It would be difficult to find a better example of U.S. government double-dealing and hypocrisy than U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela and Egypt.
The U.S. government funnels millions of dollars in foreign aid into both countries — aid that has been forcibly taken from the pockets of the American people by the Internal Revenue Service.
In Venezuela, this is accomplished with such U.S. agencies as USAID, which is reputed to oftentimes serve as one of the CIA’s many front organizations, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
The U.S. government’s rationale for sending foreign aid into Venezuela? U.S. officials say that they just want to promote “democracy.”
Really?
Then, why are they, at the same time, sending millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid in the form of Apache helicopters to the Egyptian military dictatorship that not too long smashed Egypt’s experiment with democracy by violently ousting the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamad Morsi?
So, let’s ask ourselves the obvious question: How can the U.S. government honestly be advancing “democracy” with its foreign aid in Venezuela when it is, at the same time, helping
Egypt’s military dictatorship maintain its tyrannical hold in that country?
The answer is simple: The millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid that are being funneled into Venezuela have absolutely nothing to do with advancing “democracy.” Instead, the only objective is to accomplish what U.S. foreign aid has accomplished in Egypt — the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an independent dictator who refuses to do the bidding of the U.S. government, and his replacement with a powerful dictatorship that is loyal to the U.S. government, preferably a military dictatorship, like the one in Egypt, owing to its ability to better maintain “order and stability” by incarcerating, torturing, and killing domestic opponents of the tyranny.
After all, isn’t that what the U.S. officials did in Chile in the 1970s? They interfered heavily with the internal affairs of that country. When they finally succeeded in ousting the president of the country, Salvador Allende, from power, who did they replace him with? You got it — a military dictatorship, one that immediately embarked on a brutal campaign to maintain “order and stability” by incarcerating, torturing, raping, or murdering tens of thousands of people who were suspected of holding communist or socialist beliefs. U.S. officials loved it. They not only had helped to bring on the coup, they also flooded the Pinochet regime with millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid, knowing full well that Pinochet’s goons were jailing, torturing, raping, and killing tens of thousands of innocent people in the name of maintaining “order and stability” within the country.
Of course, detractors might say, “But Jacob, Maduro is a socialist, just as Allende in Chile was, and Morsi is a Muslim,” to which I would reply: So what? What business is it of the U.S. government to be ousting foreign leaders from power simply because of their political, economic, or religious beliefs?
Anyway, no one can deny that in principle U.S. officials share the socialist philosophy of Maduro and, for that matter, his communist idol, former Cuban President Fidel Castro. They all share a common commitment, for example, to such socialistic programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, farm subsidies, public schooling, income taxation, occupational licensure, price controls, fiat money, central banking, drug laws, gun control, and federal ownership of vast tracts of land. Maduro, like Castro, has simply carried out socialist policies to a greater extent than U.S. officials have, which is why Venezuela is suffering greater economic difficulties than the United States is suffering.
It was no different in Iran in 1953. The CIA engineered the ouster of Prime Minister Mohamad Mossadegh. The person they replaced him with, the Shah of Iran, wasn’t a military dictator but he was a brutal dictator nonetheless. With the full support of the CIA, the Shah and his domestic military-police-intelligence forces embarked on a 25-year reign of terror against the Iranian people with the aim of maintaining “order and stability.” That’s why the Iranian people violently revolted in 1979 against their own government—a CIA-installed and CIA–supported government.
Consider Guatemala in 1954. The CIA engineers the ouster of President Jacobo Arbenz and replaces him with … yes, a brutal military dictatorship. As the world witnesses Ukraine’s devolution into civil war after the recent U.S. intervention in that county, don’t forget that the CIA’s similar intervention in Guatemala succeeded in igniting a violent civil war that lasted decades and tortured, maimed, or killed millions of Guatemalans.
This is the whole history of the U.S. national-security state’s interventionist foreign policy. It is a history of dictatorship, death, and destruction. And it’s all a big game, one in which U.S. officials interfere with the internal political affairs of other countries with the aim of getting pro-U.S. dictatorships into power.
Sometimes it’s done in the name of promoting “democracy.” Sometimes it’s done through assassination, as the CIA tried repeatedly to do to Castro. Sometimes it’s done by invasion, as the Pentagon and CIA did with Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein, who, not surprisingly, had been a partner and ally of the Pentagon and CIA in the 1980s.
But make no mistake about it: the U.S. government’s foreign aid and interventionism have nothing to do with promoting “democracy” or, for that matter, freedom. It’s all about installing and supporting brutal pro-U.S. dictatorships in Venezuela, Egypt, and everywhere else.