Chile, Nicaragua, Iran

1. Chile: the entire left rant is founded on a deliberate lie. Presume that Allende was a saint. He was the 2nd coming and we are damned because we killed him again. The fact remains that CIA / US influence on the happening of the coup or its timing were marginal at best and irrelevant in all probability. Kissinger and Nixon did lie about US involvement. So does the left to this day. The Chilean military did not kill the saint as soon as he took office. They killed him after he had mismanaged the country into virtual civil war. They did so in direct response to a request by a majority of the Chilean parliament. Allende had been ruling by decree, ignoring both parliament and the Chilean Supreme Court. This led the Chilean military, which had previously brushed off both American requests to remove him and American bribes to speed the process, to dump him before they lost the power to do so. Chile had 3 political groupings, each with roughly 1/3rd of the vote. The Christian Democrats initially supported Allende, which is how he took office. They then turned against him, after which the military coup took place.

2. Nicaragua: let us be clear on which era we are talking about. The initial interventions up till FDR withdrew our garrison was pure Yankee Carib imperialism. We intervened in Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, the DR, Haiti and Guatemala directly and repeatedly. Partly it was bill collecting for Wall Street. Partly it was the flip side of the Monroe Doctrine - if Europeans could not intervene to secure payment of debt we would send the Marines to seize the customs house and collect everyone's money. The issue then becomes why did we stick with Samoza as long as we did. The answer is mostly a mixture of ignoring the Carib (except during immediate crisis) and lack of a viable alternative. Most Carib countries in that era offered a choice of oligarchs or what to us were dangerous radicals. Carter finally brought down the last Samoza - the entire political class had turned against him but he had still fought the Sandanista Front to a draw before Jimmy the great slayer of attack rabbits pulled the plug. He sent the deputy director of the CIA down to tell Samoza and his top officers that either they left in the morning or their green cards would be invalidated, their Miami bank accounts seized and the relatives they had parked in Florida for safekeeping expelled. The idea was that the 'moderates' would keep the reds on the Junta from turning the country into a satellite. Next joke. They immediately did the full tilt militarized red state, froze out the moderates (big shock), and became the rear area for the Salvador reds whose final offensive almost swept to victory before Reagan took office. All this happened BEFORE the 'Contras' were anything more than some renegade cattle rustlers on the Honduran border.

My criticism here (of U.S. policy, not of Scott's statement) is that we weren't interested in whether there was a viable alternative or not. Indeed, as Scott says in his criticism of Carter's policy, we could have gotten rid of the Somoza dynasty (and without violence even!) at any time. Turning some nebbish into a viable and (relatively) moderate candidate for power would have been harder, but eminently doable. Neglect of Nicaragua and political swings here in the U.S. from FDR to Jimmuh resulted in us sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.

3. Iran: This one is complicated. The royals were opposed by a mixture of nationalists, democratic reformers, radicals, Reds, national minorities, Islamicists and local notables with a beef about patronage. It would have been possible to have split the very poorly unified opposition and backed a moderate democracy. We lacked the local knowledge. Those who had the local knowledge in the US and UK were mostly concerned with protecting the oil investment from nationalization. There was also hysterical anti-Communism in the early 1950's such that it was hard to work with local reformers.