List of military interventions of the United States

Clockwise, from top left: U.S. Marines battle in Hamo village during the Tet Offensive, extraction of troops after an airmobile assault, a burning Viet Cong base camp in Mỹ Tho, Vietnamese civilians killed by U.S. troops during the My Lai Massacre

United States' military actions and war crimes of violence against living persons that are unlawful under international law, from the First World War onwards.

War crimes are "violations of the laws or customs of war"; including but not limited to "murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps", "the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war", the killing of hostages, "the wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, and any devastation not justified by military, or civilian necessity".

Incidents in WWII involving desecration of Japanese remains, and other such non-military actions are not listed in the Timeline, but are linked in the See Also section.

The numbers dead are rarely large for regime change; comparisons between the importance of the dead and the loss of democratic and socialist governments are unlikely to be uncontroversial, but quite likely to be thought-provoking.

The USA engaged in more than 20 covert military actions designed to cause instability in governments in half century between the formation of the early incarnations of the CIA the end of the Cold War, the great majority involving the Special Activities Division (SAD) and Special Operations Group (SOG) of the Central Intelligence Agency. During that period it mounted two full-scale invasions: the Korean and Viet Nam wars. The pace of its actions has increased, and the amount of overt actions increased since then; the US has engaged in closer to 30 military actions in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, and six full-scale invasions: the Gulf War, the invasion of Panama, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the Somali Civil War, the Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan.

After the Cold War, the CIA's role changed significantly, and SAD and SOG forces were increasingly used in overt warfare, while covert regime change was more often carried out by the covert non-military divisions of the CIA, using destabilization techniques (propaganda, paid protestors, bribes, blackmail and threats of government officials, black propaganda and control of the press, etc).

One exception is the use of CIA drones in attacks on military leaders in Iraq, which was alluded to by Bob Woodward in a CBS interview Another is the ongoing, as of Feb 2011, covert assaults on Iraq by CIA squads begun by GW Bush (junior) and first reported in 2007.

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Footnotes and non-military interventions

• American mutilation of Japanese war dead
• Operation Gladio (Wikipedia:Operation Gladio) US intelligence sleeper cells in NATO countries and throughout Europe, established in 1948. Its role in NATO countries' affairs was primarily subversion, the Strategy of tension (WP:Sot) of False flag operations, but its connections to numerous nefarious and malign influences are many, and despite numerous investigations by European governments, it never seems to fully go away.

The Algerian War of 1958. The CIA was involved in Algeria incidents in 1958, 1963, 1968, and 1969 (and it would follow that more current events may be influenced by them, if only by the Butterfly Effect)

• Tibet, 1950-: It is this author's opinion that seeing the very positive reaction by what has normally been a thorn in the side of the US' neo-imperialism, the UN, to the Tibet issue, was what made the CIA and later the FBI aware of the potential of working both sides of the political divide with astroturf seeding of (from the CIA's perspective) "useful idiots" in human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Nothing like a solid chunk of 'thinking globally and acting locally' for example, to keep the CIA and its operatives from being further outnumbered in the field by aid workers and reporters. And of course if the middle or left can be kept busy pressuring China to reinstate a religious oligarchy (workers schlepping rice up the mountain to the monks in their temples), then so much the better.
• Angola, 1975-1980. In a pattern that would be repeated nearly 20 years later, the CIA, armed forces, and Machiavellian foreign policymaker minders of a president newly pressed in the Neocon mold with aw-shucks and gusto to spare, would turn his pet peeves into a policy of crippling warfare and puppet government diplomacy. Reagan sent cheap and effective missile launching systems to take out the helicopters that had given the communist forces an advantage. Namibia's uranium mines were now safe for democracy.

Revolutionary war really is a messy business; left-wing historians ignore death tolls and killing civilians altogether or capitulate to the mainstream view of it being genetically linked to communism. The first step in reducing the bloodshed is understand how and why it occurs, but no. So one of the stories left to history of Angola is tales by a missionary of the godless communists strafing peasants with a helicopter gunship (no mention of how many times more than one that happened, of course). See Angola 1980s on Wikipedia. And of course it is the only story about Angola in the WP article.

• Cambodia 1980. Ronald Reagan authorized support for vestiges of the Khmer Rouge to destabilize Cambodia's government, which was strengthened by Viet Namese occupation forces. The coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, (KPNLF, under Son Sann) was led against the government that had replaced it. Both were Communist, and the Khmer Rouge was universally considered the most bloody regime of the 20th C. After 1.2 million deaths (Admittedly deaths from famine were due in part to the war. But unlike other famines used as boogeymen by many a right wing charge of genocide by socialist governments, the war was a direct result of US warmaking), more than half as many as the notorious Khmer Rouge had killed, the Vietnamese withdrew, and Cambodia's Communist regime fell eight years after the US destabilization began. The US would return to finish the next half of the plan in 1991

Rangers from Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, US Army, prepare to take La Comandancia in the El Chorrillo neighborhood of Panama City during the invasion of Panama of December 1989

• Cambodia 1991. After three years, the US returned to Cambodia. Overtly, with UN support even, they overthrew the very Khmer Rouge government they had backed in 1980-1988. In keeping with their new stance of overt regime change, the invasion was out in the open this time. And during this honeymoon period with the rest of the world, as the conquering heroes that had ousted communism, and in a country that was synonymous with the notorious Khmer Rouge, they even got UN support to oust the very Khmer Rouge they had given arms to in 1980-1988. It took a tortuous 6 years, but 'free' elections were held in 1995, and the country was 'stable' by 1997.

Propaganda poster, Regime of the Colonels-era Greece. Similarities to the logo below are more than coincidence, see Wikipedia:Operation Gladio#Greece

• Iraq 1973-1975. The CIA had in 1953 toppled a democratic government to install Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the last Shah of Iran. His father had been the largest supplier of goods to prewar Nazi Germany, and the US colluded with him to finance and arm Kurdish rebels in an attempt to overthrow Iraq's Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. This started a chain of circumstances that led to the death of hundreds of Iraqis and more Kurds, on top of the deaths in the Iraq and Iran hostilities. Iran and Iraq signed a peace treaty in 1975; the CIA support was cut off.

The Shah denied his useful tools the Kurds refuge in Iran, even as many were slaughtered. The U.S. decided not to press the issue with the Shah. "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work," declared Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

• Venezuela 2002. The Department of State report is worded strangely, very much like someone avoiding the truth.

4.“Did opponents of the Chávez government, if any, who met with embassy or Department officials request or seek the support of the U.S. government for actions aimed at removing or undermining that government? If so, what was the response of embassy or Department officials to such requests? How were any such responses conveyed, orally or in writing?”

Logo of Operation Gladio, sponsor of the Regime of the Colonels government (propaganda poster shown above); the more derogatory word 'junta' is sometimes used

Taking the question to be whether, in any such meetings, Chávez opponents sought help from the embassy or the Department for removing or undermining the Chávez government through undemocratic or unconstitutional means, the answer is no.

Which leaves unsaid whether regime change was attempted through 'democratic or constitutional' means. One also may assume a degree of latitude in the interpretation of that phrase from a person using such evasion.

• Ukraine, 2004. Orange Revolution (WP): CIA paid demonstrators and pressured government officials. See Post-Cold War covert regime change by the US#Ukraine, 2004
• Lebanon, 2005: On the 5th of March, 2005, the New York Post reported:

U.S. intelligence sources told The Post that CIA and European intelligence services are quietly giving money and logistical support to organizers of the anti-Syrian protests to ramp up the pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to completely quit Lebanon The Wikipedia:Cedar Revolution followed, and is thus claimed to have been influenced by the CIA.

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-179-1552-13, Griechenland, erhängter Mann in Ortschaft.jpg

Greece, 1943: A member of the nationalist and pro-Nazi Security Battalions stands for the photograph; the hanged man was executed for aiding the Greek Resistance. During this period, the Resistance cause attracted communists in large numbers, reaching a peak of 50,000; the anti-communists were attracted to the collaborationist Security Battalions, and never comprised more than 12,000 of Resistance members. The US began backing all resistance groups in order to oppose the threat of Nazism, but their fear of communism was too strong, and soon the US ceased funding any resistance groups other than anti-communist ones. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman authorized the pre-CIA Office of Policy Coordination to support aid to Greek anti-communists in cooperation with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. The US Army Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) also provided personnel

• Palestinian Authority, 2006-present (Wikipedia:Battle of Gaza (2007). After winning Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Hamas and Fatah formed the Palestinan authority national unity government in 2007, headed by Ismail Haniya. In June 2007 Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and removed Fatah officials. The ICRC estimated that at least 118 people were killed and more than 550 wounded during the fighting in the week up to June 15.

In May 2007, US officials promised to continue funding a $84 million aid package aimed at improving the fighting ability of the Abbas Presidential Guard loyal to Fatah.

In the April 2008 the journalist David Rose suggested that the United States collaborated with the Palestinian Authority and Israel to attempt a coup on Hamas, and Hamas pre-empted the coup. Hamas Foreign Minister Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar has echoed this view, and called the arming of Fatah by the United States an "American coup d'état".

• Venezuela, 2007 See Operation Pliers

Venezuela claims that a confidential memorandum (concerning Operation Pliers) from the US embassy to the CIA revealed and circulated by the Venezuelan government on November 26, 2007 provides details on the activity of a CIA unit engaged in clandestine action to destabilize the forth-coming national referendum and to coordinate the civil and military overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Venezuela. The memo shows the US Embassy spending $8 million dollars in propaganda alone.

See Also

• United States of America
• Cold War covert overthrow of governments by the US
• Post-Cold War covert regime change by the US
• US military operations in the 20th and 21st centuries
• private military corporations
• Iranian coup d'état of 1953
• Imperialism Pool/History
• United States of America and state terrorism

• Wikipedia:List of war crimes
• Wikipedia:List of successful coups d'état

External links

• Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls
• What People Are Saying - Not the Enemy
• Data from William Blum book, "Rogue State" supplemented by casulty data from various sources
• Statistics of American Genocide and Mass Murder - R. J. Rummel
• U.S. Interventions - 1945 to the Present William Blum
• Timeline of United States military operations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Covert U.S. regime change actions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• History of U.S. Military Interventions since 1890 by Zoltan Grossman