by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
This is the list of U.S. coups during the Cold War that’s presented in the highly regarded 2018 academic book COVERT REGIME CHANGE, by Lindsey O’Rourke.
(Only the start-date for each coup is shown here, but some of these coups went on for years; 39% succeeded at Government-overthrow, 61% did not. This list is taken from “Table 1.1: U.S.-backed regime change attempts during the Cold War (1947-1989)”):
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France 1947
Italy 1947
Albania 1949
Belarus 1949
Bulgaria 1949
Czechoslovakia 1949
East Germany 1949
Estonia 1949
Latvia 1949
Lithuania 1949
Poland 1949
Romania 1949
Hungary 1949
Russia 1949
Ukaraine 1949
North Korea 1950
Guatemala 1952
Iran 1952
Japan 1952
Indonesia 1954
Syria 1955
Lebanon 1957
Tibet 1958
Laoos 1959
Dominican Republic 1960
Congo 1960
Guyana 1961
Dominican Republic 1961
North Vietnam 1961
Cuba 1961
Chile 1962
Haiti 1963
Bolivia 1963
Angola 1964
Mozambique 1964
Somalia 1964
Brazil 1964
Dominican Republic 1965
Hati 1965
Thailand 1965
South Vietnam 1967
Bolivia 1971
Iraq 1971
Italy 1972
Portugal 1974
Angola 1975
Afghanistan 1979
South Yemen 1979
Grenada 1979
Nicaragua 1979
Nicaragua 1980
Chad 1981
Ethiopia 1981
Poland 1981
Cambodia 1982
Surinam 1982
Libya 1982
Liberia 1983
Chile 1964
Philippines 1984
Angola 1985
Haiti 1986
Panama 1987
—
That list is incomplete. For two examples: it omits Thailand 1948 when the CIA cut itsself in on the profits from the international opium trade, and Indonesia 1965 when President Johnson helped organize the extermination of at least 500,000 land-reform proponents there and helped to install General Suharto (who then embezzled $15-35 billion from the country). Including just those two additional cases, they total to 64 U.S. coups during those 42 years 1947-1989. Also not included are coups that the author felt were only supported by the U.S. Government but not planned by the U.S. Government, such as allegedly “the 1967 Greek coup or the 1976 Argentine coup.” The author recognized that there might have been coups she didn’t know about. Furthermore, she was explicit that her study was aimed at supporting “a theory regarding the security motives driving America’s Cold War interventions.” That is clearly a false theory (that America’s foreign coups were done in order to protect U.S. national security — which was virtually never the case). Two examples showing it to be false were the two I mentioned that she had excluded: the 1948 CIA Thai coup to install a regime that would cut the CIA in for off-the-books funding of the CIA from the drug underworld (kickbacks, basically protection-money aid to the CIA), and the 1965 Indonesian coup to benefit U.S. owners of rubber plantations there. Routinely, scholars are willing to start with false assumptions in order to suppport an unrealistically favorable view of their Govenment. It’s myth-preserving scholarship, not science; and it is common; it’s routine in the social ‘sciences’.
A realistic presumption would be that ever since Truman became President in 1945 and started (in 1947, the year he started the CIA) America’s coups outside the Western hemisphere (O’Rourke also mentions that there had been U.S. coups in “Nicaragua (1909, 1910, and 1926), Honduras (1911, the Dominican Republic (1912, 1914, and 1916), Mexico (1914), Haitis (1915, and Costa Rica (1919)”), there have been around 80 of them since Truman came into office in 1945. During that same period, there have been at least 130 U.S. military invasions, plus countless illegal sanctions, in order to conquer countries it covets adding to its empire. After WW2, the vast majority of the world’s international aggressions — coups, invasions, subversions, and sanctions — have come from, or been initiated by, the U.S. Government. Rather than policing the world to maintain peace such as it claims, it has been the world’s biggest organized-criminal operation and source of wars, with no close second.
