al Assad regime eventually turned into a CIA program to arm the rebels directly, dubbed Timber Sycamore which the New York Times called, “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA” and “one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s”.

According to the Washington Post in 2015 , Timber Sycamore was, “one the agency’s largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year.”

A declassified State Department cable from 2015 revealed the real reason for the operation, writing, “A new Syrian regime might well be open to early action on the frozen peace talks with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsor since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles” and “Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East” adding, “America can and should help them (Syrian rebels) - and by doing so help Israel”.

Following the CIA regime change program- as the U.S. Pentagon official Dana Stroul, boasted -the U.S. placed crushing sanctions on Syria and occupied one third of the country military which was the “economic powerhouse of Syria” with the intention of keeping Syria in “rubble” in hopes it would lead to regime change, a plan that eventually came through in late 2024, when CIA backed rebels overthrew Bashar Al Assad.

Turning Ukraine Into A U.S. Proxy.

Another major U.S. regime change project was the overthrow of Ukraine’s neutral, elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to turn Ukraine into a U.S. proxy to be used to fight Russia.

The U.S., through USAID and NED, funded groups like New Citizen, which organized protests against Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013.

Once the protests were underway, they were overtaken by far-right extremist groups, including Right Sector and the Svoboda party, who eventually overthrew Yanukovych in a violent coup backed by the U.S. over false claims that Viktor Yanukovych massacred protestors in Maidan Square.

After the coup, the U.S. senator Chris Murphy, who went to Ukraine during the coup, admitted on C-Span, “With respect to Ukraine, we have not sat on the sidelines; we have been very much involved. Members of the Senate have been there, members of the state department that have been there on the (Maidan) square. The Obama administration passed sanctions, the Senate was prepared to pass its own set of sanctions, and as I said, I really think the clear position of the United States has been in part what has led to this change in regime. I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office”.

The U.S. justified backing the coup based on the claim that Viktor Yanukovych’s forces committed a sniper massacre on protestors in Maidan Square, but in-depth research from the University of Ottawa’s Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science, Ivan Katchanovski, proves that the massacre was actually carried out by Right Sector, one of the militant groups behind the coup.

Before the coup took place, then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape deciding who to install in government after Viktor Yanukovych was deposed, eventually deciding that, “Yats is the guy” referring to the Ukrainian opposition leader Arseniy Yatseniuk.

This-as Forbes Magazine noted at the time- was because, “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund’s demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while, “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”.

Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko documented the effect of the IMF-imposed policies after the U.S. imposed regime change in Ukraine, including:

• “Ukraine’s GDP shrinking by approximately 17%”.

• The exchange rate going from “8 hryvnias (Ukrainian dollar) to 1 U.S dollar” in 2013 to “23 hryvnias to the dollar” in 2015

• Inflation rising from 24.9% in 2014 to 43.3% in 2015

• a “significant decline in industrial production during the first two years” after the coup, leading to Ukraine losing “its economic cluster that manufactured goods with high added value (machine engineering)”

• “mining and metallurgical complex, energy (coal production), chemicals, food production”, “sustained significant losses”.

• “an increase in unemployment and the emigration of citizens from Ukraine to neighboring countries—primarily to Poland and Russia.”

• “utility rates increasing by 123%, reaching up to 20% of family income” from the IMF introduced policies

Along with the IMF “reforms” the coup was done to turn Ukraine from a neutral country into a U.S proxy willing to fight Russia.

As Konstantin Bondarenko put it, “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia.”

Following the regime change, the UK’s channel 4 news reported that, “the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum”, which supported abuses against Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population, including by supporting ethnic Russian’s being trapped in a burning trade Union building in Odessa in 2014 and burning alive, which eventually led to all out civil war in Eastern Ukraine.

Furthermore, the new U.S.-backed government dropped its neutral stance on NATO and, as former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg put it was, “keen to ensure that the resolution from the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, through which Ukraine had been promised NATO membership, would be upheld”.

This regime change- by design -provoked the eventual Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and ensuing U.S. proxy war to weaken Russia.

Regime Change In South America.

The recent regime change in Venezuela is far from the only U.S. regime change in South America in recent years.

As Mother Jones reported in 2004, when, “a rebellion erupted against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide”, Haiti’s democratically elected president, “Several leaders of the demonstrations — some of whom also had links to the armed rebels — had been getting organizational help and training from a U.S. government-financed organization”, the International Republican Institute, a subsidiary of the CIA cutout NED.

Mother Jones noted, “In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders. Though IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan — it is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections — a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force. In 2004, several of the people who had attended IRI trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide”.

In 2009, a military coup took place against Honduras’ elected president Manuel Zelaya, and an in-depth investigation fromthe Center for Economic and Policy Research Research Associate Jake Johnston later found that:

high-level US military official met with Honduran coup plotters late the night before the coup, indicating advance knowledge of what was to come;

While the US ambassador intervened to stop an earlier attempted coup, a Honduran military advisor’s warning the night before the coup was met with indifference;

Multiple on-the-record sources support the allegations of a whistleblower at SOUTHCOM’s flagship military training university that a retired general provided assistance after-the-fact to Honduran military leaders lobbying in defense of the coup;

US training of Honduran military leaders, and personal relationships forged during the Cold War, likely emboldened the Honduran military to oust Zelaya and helped ensure the coup’s success;

US military actors were motivated by an obsessive concern with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s perceived influence in the region, rather than just with developments in Honduras itself.

From 2014-2018, the United States National Endowment for Democracy spent $4.1 million funding opposition groups in Nicaragua- which “laid the groundwork for insurrection” that attempted to violently oust the country’s president, Daniel Ortega.

The outlet Global Americans noted during the insurrection in 2018, “it is now quite evident that the U.S. government actively helped build the political space and capacity in Nicaraguan society for the social uprising that is currently unfolding”.

USAID even funded opposition outlets which- before the failed coup attempt- “urged anti-Sandinista forces to storm the presidential residence, kill the president, die by the hundreds doing so, and hang his body in public”.

The U.S. also caused a violent military coup in Bolivia in 2019, by pushing the false claim that the country’s president, Evo Morales, stole the election that year, which was used to justify the military coup, which installed a military dictatorship led by U.S. puppet Jeanine Áñez, who massacred many of Morales’ indigenous supporters when they protested the coup.

The U.S.’s latest regime change in Venezuela is the end of yet another regime change campaign to be added to the long list.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber