Saturday, December 21, 2019

The Real Lesson of Afghanistan Is That Regime Change Does Not Work

This premise misses the obvious lesson that Washington insiders refuse to learn: the underlying fault is not in how the U.S. tries and fails to reconstruct societies destroyed by its "Regime changes," but in the fundamental illegitimacy of regime change itself.

The first step in targeting a country for regime change is to delegitimize its existing government in the eyes of U.S. and allied publics, with targeted propaganda or "Information warfare" to demonize its president or prime minister.

One lesson for those of us opposed to regime change operations is that we must challenge these campaigns at this first stage if we want to prevent their escalation.

The U.S. has relied more heavily on coups and proxy wars in the wake of its military disasters in Korea, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan and Iraq, to attempt regime change without the political liability of heavy U.S. military casualties.

This dangerous presumption led the U.S. into military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan despite its previous "Lessons learned" in Vietnam, underlining the central unlearned lesson that war itself is a catastrophe.

Any responsible government Americans elect in 2020 must learn from the well-documented failure and catastrophic human cost of U.S. regime change efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Honduras, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, Iran and now Bolivia.

Permanently ending this entire U.S. policy of coercive regime change is therefore a political, moral and existential imperative.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/20/the-real-lesson-of-afghanistan-is-that-regime-change-does-not-work/

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