The United States government has been involved in and assisted in the overthrow of foreign governments (more recently termed "regime change") without the overt use of U.S. military force. Often, such operations are tasked to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Regime change has been attempted through direct involvement of U.S. operatives, the funding and training of insurgency groups within these countries, anti-regime propaganda campaigns, coup d'états, and other activities usually conducted as operations by the CIA. The U.S. has also accomplished regime change by direct military action, such as following the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 and the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Some argue that non-transparent United States government agencies working in secret sometimes mislead or do not fully implement the decisions of elected civilian leaders and that this has been an important component of many such operations. See Plausible deniability. Some contend that the U.S. has supported more coups against democracies that it perceived as communist, or becoming communist.
The U.S. has also covertly supported opposition groups in various countries without necessarily attempting to overthrow the government. For example, the CIA funded anti-communist political parties in countries such as Italy and Chile; it also armed Kurdish rebels fighting the Ba'athist government of Iraq in the Second Kurdish-Iraqi War prior to the Algiers Agreement.
Famous quotes containing the words covert, united, states, foreign, regime, change and/or actions:
“There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid,
And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;
The city to the soldier’s rage resigned;
Successless wars, and poverty behind;
Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores,
And the rash hunter strangled by the boars;
The newborn babe by nurses overlaid;
And the cook caught within the raging fire he made.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“Emblem: the carapace of the great crowned snail is painted with all the flags of the United Nations.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“So the gentle poet’s name
To foreign parts is blown by fame;
Seek him in his native town,
He is hidden and unknown.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.”
—Augusto Roa Bastos (b. 1917)
“To be told that our child’s behavior is “normal” offers little solace when our feelings are badly hurt, or when we worry that his actions are harmful at the moment or may be injurious to his future. It does not help me as a parent nor lessen my worries when my child drives carelessly, even dangerously, if I am told that this is “normal” behavior for children of his age. I’d much prefer him to deviate from the norm and be a cautious driver!”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)