Talk:United States involvement in regime change/Archive 2

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Honduras June 28, 2009

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/opinion/la-oe-frank-honduras-drug-war-20130212 http://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/11/29/wikileaks-honduras-state-dept-busted-support-coup http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/clinton-s-honduran-hypocrisy-killing-democracy-supporting-economic-inequality-abandoning-women http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/hillary-clintons-link-to_b_9470362.html http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/hillary-clinton-honduraslatinamericaforeignpolicy.html https://theintercept.com/2017/11/26/honduras-election-pacheco-security-minister-is-running-drugs-according-to-court-testimony/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 47.198.227.124 (talk) 06:18, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

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Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars

Do the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars really count as regime change? Aren't they more akin to imperialism rather than regime change? By contrast, the Hawaiian Revolution overthrew an indigenous government in addition to leading to eventual U.S. annexation. - Presidentman talk · contribs (Talkback) 22:03, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Imperialism and regime change are not mutually exclusive categories. The regimes in those areas were changed as a result of US military actions and so they seems to fit well within this article.--NYCJosh (talk) 14:55, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Iran 2005 Removal

Why does this tab exist when it clearly states in the paragraph that it had nothing to do with America but is instead an Israeli conspiracy? It shouldn't be here on the virtue that America is not involved. In an article about "United States involvement in regime change" there is no United States involvement in this 2005 Iran section and thus should be removed. Earl Hammond (talk) 02:21, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

One of the sources of the 2005 Iran section states that a US official claimed it was an Israeli action disguised as an American action. The section includes that statement. But the other sources of the section state that it was an American regime change action. The US official's claim that it was an Israeli action may itself be part of a US effort to disguise the true US nature of the action. Official statements and, in particular, denials, about covert actions, have to be taken with heaping spoonfuls of salt. Often such covert actions are designed according to the principle of "plausible deniability," so official denial is to expected and, indeed, the official issuing the denial may believe that he is telling the truth. Or the US official may be mistaken, or he may be correct or partially correct. We can't just negate the other sources because of this.--NYCJosh (talk) 15:05, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

1980 Turkey coup

Any Turkish readers out there? There is some info about US support for the 1980 coup in Turkey but I can't read it. It's footnotes 31-34 in this link: http://military.wikia.com/wiki/1980_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat?action=edit&section=9

Here I have copied and pasted them from this link.

31. Birand, Mehmet Ali. 12 Eylül, Saat: 04.00, 1984, pg. 1

32.↑ Hear Paul Henze say it: Fethullahçı Gladyo on YouTube 8m20s in.

33.↑ Balta, Ibrahim. "Birand’dan Paul Henze’ye ‘sesli–görüntülü’ yalanlama," Zaman, 14 June 2003.(Turkish)

34.↑ "Paul Henze ‘Bizim çocuklar yaptı’ demiş" (in Turkish). Hürriyet. 2003-06-14. Archived from the original on 3 October 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20081003162825/http://hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr/goster/haber.aspx?viewid=279384. --NYCJosh (talk) 15:22, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Blatant misrepresentations of fact

GPRamirez5, having just been told by an uninvolved editor at RSN not to delete scholarship in favor of op-eds, has proceeded to do exactly that anyway—replacing what Salim Yaqub calls "the most detailed and comprehensive study to date of U.S.–Iraqi relations from the late 1950s to the 1970s" (Gibson 2015) with a New York Times "Opinion" piece by an author (Roger Morris) with no expertise on Iraq whatsoever. Because GPRamirez5 took the garbage opinion piece at face value, and has little depth of understanding about this case, he also regurgitated the op-ed's false claim that the highly respected CIA expert David Wise endorses allegations that the CIA supported the 1963 Ba'thist coup in Iraq. In fact, Morris blatantly misrepresented Wise, who had never said anything of the kind. Wise subsequently went on record to dispute Morris's account: "But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s. David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, says he is only aware of records showing that a CIA group known as the "Health Alteration Committee" tried to assassinate Kassem in 1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief."—Reuters, April 20, 2003. (That's why we have WP:RSOPINION in the first place!) In another edit, GPRamirez5 retained Gibson, but only for the shockingly ridiculous misrepresentation that "It remains generally accepted among scholars that the CIA was behind" the famous October 1959 Ba'thist assassination attempt on Qasim. Anyone with any knowledge of the relevant historiography would know that that is completely false; as a consequence, GPRamirez5 has been unable to produce even one (1) example of a scholar endorsing Sale's article after I asked him repeatedly to do so, and yet he continues to insist that such scholars exist—and, in fact, are the majority! These edits are the product either of incompetence or are simply deliberate lies, and they will not be allowed in without consensus and contrary to the advice given at RSN.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:46, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Again, GPRamirez5 is cherrypicking from a few Google searches and likely has no idea if Sale's allegations are actually "generally accepted among scholars"—he just doesn't care. Very few Middle East scholars have ever even discussed Sale's 2003 article, but among the tiny minority who have, what follows is a representative sample:

• According to a thesis by an author strongly sympathetic to Aburish: "Aburish thinks the CIA connection with Hussein before his Egyptian exile is not possible. ... (James) Akins likewise discounted Sale's version: 'Richard Sale is very good and is, I would say, unusually reliable but if he said, wrote or believed that the CIA was behind this attack on Qassem, he's just wrong.' Without confirmation Sale's claims cannot be considered historical."
• Wolfe-Hunnicutt 2011 discusses Sale in one footnote: "I am unaware of any evidence of covert relations between the CIA and the Ba'th prior to the October 7. See Citino, 256-257. It seems more likely that it was October 7 that brought the Ba'th to the attention of the US government."
• As mentioned above, the only published, in-depth academic source to discuss Sale that either GPRamirez5 or I have found is Gibson 2015, which states: "The body of evidence available does not suggest that the United States was directly complicit in the attempted assassination. First, the SCI analysis makes clear that the communists would be the primary beneficiaries of covert action against Qasim. Second, just days before the attack, Allen Dulles predicted that it would occur within the "next two months," not a week. Third, the SCI and NSC had just reaffirmed the nonintervention policy. Fourth, the SCI had raised concerns that Qasim's assassination could lead to a communist takeover. Fifth, while the CIA was preparing for the contingency of a communist takeover, it had previously indicated that it had few assets that could influence a post-Qasim Iraq. Finally, the CIA was not confident that pro-Nasser elements could even carry off a coup, which proved accurate."—Source: Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7.

The sources seem to unanimously say one thing, yet GPRamirez5 insists that the "consensus" is exactly the opposite, even as he refuses to demonstrate that by citing multiple high-quality RS (or any RS!) to the effect that Sale's article is a non-controversial episode "generally accepted among scholars" of U.S. foreign relations. Which scholars, GPRamirez5? YOU STILL HAVEN'T CITED EVEN ONE!TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 01:18, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

No uninvolved editor reprimanded me for the record. And to reiterate, we should trust Roger Morris over your more obscure sources for three reasons: 1) Having a Guggenheim Fellowship, Morris is one of the most distinguished scholars in the country. 2) He in fact isn't the only source for the claim. 3) His article appears to have been cited more frequently by academics than Gibson's book. And its often cited favorably, as it is in the Ismaels' book, a literal textbook on Middle East history.-GPRamirez5 (talk) 03:25, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

So, you can't substantiate your claims about David Wise? And you still can't tell me which scholars, specifically, have supported Sale? If you can't do that, then you're not really addressing anything of substance. Morris is not a distinguished Iraq scholar.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:04, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

One things that leaps out to me when reading the Morris column is "America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in discolsures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the C.I.A." What "disclosures by the Senate" is he talking about? Does Morris mean the Church Committee? If so, it would take an incredible logical leap to say that the Church Committee "widely substantiated" any of the very specific claims Morris makes. Also, as TTAAC says, while Wise has previously written on CIA covert action in Iraq ([1]), he said nothing resembling the words Morris put in his mouth. Therefore, I agree with TTAAC that this opinion piece should not be used, as Morris appears very cavalier about the facts.--יניב הורון (talk) 14:03, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

The fifth paragraph of the article you linked to יניב הורון—

Enter the gruesomely named Health Alteration Committee, a CIA unit that had as its purpose doing exactly what its name suggested. The committee decided to "incapacitate" a target described in the Church Committee's assassination report as "an Iraqi colonel." Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA's Technical Services Division mailed a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief to the target, identified in subsequent published reports as Kassem. The CIA told the senators on the Church Committee that the handkerchief had not worked, but that the target "had suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad." That description would fit Kassem, who was killed in that manner during a 1963 coup led by officers of the Baath Party, the political instrument of Hussein's rise to power.

Nothing here contradicts Morris. And I'm sure this isn't the only thing Wise has written about Kassem and the CIA. -GPRamirez5 (talk) 15:14, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Which is consistent with Reuters's "But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s. David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, says he is only aware of records showing that a CIA group known as the "Health Alteration Committee" tried to assassinate Kassem in 1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief." Wise never made any claim that the CIA had somehow orchestrated the 1963 coup.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 15:46, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Wise has written about a hundred articles and a dozen books. How do you know he "never made any claim..." Stop with trying to second-guess the scholars—It's a grossly WP:OR attitude.-GPRamirez5 (talk) 15:59, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

"the scholars"? You mean the Morris op-ed again? I'm quite familiar with Wise's work, but I'm not citing my own OR; I'm citing Wise himself as quoted in Reuters, April 20, 2003 (in a hard news report, not an op-ed). Wise told David Morgan that Morris's op-ed was the first time that he had ever heard about the CIA's supposed support for the Ba'th. In light of that, it's bizarre that you won't concede the point, especially when we both know that op-eds cannot be used for factual claims about living people. (Not to mention, the Morris op-ed doesn't even explicitly support your proposed text—Morris implies that Wise, a highly respected authority on the CIA, endorses all of his claims, but all that he says explicitly is "America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated ... in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise". Obviously, once the lie is discovered Morris can always say that that bit was just in reference to the infamous poisoned handkerchief, not the 1963 coup.)TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 16:27, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Also, observant readers will note that Morris claims in his op-ed that the U.S. actually supported Qasim "from 1958 to 1960 ... as a counter to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt." Contrary to what GPRamirez5 has suggested, this assertion runs directly counter to Sale's "report" alleging that the Ba'th's famous 1959 assassination attempt on Qasim was a collaboration between Egyptian intelligence and the CIA. Of course, Morris is not an expert on the history of Iraq and I would not use him to contradict the experts if the experts said something else, but my own reading of the academic literature on the history of Iraq only underscores how extraordinarily FRINGE Sale truly is—no RS seems to have supported or corroborated any aspect of his 2003 article, period. (GPRamirez5 erroneously stated that Sale is "generally accepted among scholars," but he has steadfastly refused to cite or quote any of these alleged "scholars" after I have asked him about five times to do so across various threads, presumably because they do not exist.)TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 08:13, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

TheTimesAreAChanging your own source Gibson acknowledged that the US see-sawed between Nasser and Qasim, just as it see-sawed back and forth about the assassination plan. And of course it was very clear in my last edit that Gibson acknowledged that most scholars disagreed with him. Your own favorite source acknowledged that he is the FRINGE.-GPRamirez5 (talk) 14:16, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

I've already explained above that your claim that Gibson characterizes Sale as the "academic consensus" and himself as FRINGE, based on a cherrypicked quote from the introduction of a book you haven't read, is a tendentious and bad-faith misrepresentation unsustainable in context. All Gibson says is that there have been various questionable claims about CIA activities in Iraq—none of which, he emphasizes, have been proven—that have nevertheless garnered acceptance among some "scholars"—scholars that he names in the relevant footnotes. (He then devotes the rest of the 200-page book to explaining why these allegations are not credible.) Gibson does not say that, in the 12 years since its publication to the 2015 publication of Sold Out?, Sale's 2003 report has become widely or universally accepted by all major experts on U.S. foreign relations, as you insist. (Indeed, I doubt that Gibson alone would be a strong enough source by itself to advance such a charge in Wikipedia's voice!) I don't think that I'm being unreasonable here: If, as you insist (sans any evidence), Sale's 2003 report has become widely or universally accepted by all major experts on U.S. foreign relations, you should be able to demonstrate that by citing multiple high-quality RS on this putative "academic consensus." We both know that even a cursory review of the literature would prove you wrong, which is why you have refused to do so. I'll change my mind once you present any sources for your view.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:33, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Other Press

NYCJosh cites a book by a former 60 Minutes reporter and published by Other Press for the claim that "The declassified papers of the British Cabinet of 1963 also disclose that the coup was backed by the CIA and the British. The Guardian, London, January 1, 1994, 5." I tracked down this 1994 Guardian article by Seamus Milne some time ago out of curiosity. Suffice it to say, it does not support the claim in question:

EVIDENCE of the British government's strong support for the first Iraqi government led by Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party is revealed in the enthusiasm with which Macmillan's cabinet secretly agreed to arm the new Baghdad regime, writes Seumas Milne.

The Ba'athist overthrow of General Kassem in February, 1963, in a bloody anti-communist coup backed by the CIA, was accompanied by the killing of about 5,000 communists and supporters of the dead leader.

Less than two months later Edward Heath - then Lord Privy Seal - gave a sympathetic report to cabinet on an Iraqi request for military aircraft and armoured personnel carriers.

"If these inquiries reflected a disposition on the part of the new government of Iraq to reduce their dependence on the Soviet Union, we should seek to take advantage of it," the future prime minister said.

The only worry was that British equipment might be used to attack Kuwait, but the government pressed ahead with the arms supplies anyway.

By June, there was some ministerial nervousness at the "ruthless methods" being used by the Baghdad regime against the Kurds.

Lord Home, then foreign secretary, warned that the government might be criticised if British weapons were used to repress the Kurdish community. The cabinet slowed the flow, but in September military supplies were again sharply stepped up.

They included 16 Wessex helicopters, 20 training aircraft, small arms, mortars, ammunition, Saracen carriers and 3,000 rockets. "These arms are wanted urgently by the Iraqis for operations against the Kurds ... our interest lies in a gradual supply of arms to meet Iraqi requirements," one minute to Macmillan reads.

"I agree," the prime minister has scribbled across the bottom, asking that the matter be "pushed forward energetically".

Duncan Sandys, the colonial secretary, reported to cabinet in May that the Iraqi government had "found it necessary to imprison a number of supporters of President Nasser and to execute certain adherents of the previous president." He said the agreement to supply military equipment would increase British influence in Iraq.—Source: Milne, Seamus (1994-01-01). "Cabinet Papers 1963: Iraq: Ministers Eager to Sell Arms to New Rulers After Bloody Coup". The Guardian.

Although Milne says that the coup was "backed by the CIA," none of the declassified British documents that he quotes from mention the CIA. Nor do they relate to any covert British involvement in the coup. Rather, these documents discuss material British support for the new Iraqi government after the coup. NYCJosh's source is not an academic source, and not RS for this verifiably untrue claim. Milne's article would be RS for an article on British foreign policy. There remain no declassified documents proving CIA involvement in the coup, as noted by Hahn 2011, a much stronger and more recent source published by Oxford University Press.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:54, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

1959 Iraq Version II

In the spirit of cooperation, I started with TheTimesAreAChanging's version of this section, not the one I had added. I added footnotes (the Salon source--totally a RS). I streamlined the UPI attribution since WP does not typically name individual journalists when citing major news outfits, I changed verb to "orchestrate" so the sentence flows better, and added details based on the UPI source about US treatment of alleged US instrument/agent of regime change. Here it is: [2] Please state objections, if any, below.

AlterNet's "35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists" is not a suitable RS for historical facts stated in wikivoice.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:06, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Let's wait for Red Rock Canyon's view on the Salon source.

In general, I think you have a misconception about non-academic sources as RS. They are fine in general, it only gets tricky when they conflict with academic sources. You can't just delete all newspaper accounts and the like.

1. Please state any objection to my streamlining the sentence with the UPI attribution since WP does not typically name individual journalists when citing major news outfits.

2. Please state any objection regarding my changing the verb to "orchestrate" so the sentence flows better, since the sentence previously states that the assassination was by others (Saddam)

3. Please state any objection yo my adding details based on the UPI source that you also included, so the reader knows how the US allegedly pulled off the regime change and what happened.--NYCJosh (talk) 00:15, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Your extensive copying of whole paragraphs from newspaper articles and op-eds is primarily a DUE issue, not a reliability issue (although these two areas of concern are related, because you have been citing opinion pieces without the required in-text attribution). An encyclopedia entry covering hundreds of years of history simply does not have the space to accommodate every single news report and op-ed, hence Wikipedia's preference for academic secondary sources, distilled into a concise summary style. (Edits like this may also run afoul of WP:COPYVIO; consider the pronounced similarity between NYCJosh's "US agents in Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad summoned forces hostile to the Iraqi regime and orchestrated what became known as the Iraqi Ramadan Revolution. ... The CIA established an operations center in Kuwait to orchestrate the coup. The operations base in Kuwait intercepted Iraqi communications and transmitted via radio secret orders to the coup plotters. On February 8, 1963, the day of the start of the coup, secret orders were transmitted from Kuwait to the coup leaders. Qasim was shot and his body was shown on Iraqi television. ... The US provided weapons to the new Ba'athist despots and the CIA provided the Ba'athists with lists of Iraqi political opponents, including communists, targeted for execution, resulting in a bloodbath led Saddam Hussein that killed thousands of Iraq's educated class and other civilians" and Roger Morris's "In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. ... Then, on Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but eventually Kassem gave up, and after a swift trial was shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television. ... Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.") So, my answer to you is that devoting a paragraph to extensively quoting/summarizing every detail from Sale's 2003 news report would be UNDUE, especially given the scope of this Wikipedia article. It seems appropriate to name Richard Sale as well as UPI because, unlike most journalists, Sale is an independently notable author in his own right. I also object to your repeated insinuations, e.g. here, that UPI is on the same level as The New York Times in terms of its reputation for fact-checking and accuracy—and, for that matter, that The New York Times's op-ed section is equivalent to its hard-news reporting.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 10:12, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Issue 1. Naming the journalist at UPI undermines the authority of the source because most readers don't know who Sale is. We can mention in the footnote Sales' expertise.

Issue 2. I guess we are in agreement.

Issue 3. You're responding to my original contribution. In my most recent edit that was deleted, I had added one or two sentences based on the UPI story about what happened in a very bare bones way. Don't think it's a UNDUE issue. Without it, the reader learns nothing about the outcome of the assassination attempt and the fate of the plotters.--NYCJosh (talk) 11:41, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

I can probably find an academic source discussing the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, so that we are not relying on a single disputed news article for uncontroversial historical facts. As I recall, there's a fairly detailed treatment in Makiya's Republic of Fear.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 18:39, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

I added more detail on the Ba'th's famous 1959 assassination attempt on Qasim here, relying more on Karsh than on Makiya. Given the very clear academic consensus that Sale's report is fictional, I still consider this level of detail to be UNDUE for this article.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:34, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

1963 Iraq Version II

In the spirit of cooperation, I started with TheTimesAreAChanging's version of this section, not the one I had added. I added footnotes. Despite my new scholarly sources, my entire revision was deleted within seconds. There is no way anyone could have checked each of those that fast. Here it is: [3] Please state objections, if any, below.

You can restore any academic sources in that edit, with my blessing; the rest is UNDUE. The big problem with your edit is addressed below.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:05, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

I've added a bit on the anti-communist purge, from some of the many RS that have discussed it, here.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:32, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

That the US gave the new Baathist govt the lists of people is not merely an allegation and is not controverted by any source. Also, the source is not just King Hussein. The sentence you added is misleading "great deal of discussion regarding allegations..." The sources you add seem to say that the Baathists could have obtained the lists by other means because they were public, but do not contradict that the US gave the lists tot the Iraqis. --NYCJosh (talk) 00:23, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Here are some excerpts from the sources that I cited:

• Batatu, Hanna (1978). The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. Princeton University Press. pp. 985–987. ISBN 978-0863565205. It is not clear what prompted Husain to say these things. He had, of course, never been a friend of the Ba'ath party. But his observations should be read in the light of the recent revelation that he has been since 1957 in the pay of the C.I.A. It is perhaps pertinent to add that a member of the 1963 Iraqi Ba'ath Command, who asked anonymity, asserted in a conversation with this writer that the Yugoslav embassy in Beirut had warned certain Ba'athi leaders that some Iraqi Ba'athists were maintaining surreptitious contacts with representatives of American power. The majority of the command in Iraq was, it would appear, unaware of what was said to have gone on. Be that as it may, it is necessary, in the interest of truth, to bring out that, insofar as the names and addresses of Communists are concerned, the Ba'athists had ample opportunity to gather such particulars in 1958-1959, when the Communists came wholly into the open, and earlier, during the Front of National Unity Years—1957-1958—when they had frequent dealings with them on all levels.
• Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 59. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7. The original source of this allegation was King Hussein of Jordan ... While much of the historiography has focused on whether the United States provided the Ba'th with lists, few have latched onto Batatu's explanation that the Ba'th had 'ample opportunity to gather such particulars in 1958-1959, when the Communists came wholly into the open.' This explanation actually makes perfect sense and is supported by documents that suggest the Ba'th Party had created its own lists during 1958-1959. For instance, an INR analysis from February 15 stated, '[Communist] party members [are being] rounded up on the basis of lists prepared by the now-dominant Ba'th Party.' A separate INR analysis from February 21 pointed out that during the 1958-1959 period, the communists had 'exposed virtually all its assets' whom the Ba'th had 'carefully spotted and listed.' Therefore, the existence of lists is not in dispute, though it is questionable that the Ba'th would ever have needed the CIA's help to figure out who their enemies really were.
• Citino, Nathan J. (2017). "The People's Court". Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in US-Arab Relations, 1945–1967. Cambridge University Press. pp. 220–222. ISBN 9781108107556. Among the allegations is that the CIA supplied the lists of Iraqi communists the Ba'thist National Guard militia used in its post-coup campaign of mass arrests and killings. ... William Lakeland ... joined the political section of the Baghdad embassy in 1960. He and his colleague James Akins used coverage of the July 1962 Moscow Conference for Disarmament and Peace in Iraq's leftist press to compile lists of Iraqi communists and their supporters. Al-Bilad, the paper that had served as one of Mahdawi's main platforms, published lists of delegates to the conference as well as the names of those who had signed petitions supporting it. In transmitting these names to the State Department, Lakeland wrote that 'these lists provide a "Who's Who" of communists and communist sympathizers active in Iraq today.' He found it significant that 'they are thus willing to stand up together and be counted.' ... Although the United States did not initiate the 14 Ramadan coup, at best it condoned and at worst it contributed to the violence that followed. ... Whether or not the CIA or other government agencies provided the lists of communists used by the Ba'thist National Guard in the post-coup violence, the United States worked closely with it. Historian Weldon C. Matthews has meticulously established that National Guard leaders who participated in human rights abuses had been trained in the United States as part of a police program run by the International Cooperation Administration and Agency for International Development.

I believe that my summary accurately reflects what these sources say.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 10:15, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Who is INR in your Gibson excerpt?

Bureau of Intelligence and Research.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 18:40, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Academic sources versus newspapers

This discussion stems from a discussion of the UPI source for the 1959 Iraq and 1963 Iraq sections. On the RS noticeboard, an editor wrote that WP RS policy is that an academic source is preferred when assertions it presents as facts are contradicted by a newspaper article. The UPI expose describes its primary sources as: "United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report."

So any and all factual assertions in the article could ordinarily be included on WP. However, Gibson, was cited as an academic work that casts doubt on the CIA's role in the 1959 assassination attempt.

(1) Access to Primary Sources. Some of the academic sources cited qualify their omission or denial of the CIA role by saying something to the effect that to the best of their knowledge based on their review of documents available, the CIA was uninvolved. The UPI article was based on investigative reporting. Investigative reporting can get info that academics can't usually get. It had access to primary sources to which the academics did not, including actual US officials who participated in the planning or had other first hand knowledge. It would be difficult for an academic to conduct this kind of investigation. Academics (and I know many) typically don't have the training or the budget to find such people, travel to meet them, etc. Even the sources who are found by an investigative team like the UPI are often reticent to go on the record. Journalists are better trained and trusted to handle such off the record conversations.

(2) Evidence based on covert intel documents. Our discussion concerns covert actions, where CIA paper trails are scant, at least to the public. But even internally within the CIA, typically code words are used and CIA station chiefs are given latitude on choice of methods or are given subtle hints. Plausible deniability is always kept in mind to protect US senior leaders. On the other hand, journalists who find former intel officials often can't give their names, and thus the reader never learns their proximity to the events, their titles, etc. Instead the reader just gets "anonymous sources tell UPI."

(3) WP rules. WP rules appear not to have been designed for this kind of investigative reporting on a covert action being contradicted by an academic source. So we are told that an academic source is more credible than a newspaper article, when the two contradict each other. Of course, it usually is and thus the WP RS rule in this regard works well most of the time. So for example if a newspaper article interviews healers who use crystals and their clients and states that many believe in the power of crystals and believe in their efficacy, providing anecdotal evidence, then it's a good idea to give primacy to an academic source that debunks such claims and explains that studies have found zero evidence. (The previous example I made up entirely.) But that's not the case here, since, again, Gibson never interviewed the US officials to whom UPI had access. It follows that the UPI story is far more credible than an academic like Gibson on this issue.

(4) Facts that are not contradicted at all. The UPI article includes facts regarding events not discussed by Gibson or other cited academics. These assertions are uncontroverted. In fact, the Karsh source tends to corroborate one aspect of it. There is no RS rule basis for not including them. It's not a question of having to prove a negative. If an academic source stated that Saddam was living back in Iraq the entire time during which UPI says he was living in Egypt or living as a Sufi who had renounced all interest in politics than that could undermine, as could many other scenarios. --NYCJosh (talk) 17:09, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

CIA funding for Taliban and Arab fighters in Afghanistan

Someone deleted the assertion that CIA funds were used by the ISI to train Tabliban and Arab foreign fighters to fight the insurgency war against the Afghan govt and the Soviet army backing it in the 1980s. The deleter wrote that this was refuted by the article "Allegations of CIA assistance to Bin Laden." I am trying to head off an edit war. The following are two unrefuted paragraphs from that article (in the section entitled "Agreements"

Sir Martin Ewans, noted that the Afghan Arabs "benefited indirectly from the CIA's funding, through the ISI and resistance organizations," and that "it has been reckoned that as many as 35,000 'Arab-Afghans' may have received military training in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $800 million in the years up to and including 1988."

Some of the CIA's greatest Afghan beneficiaries were Arabist commanders such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who were key allies of Bin Laden over many years. Haqqani—one of Bin Laden's closest associates in the 1980s—received direct cash payments from CIA agents, without the mediation of the ISI (Charlie Wilson described Haqqani as "goodness personified"). This independent source of funding gave Haqqani disproportionate influence over the mujahideen, and helped Bin Laden develop his base.

Response to some objections:

1. Unsourced. Please explain what you believe to be not fully supported.

2. Unrelated to the article. The CIA was funding the jihadis, including the Arab fighters, and allegedly including Osama, in an effort to overthrow the Afghan govt, which they eventually did. What could be more related than that?

3. Coatrack. The identity of the fighters who were being supplied by the CIA (through the ISI) to overthrow the govt is essential to the primary theme of the article.

Generally, if you delete and fail to respond substantively here on FB, then you are not acting as a responsible WP editor should. --NYCJosh (talk) 22:51, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

The quote you provided above is far more nuanced than your original claim that "Supplies and training for the Afghans, including jihadis who later became known as the Taliban, and for some Arab foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, were channeled through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan." Maybe if you could attribute the allegation and include opposing views, we could have acceptable encyclopedic text, but it's still not clear to me why this article should dive into unverified allegations at all. I also have to ask, since it's not apparent from your edits, what would you consider the best reliable source that lends credence to the unverified bin Laden–CIA connection theory?TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 07:54, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Glad we are moving toward agreement. In answer to your two questions:

1. Why go there? The question of how the US toppled the Afghan govt and the Soviet occupiers is key to the theme of US regime change. So the question that is answered is: who received US funding to get the job done? Was it just indigenous Afghan fighters or also foreign Arabs? Who were the instruments of the US' RC?

Obviously, the issue of funding for Al Qaeda and Osama is also very important for US history given subsequent events. This article is a US history article. To fail to mention the funding, even if it were not central to the "instrument of RC" issue, would seem disingenuous in an article about US history.

2. Support for statement? From the same article you had cited, "Allegations of US Assistance to Osama bin Laden"

In a 2004 article entitled "Al-Qaeda's origins and links", the BBC wrote:

During the anti-Soviet jihad Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. Some analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.

Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary in the UK from 1997–2001, believed the CIA had provided arms to the Arab mujahideen, including Osama bin Laden, writing, "Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the '80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan." His source for this is unclear.

So we've got THE UK foreign sec (Robin Cook) statement as cited in The Guardian stating it as factual, not as an allegation, AND a separate BBC source that states it as allegation. Since we've got one RS stating it as factual we can state it as factual. The BBC source saying it is an allegation does not downgrade the Robin Cook statement. It adds to the degree of certainty, does not diminish it. (Imagine we have two witnesses: Witness A says I know event X happened, while witness B says I think event X happened. Witness B strengthens Witness A's testimony and our confidence, does not diminish it.)

Plus we've got the general background of $800 million in CIA support for 35,000 Arab fighters that I quoted above, so we know that there was plenty of American money being used to train tons of Arabs.

Now let's consider the CIA denial in the same article. First, the same article has several sources saying the CIA channeled the funds through ISI and that the ISI actually did the training of the fighters in Pakistan and that CIA did NOT control who got the training. So it makes sense for the CIA to be trying to cover its behind (CIA doing CYA) after Osama starting attacking American targets in the mid 1990s but how could it even know who the heck the ISI was funding at the time? No one claims that CIA was screening whom the ISI was funding or even was notified about whom the ISI was training. In fact, the CIA at the time likely would have had no objection to training many of the Arabs who went on to become Al Qaeda. Why would it, given the Arabs were volunteering to fight the bad old Russkies at the time and before they attacked US targets? Remember, Osama turned anti-American when the US "heathens" were allowed to establish a military presence in the holyland of Mecca and Medina in the lead up to the 1991 Gulf War (still years away). The denial doesn't seem credible given the uncontroverted lack of knowledge by the denier. So while I would usually support including a US govt denial, even if it's suspect and self-serving, in this case the denial doesn't even appear to be plausible and thus doesn't appear to merit inclusion.--NYCJosh (talk) 20:17, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Your argument is incoherent. "How could [the CIA] even know who the heck the ISI was funding at the time?" How could the British foreign secretary from 1997 to 2001, writing in a 2005 opinion piece for The Guardian, know who the ISI was funding during the 1980s? If this former British foreign secretary, seemingly making a passing and (in your own words!) "unclear" statement with no elaboration in a single opinion piece is the most definitive statement supporting the alleged bin Laden–CIA connection that you were able to find in nominally reliable sources after searching, then it seems clear that Cook's opinion is WP:UNDUE for this article. Obviously, if you could demonstrate that secondary sources such as terrorism experts or bin Laden biographers generally agree that bin Laden was trained by the ISI (which, as far as I know, they do not)—or even by the CIA directly—that would be a completely different matter.

BTW, per WP:RSOPINION, opinion pieces like Cook's generally cannot be used on Wikipedia without attribution; they are RS only for the author's opinion. That's a good thing, because Cook's article also contains the well-known disinformation that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians." Again, that's not content that you're going to find in mainstream RS scholarship on al Qaeda, and looks like something Cook pulled up from Global Research. You seem to be relying on very unreliable sources rather than experts like Bergen and Coll.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:57, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

By the time Cook was in power, Western intel had learned a lot about Osama's history and activities because Osama was one of the most wanted international terrorists in the world, having attacked Western targets in several countries in the 1990s. It would be surprising if Cook did not know Osama's detailed history year by year, including who had funded him, when and how, his connections past and present to state intelligence operations, like that of the ISI, etc. By way of contrast, Osama was not an enemy of the US in the 1980s, so there would be no reason for the US even to try to prevent the ISI from funding him, just as the ISI was funding tens of thousands of other Arab jihadi volunteers ready to fight the Soviets.

I was citing the article you had cited. I didn't do any other poking around. The Guardian quoting Robin Cook is a first rate source. Your personal opinion about the origins of the name Al Qaida is both not notable and irrelevant to this issue.

We have a prima facie case for inclusion, so if you can provide a source that contradicts Cook, other than implausible US CYA denials, please let us know.--NYCJosh (talk) 22:16, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Again, my sources are Bergen and Coll. If your position is that the Cook Guardian opinion piece is reliable for unattributed statements in Wikipedia's voice to the effect that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians," I would consider that a non-starter. However, you are welcome to take the matter to WP:RSN if you think that I am misapplying WP:RSOPINION.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:06, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Please re-read Bergen and Coll in the "Opposing view" section of the very WP article you cited. They say there that there is no evidence of CIA or other American officials having contact with Osama or with Al Qaida, or of "direct relationship" with Osama (according to Coll). They do not deny that the ISI, which received hundreds of millions of dollars from the US for the sole purpose of training the anti-Soviet insurgency, funded Osama or had contact with him.

In fact, Bergen quotes an ISI official as saying: "It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment....It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan."

So your Bergen and Coll do not contradict Cook on this point. CIA/US officials may have had no direct relationship, but the ISI could very well use US money for the funding, as Cook states. Your discussion of another statement by Cook is beyond the scope of this discussion.--NYCJosh (talk) 18:32, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (2003), pp. 59–61, states:

It is often said that bin Laden was funded by the CIA. This is not true, and, indeed, would have been impossible given the structure of funding that General Zia ul–Haq, who had taken power in Pakistan in 1977, had set up. A condition of Zia's cooperation with the American plan to turn Afghanistan into the Soviets' 'Vietnam' was that all American funding to the Afghan resistance had to be channelled through the Pakistani government, which in effect meant the Afghan bureau of the Inter–Services Intelligence (ISI), the military spy agency. The American funding, which went exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers, was supplemented by Saudi government money and huge funds raised from mosques, non-governmental charitable institutions and private donors throughout the Islamic world. Most of the major Gulf-based charities operating today were founded at this time to raise money or channel government funds to the Afghans, civilians and fighters. In fact, as little as 25 per cent of the money for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states.*  ... It is a mistake to overestimate the contribution made to the war in Afghanistan by the Arabs. Many Afghan mujahideen fighters, of whom there were somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 fighting at any one time, saw the volunteers who came to join them from the Middle East as a liability. There were only a few hundred fighting at any one time and their contribution to the 'jihad' in military terms was negligible. The Afghan Arabs rarely fought in discrete groups and were usually deployed as small detachments attached to the various mujahideen factions. There was never an 'Arab' or 'International' brigade as such. Many volunteers merely turned up in Peshawar, made their way over the border and attached themselves to a commander. Estimates of how many Arabs took part in the ten-year combat vary. Some are ludicrous. Former CIA officials stationed in Pakistan at the time say it was a maximum of 25,000. It is likely that less than half of the volunteers actually saw combat, spending their time instead in support activities away from the frontlines.

(*That's a fascinating and clarifying statistic, which should be added to the main Soviet–Afghan War.)

NYCJosh, you have an interesting original research argument about how Burke could definitively prove a negative in this case, given that "The Afghan Arabs rarely fought in discrete groups and were usually deployed as small detachments attached to the various mujahideen factions," but the burden of proof is actually the other way around. You have failed to provide high-quality reliable sources that affirmatively state that bin Laden was personally aided by the ISI (let alone by any Western intelligence agency), and I don't believe that any such RS exist. It's also clear that GPRamirez5's "as many as 35,000 'Arab-Afghans' may have received military training in Pakistan" statistic, which you cited above, is very much open to question. (I may have to update Allegations of CIA assistance to Osama bin Laden accordingly when I have the chance.) In any case, if you were merely interested in providing readers with a neutral overview of the ISI and CIA covert operations in Afghanistan, you would specify that Zia's government allocated most resources to seven mujahideen factions—popularly known as the Peshawar Seven—with disproportionate funding going to hardline Islamist commanders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Ignoring all of that and focusing instead on the militarily insignificant Arab volunteers, and specifically on unsubstantiated assertions regarding bin Laden, appears to misrepresent the primary thrust of all RS on this topic in an attempt to poison the well against the ISI and CIA.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 07:41, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

TheTimeAreChanging, you have shifted from citing Coll and Bergen to your new source, Burke. The section of Burke you cite fails to explain how he knows that Osama received no American funding. Is it based on some uncited CIA denial? I doubt he there on the ground monitoring the ISI throughout the entire relevant period. If you have the book you cite, perhaps he provides a footnote on this.

I have been citing the Cook source supporting the proposition. Cook as UK foreign sec had access to all kinds of sources and his factual assertion does not need further footnoting.

I have no objection to including also the funding for the seven mujahideen factions, Gulbuddin, etc. But as I noted, the funding for Osama is important not just for the sake of completeness but also because of Osama's subsequent outsize role in US history. It feels disingenuous to deny readers this important piece of info. --NYCJosh (talk) 22:10, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

Having received no reply or objections in about a week, I assume consensus has been reached.--NYCJosh (talk) 02:57, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

A discussion dying out after few or no editors supported your edits does not indicate that you have consensus, Josh.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 15:35, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

References

1959 Iraq

This was deleted despite multiple RSs. Please provide objections, if any, based on WP rules.--NYCJosh (talk) 02:57, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

The CIA, working with Egyptian intelligence, attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim, a nationalist Iraqi Army brigadier, who had seized power in the 14 July Revolution that had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy. CIA and Egyptian intelligence recruited Saddam Hussein as an agent and the operation was set for October 7, 1959. The assassins botched the hit, only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm and killing Qasim's driver. Also, Saddam's calf was accidentally grazed in the incident. The CIA and Egyptian intelligence helped Saddam and other assassination attempt participants escape, Saddam being helped to flee to Cairo, where Saddam remained an agent in close contact with the CIA.

Spamming sources that don't support your claims is unhelpful and disruptive. It gives the impression that you are trying to mislead readers. Polemicist Patrick Cockburn, reviewing a 1997 book by the highly unreliable Said Aburish for The Indepedent, states: "In 1959 a party member named Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, aged 22, had tried to assassinate Gen Kassem in Baghdad, but had been wounded in the leg." That's it. The famous 1959 assassination attempt is never mentioned again anywhere in the article; the article does not support any of the wild claims that you attribute to it. In his PBS interview, the highly unreliable Aburish (citing no evidence) alleges that "There is very good reason to believe that Saddam Hussein was in contact with the American embassy in Cairo when he was in exile." However, Aburish says nothing about CIA involvement in the earlier assassination attempt. Again, you have misrepresented the source. (Aburish actually contended that any pre-exile contacts between U.S. intelligence and Saddam were impossible.) The Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq mailing list email by a random person that you are citing as a reliable source is limited to events in 1963, and contains absolutely zero reference to anything in your paragraph above.

The famous 1959 assassination attempt was reenacted on Iraqi television for decades under Saddam's rule and has been discussed in numerous sources, but there is actually just one source that alleged an American role in the plot; namely Richard Sale in UPI, April 10, 2003. Hence this WP:EXTRAORDINARY claim lives or dies based on the credibility of the one source. You list numerous derivative "sources" based on Sale's account to make it seem like Sale's ridiculous allegations are well-supported, but this is merely a distraction: Obviously, a Boston Globe op-ed that opens with "UPI reported on April 10, 2003 ... " cannot "corroborate" Sale. Similarly, that the activist group Global Policy Forum hosts an archived link of Sale's article does not make it any more reliable.

Sale's article was ignored by every other news outlet when it was published and I have not seen it mentioned in a single academic source on Iraq besides Gibson's 2015 Sold Out? (and I happen to have several on hand). It is important to emphasize the following point very strongly, because GPRamirez5 has been tag team edit warring with NYCJosh out of his own personal dislike for me despite a manifest lack of competence and knowledge of the relevant literature in this case: Yes, there has been some scholarly discussion of allegations that the CIA played a role in the first Ba'thist coup of February 1963 going as far back as Batatu's 1978 The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (although it was highly sporadic and limited until those allegations suddenly gained widespread currency in the mid-2000s due to the Internet and the U.S. invasion of Iraq) ... but the notion that the CIA hired Saddam to gun down Qasim in October 1959 is virtually impossible to find in any serious source. And here is what Gibson—the only academic to discuss Sale's report in depth—has to say on the matter:

On October 1, the NSC [National Security Council] invited both Jones and Armin Meyer (the NEA [State Department Bureau of Near–Eastern Affairs]'s director) to brief the council. Relying on the report, they explained that the SCI [Special Committee on Iraq, active 1959–1961] had reached three main conclusions:

1) dramatic action by the U.S. in Iraq was not desirable; 2) restraint by the Arab countries [was] the best means of restraining Iraq; [Qasim] should be encouraged through third parties to maintain an independent Iraq which would resist the communist threat.

Jones reported indications of an impending assassination attempt on Qasim, but suggested that these could be "Communist provocations." Commenting, Director Dulles told the council that Nasser had "urged the assassination plotters not to move too fast" and might "be laying plans to intervene in the event chaos ensues." Reflecting a lack of concrete intelligence, he predicted that the assassination attempt could occur "in the next two months." America's spy chief was wrong. On October 7, the Ba'th Party thrust itself into Iraqi politics for the first time, when an assassination team led by a young Saddam Hussein attempted to kill Qasim, striking him in the shoulder but not killing him. He spent the next six weeks in the hospital recovering.

Despite claims to the contrary [Gibson, of course, cites Sale in his footnote here, because there are no other sources for this claim besides Sale], the body of evidence available does not suggest that the United States was directly complicit in the attempted assassination. First, the SCI analysis makes clear that the communists would be the primary beneficiaries of covert action against Qasim. Second, just days before the attack, Allen Dulles predicted that it would occur within the "next two months," not a week. Third, the SCI and NSC had just reaffirmed the nonintervention policy. Fourth, the SCI had raised concerns that Qasim's assassination could lead to a communist takeover. Fifth, while the CIA was preparing for the contingency of a communist takeover, it had previously indicated that it had few assets that could influence a post-Qasim Iraq. Finally, the CIA was not confident that pro-Nasser elements could even carry off a coup, which proved accurate.—Source: Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7.

Furthermore, Gibson (p. 26) notes that the U.S. "had also taken steps to discourage Jordan and Iran from 'taking military action' against Iraq" during Qasim's hospitalization.

While I appreciate that NYCJosh added a citation to Gibson after I cited the latter here, it is disingenous for NYCJosh to pretend that Gibson is a proponent of Sale's theory. If we were to include Sale, then we would have to include an additional sentence to the effect that "Scholar Bryan R. Gibson challenged the veracity of Sale's report, citing declassified documents that indicate the CIA was blindsided by the timing of the assassination attempt on Qasim and that the U.S. National Security Council 'had just reaffirmed [its] nonintervention policy' six days before it occurred." But given that Sale's reporting remains uncorroborated, FRINGE, and UNDUE, it's hard to see why it would merit inclusion here at all. This article purports to provide a general overview of U.S. foreign policy over the past two centuries. If NYCJosh or GPRamirez5 can produce a single (1) academic overview of U.S. foreign policy similar in scope to this article that includes anything related to this topic, then we can compromise and include two sentences on Sale and Gibson. Otherwise, it should be obvious that this article is being abused as a COATRACK and has increasingly devolved into NYCJosh's shockingly poorly-sourced blog. With only three editors commenting, there remains no consensus for any of it.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 13:35, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

The Gibson quote documents what the majority view is, by his own admission. Considering that your middle name used to be WP:FRINGE, TheTimesAreAChanging, you ought to be conscientious about this.

I don't find your arguments convincing, especially since you've recently been caught labeling a reportage piece as an opinion piece, and claiming a direct quote "misrepresents" a source.-GPRamirez5 (talk) 14:41, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

GPRamirez5 is cherrypicking a single sentence from the introduction to make a very disingenuous assertion about "academic consensus," without actually doing any research. In the introduction, Gibson writes:

It is accepted among scholars that the CIA tried to assassinate Qasim in the Fall of 1959; tried to "incapacitate" him again in 1960; and finally, assisted the Ba'th Party in its overthrow of his regime in February 1963. ... However, a careful examination of a wide range of documents and interviews raises important questions about the veracity of these claims as to whether the CIA was behind the 1963 Ba'thist coup.—Source: Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. xvii. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7.

While Gibson's phrasing could be better, in context it's clear that he's talking about the specific "scholars" he cites in the footnotes for each of those three assertions (including Sale for the 1959 assassination attempt), not making a generalized statement about "academic consensus." The latter interpretation would make no sense because many of the sources for these claims are vague and contradictory (e.g., Sale reported that the CIA was not behind the 1963 coup). Elsewhere in the book, Gibson employs a similar formulation with greater specificity:

It has been suggested that the CIA "masterminded" the Ba'thist coup [here Gibson cites Aburish], but other sources, like Peter Hahn, have observed that no declassified US documents support this claim. To resolve this debate, a number of factors need to be considered.—Source: Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7.

Again, in context there is no implication that Aburish rather than Hahn is closer to the putative "academic consensus" on this point. But even if it were possible, in good faith, to misinterpret Gibson as saying that "most" scholars believe the U.S. played "some" role in the coup itself (without there being much agreement on what, exactly, that role was), Sale's article on the 1959 assassination attempt is only loosely related to the coup allegations. Given that Sale has been almost entirely ignored by mainstream sources and academics, it's simply not possible that there is an "academic consensus" endorsing the veracity of his article. If GPRamirez5 thinks otherwise, then he needs to show rather than tell that academics favorably citing Sale exist, because I haven't been able to find any.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 16:27, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

References

1963 Iraq

This, too, was deleted, despite many RSs. Please provide objections, if any, based on WP rules.--NYCJosh (talk) 03:03, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

After its earlier attempts failed to assassinate Prime Minister of Iraq Abd al-Karim Qasim (sometimes written as Abdel Karim Kassem), the authoritarian leader of the regime, US agents in Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad summoned forces hostile to the Iraqi regime and orchestrated what became known as the Iraqi Ramadan Revolution. The coup was led by the Ba'ath Party's Iraqi-wing. The CIA established an operations center in Kuwait to orchestrate the coup. The operations base in Kuwait intercepted Iraqi communications and transmitted via radio secret orders to the coup plotters. On February 8, 1963, the day of the start of the coup, secret orders were transmitted from Kuwait to the coup leaders. Qasim was shot and his body was shown on Iraqi television. The US provided weapons to the new Ba'athist despots and the CIA provided the Ba'athists with lists of Iraqi political opponents, including communists, targeted for execution, resulting in a bloodbath led Saddam Hussein that killed thousands of Iraq's educated class and other civilians. The Ba'athists then governed Iraq for several decades.

"Many RSs," Josh? Like what, exactly? A New York Times op-ed prominently labelled "opinion"? A url ending in .org? A Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq mailing list email by a random person? The American Spectator? ProCon.org? A deadlink to Salon's "35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists"? A Boston Globe op-ed by two nonspecialists? No!—those are all highly unreliable, FRINGE, spam, garbage sources. (In fact, the aforementioned Sale may be one of the better sources in the citekill above, although NYCJosh carefully avoided the part where Sale writes: "In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup ... but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this. 'We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened,' this official said.") Here is what RS actually state:

• Hahn, Peter (2011). Missions Accomplished?: The United States and Iraq Since World War I. Oxford University Press. p. 48. ISBN 9780195333381. Declassified U.S. government documents offer no evidence to support these suggestions.
• Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. xvii, 58, 200. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7. However, a careful examination of a wide range of documents and interviews raises important questions about the veracity of these claims as to whether the CIA was behind the 1963 B'athist coup. ... In sum, barring the release of new information, the preponderance of evidence substantiates the conclusion that the CIA was not behind the February 1963 B'athist coup.
• Citino, Nathan J. (2017). "The People's Court". Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in US-Arab Relations, 1945–1967. Cambridge University Press. p. 222. ISBN 9781108107556. Although the United States did not initiate the 14 Ramadan coup, at best it condoned and at worst it contributed to the violence that followed. (emphasis added)

Although there are earlier academic sources like Little's 2004 American Orientalism and Wolfe-Hunnicutt 2011 that are sympathetic to the idea that the CIA may have played some role in the coup or its aftermath, based on evidence that they acknowledge is purely circumstantial, no RS supports any of this nonsense from King Hussein of Jordan about the "operations center in Kuwait." (One thesis, by William J. Zeman, did attempt to verify it through both declassified documents and radio logs, and found—you guessed it—nothing!) That's because there remains absolutely no evidence to substantiate Hussein's allegations against the Ba'th (which served the political purpose of deflecting from Hussein's own well-documented ties to the CIA), and serious sources aren't going to make wild claims in the same hysterical style preferred by NYCJosh, but invariably acknowledge uncertainty and complexity. Moreover, the sources listed above appear to represent an emerging academic consensus: Gibson 2015 (p. 57) cites Hahn 2011 but greatly expands on Hahn's analysis; Citino 2017, in turn, accepts Gibson's conclusion that the CIA did not attempt to "incapacitate" Qasim but rather Mahdawi in April 1962 as fact, and bases his entire chapter on Mahdawi around that conclusion. Moreover, while Wolfe-Hunnicutt (albeit with the caveat "that the details of American covert activity in Iraq remain shrouded in mystery, given the limits of available documentation") previously emphasized that "Washington's support [for the coup], on the other hand, (whether material or merely moral) was significant to the ultimate historical outcome," he appeared to back off from such claims in his favorable 2016 review of Sold Out? for The Middle East Journal, stating instead that "the United States has been deeply involved in Iraq since the 1980s." Similarly, Salim Yaqub cites Gibson as "the most detailed and comprehensive study to date of U.S.–Iraqi relations from the late 1950s to the 1970s." Any one of these scholars should be sufficient to WP:TNT NYCJosh's FRINGE spam—let alone all of them.

BTW, according to declassified documents cited by Gibson (pp. 52–54, 57–58, 200), the State Department was warning U.S. diplomats to avoid antagonizing Qasim as late as February 7, 1963—one day before the coup—as doing so could have prompted him to completely break relations with the U.S. and thereby jeopardized a major CIA operation that had penetrated a top-secret Iraqi-Soviet surface-to-air missile project and was yielding crucial intelligence, particularly on Soviet anti-aircraft technology. While the U.S. had been notified of earlier, aborted Ba'thist coup plotting in 1962, these same documents contain no hint of awareness that Qasim would be overthrown in a violent coup 24 hours later. To say the least, this sequence of events does not suggest U.S. involvement.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 15:26, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

TheTimesAreAChanging, you've got to be kidding. Basically, you're saying that based on your OR, you are in position to disqualify each of the many sources. Cockburn--he is a "polemicist." The Boston Globe--written by non-specialists, so it's "garbage" and "fringe." (Unlike you, I presume, an expert based on your own OR.) Veteran US State Dept staffer Roger Morris published in the NY Times--that's just his opinion. PBS--that's an unreliable source. Slate--oh, the link is broken. King Hussein--no he had a political agenda. UPI--that's just one source. I won't go on with the remaining sources.

More generally, your cavalier approach to sources cited, your wholesale repeated deletions of entire sections based on some special knowledge of the truth are inappropriate for WP.Please consider this your friendly warning, assuming good faith.

I also object to your antagonistic tone to me and other editors. --NYCJosh (talk) 18:39, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

References

please notice US gov's involvement in Tibet in 1950s and in Tiananmen in 1989

In 1950s before the rebellion broke out in Tibet, US government, specifically CIA, has supported several guerillas to intensify the riot and assault PLA. Moreover, the shadow of US government can also be seen throughout the whole Tiananmen Incident in 1989. Hence, I suggest the addition of these 2 links into the sidebar. Johnson.Xia (talk) 07:53, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Feel free to propose contributions if you have good sources to support.--NYCJosh (talk) 01:20, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

And ideally, I think, one that uses the phrase "regime change" to avoid WP:SYN. BobFromBrockley (talk) 12:29, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Egypt 2013?

https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2013/07/06/us-backed-coup-hijacks-egypts-revolution/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jwray (talk • contribs) 22:37, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Regime change focus

This big and detailed article seems to include several instances of US interventions that did result in regime change, and even some that were not aimed at that. Given the number of (often quite short) articles on adjacent topics, e.g. Timeline of United States military operations or Foreign interventions by the United States, I wonder if some of the material should be taken out of this article and put in them. For instance:

• The 1846 US–Mexico War was a war over territory, not an attempted regime change; it did not result in regime change.
• 1887–1889 Samoa seems more of an imperialist battle for control, rather than a "regime change", although eventually it resulted in loss of nominal independence
• 1898–1901 China was an intervention in which the US supported the existing regime against a rebellion, so seems like it definitely shouldn't be here; it was a regime preservation intervention
• 1914 Mexico was not a regime change intervention
• 1918 Russia the US was attempting to stop Bolshevik regime change; it was a failed regime preservation intervention
• 1946–1949 China the US was attempting to stop Communist regime change; it was a failed regime preservation intervention
• 1946–1949 Greece the US was attempting to stop Communist regime change; it was a regime preservation intervention
• 1948–1970s Italy: this was interference, but it wasn't regime change
• 1955–1960 Laos: this was a regime preservation intervention
• 1958 Lebanon: this was explicitly a regime preservation intervention
• 1965–66 Dominican Republic: this was explicitly a regime preservation intervention, against Communist regime change
• 1980–1992 El Salvador: ditto
• 1991 Kuwait: I think it is quite a stretch to call this a regime change intervention. The US was defending the sovereignty of Kuwait against a foreign occupation, and chose not to continue the war and depose Saddam.
• 1991–2003 Iraq: This might count, though it wasn't a military intervention, but economic sanctions

BobFromBrockley (talk) 12:18, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

You can't discount a regime change simply because it involves civil war. When the USSR sent troops into various eastern European countries, it was also to defend "existing regimes". The Kurds and Shia were in a state of de facto civil war with Saddam Hussein in 2003, but that is the classic case of regime change.-GPRamirez5 (talk) 14:15, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, GPRamirez5, which of the examples I listed are you referring to? I agree, civil war itself doesn't preclude calling something regime change, but preserving existing regimes surely does? I agree, 2003 Iraq is an obvious example of a regime change intervention - but how was the Boxer Rebellion or Kuwait 1991, for example? BobFromBrockley (talk) 14:23, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Most of this disputed, inaccurate, and misleading content has been added by User:NYCJosh using synthesis. I've long thought that cases of the U.S. supporting established governments against insurgent groups, particularly Greece and El Salvador, have no place in this article. I have also previously challenged NYCJosh regarding the criteria by which he determined that the Gulf War but not the Korean or Vietnam Wars is relevant here, but never received what I considered a satisfactory response. (Arguably only the Korean War might belong, given that allied troops crossed the 38th parallel in an effort to remove the North Korean regime, before being pushed back by the Chinese.) Similarly, I share your confusion over what the Mexican–American War has to do with this topic (although I admittedly can't blame NYCJosh for that long-standing content). Where GPRamirez5 is likely correct is with regard to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 14:33, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

I agree that regime preservation is not regime change. But, yes, intervention in Russia was attempted regime change because the Bolsheviks had been in power since November 1917, and the Tsar had been out of power since March. In the case of the Korean War, yes, the US was trying to overthrow the North Korean government and unify the country under Rhee. But if that is regime change, WW1 and 2 should be regime change. For example, US troops invaded Germany and helped remove Hitler!--Jack Upland (talk) 16:34, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

The very first sentence of the article is: "United States involvement in regime change has entailed both overt and covert actions aimed at altering, replacing, or preserving foreign governments." So the article was conceived as encompassing actions aimed at "preserving" regimes against hostile foreign forces or in civil wars or popular rebellions. I have added some content based on this guidance.

It would be silly in my view to argue that intervening in a civil war is a regime change action only when it's on the side of one but not the other. The outcome of the civil war will determine the regime and intervening will help determine it. Also, often the opposition/insurgency declares a new govt and there are rival claims to be THE legitimate govt. It wouldn't make sense from a realistic/political standpoint--it would be overly legalistic--to say it's regime change to intervene in a civil war only if the opponents have declared a rival govt.

In WWII, the US was responding to an armed attack against it in self defense so that's not what is usually thought of under this category.--NYCJosh (talk) 18:44, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

I think the civil war point is a fair one, and US support for the Whites in Russia is therefore justified. But if the lede encourages us to include regime preservation in an article about regime change, then there's something wrong. The regime change article quite straightforwardly describes it as "Regime change is the replacement of one government regime with another." The defence of existing governments, whether democratic or dictatorial, is not regime change. So it seems to me sensible to more straightforwardly align the lede with the main regime change article and trim out all the examples that don't fit, on a case by case basis. The alternative, if there's a strong reason for the article to be more capacious, is to change the name, which seems silly. At the moment, we risk WP:SYN, unless we can find reliable sources saying these are examples of regime change, which seems unlikely in many cases. BobFromBrockley (talk) 22:19, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

In WWII, the US was responding to an armed attack against it in self defense so that's not what is usually thought of under this category I agree with that. But what about when the US was responding to an armed attack against an ally, in particular one it had a treaty obligation towards? This would be the case with the Kuwait Gulf War, and some of the "banana war" interventions in Honduras for example.BobFromBrockley (talk) 22:23, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

I am glad we agree about interventions in civil wars.

Not sure to what treaty obligation you are referring regarding defending Kuwait in 1990-1991 or the Honduras civil war. In any case, my comment focused on self-defense against armed attack against the US. But notwithstanding my reservation, if you want to add regime change in Germany (and Japan?) following WWII, I will not stand in your way. --NYCJosh (talk) 15:33, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

As discussed above, I don't think regime preservation is regime change. I agree that the lead is wrong. I don't think it's different in a civil war. I raised WW2 as a reductio ad absurdum, but it seems arguable. I don't know how "self-defence" is relevant. And I don't see how self-defence is different from defence of an ally. Wikipedia is neutral, so we can't say defeat of Hitler is a good thing, while regime change is a bad thing. Perhaps you are arguing that the US wasn't planning on regime change, but just defending itself. However, I think Roosevelt was planning on regime change. Even though Hitler declared war on the US in solidarity with the Japanese, there was no significant threat to the US from Germany, and US forces certainly had no need to go into Europe to defend themselves. There was no attack on the United States proper. Rather, Japan attacked the US imperial possessions in the Pacific. If this is self-defence, why shouldn't self-defence include the defence of a less formal American empire or the defence of a network of allies? The article says there was regime change in South Korea in 1945, but this was an immediate consequence of the WW2. It is inconsistent that the US occupation of Japan is not treated the same way. There was certainly regime change in Germany, which went beyond simply defeating Hitler. The country was divided. In West Germany, there was a process of denazification. The Communist Party was banned, and the SPD abandoned Marxism. The US has maintained a continuous military presence. The regime in Germany after WW2 was clearly different from the Nazi government, but it was also different from the Weimar Republic. And it is odd that the section on post-war Italy ignores the fact that the US had largely created the political system there.--Jack Upland (talk) 04:19, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

I don't feel strongly about any particular conflict here; I can see arguments either way for WWII. (The arguments for WWII, though, tend to suggest almost any conflict other than border skirmishes could potentially be included as they might lead to regime change?) I'm more concerned about the mismatch between the lede and the title, with the former being massively broader than the latter. Can we agree to tighten the lead, and then to remove instances from the article that definitely don't fit the topic, moving any material and citations to Timeline of United States military operations or Foreign interventions by the United States? BobFromBrockley (talk) 09:40, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

I agree that the lead should be tightened.--Jack Upland (talk) 06:24, 11 December 2018 (UTC)