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Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese 
The United States has perfected the art of regime change operations. The US is the largest empire in world history with more than 1 000 military bases and troops operating throughout the world.

In addition to military force, the US uses the soft power of regime change, often through “Colour Revolutions.” The US has been building its empire since the Civil War era, but it has been in the post-World War II period that it has perfected regime change operations.

Have the people of the United States been the victims of regime change operations at home? Have the wealthiest and the security state created a government that serves them, rather than the people?

To answer these questions, we begin by examining how regime change works and then look at whether those ingredients are being used domestically.

Almost from the start, the CIA’s role has been more than intelligence gathering. It has been a key player in putting in place governments friendly to the United States and conducting other operations, e.g. the CIA is currently involved in drone strikes.

One of the first regime change operations of the CIA was Operation Ajax conducted in Iran, and led by Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, who was president when the US solidified its global empire ambitions.

The CIA was founded in 1947 and the regime change coup in Iran was 1953. Greg Maybury writes in “Another Splendid Little Coup“: “Placing to one side an early dress rehearsal in Syria in 1949, the Iran coup was the first post-War exercise in regime change upon the part of Anglo-American alliance . . .” Just this month the US government released documents showing the CIA and State Department’s planning and implementation of the coup against the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh.

This release supplements one from 2013 that did not reveal the full role of the US in the coup.

Newspaper office burned in Tehran during 1953 US coup in Iran.

The Iran coup was crude compared to more modern efforts but had the ingredients that have become common — civil society protests against the government, media reports supporting the protests, agents within the government supporting the coup and replacement of the government with a US-friendly regime.

The Iran coup may have been the most costly mistake in US foreign policy because it undermined a secular democratic government in Iran that could have been the example for the region. Instead the US installed the brutal Shah of Iran, whose rule ended in the 1979 revolution, in which, as Maybury reports, the US was also implicated because it felt the Shah had overstayed his welcome.

The Iran coup was perceived as a great CIA success, so it was copied in other Middle Eastern countries as well as countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Regime change is still a major tool of US foreign policy. There is a long-term ongoing coup campaign in Venezuela, with its most recent episode last week in which a helicopter attack on the Supreme Court was tied to the US DEA and CIA.

The US has allied with oligarchs, supported violent protests and provided funds for the opposition, which has also worked to undermine the Venezuelan economy — a tactic the US has used in other coups, e.g, the coup of Allende in Chile.

The coup in Ukraine, which the media falsely calls a “democratic revolution,” was, as the head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor says, “the most blatant coup in history.” The CIA and State Department played the lead roles.

Victoria Nuland handing out snacks to Ukraine protesters.

Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state under Clinton, bragged that the US spent $5 billion to build civil society opposition against a government that leaned toward Russia.

The government funded civil society opposition through USAID, which is the open vehicle for what the CIA used to do covertly, along with the National Endowment for Democracy.

This funding was used to build oppositional civil society groups and create destabilisation. They focused on the issue of corruption, which exists in every government, and built it up to a centrepiece for regime change. The US allied with extremist right-wing groups in Ukraine. — Global Research.