The only two countries that were arguably better off after a U.S. regime change were post World War II Germany and Japan. From Medea Bejamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies at antiwar.com:
For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that U.S. bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth – it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.
As a U.S. armada gathers off Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) – the “Nightstalkers” – the same unit that, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.
Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”
Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away – but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.
