by
Patrick
J. Buchanan

Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: Is
America Losing Control?

Friday’s lead
stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal
dealt with what both viewed as a national affront and outrage.

Egyptian soldiers,
said the Post, “stormed the offices” of three U.S. “democracy-building
organizations … in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown by the
military-led government that could imperil its relations with the
United States.”

The organizations:
Freedom House, the International Republican Institute and the National
Democratic Institute.

Cairo contends
that $65 million in “pro-democracy” funding that IRI, NDI and Freedom
House received for use in Egypt constitutes “illegal foreign funding”
to influence their elections.

“A Provocation
in Egypt,” raged the Post.

An incensed
Freedom House President David Kramer said the raids reveal that
Egypt’s military “has no intention of allowing the establishment
of genuine democracy.”

Leon Panetta
phoned the head of the military regime. With $1.3 billion in U.S.
military aid on the line, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi
backed down. The raids will stop.

Yet this is
not the first time U.S. “pro-democracy” groups have been charged
with subverting regimes that fail to toe the Washington line.

In December,
Vladimir Putin claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly
from U.S. sources, was funneled into his country to influence the
recent election, and that Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of the
results was a signal for anti-Putin demonstrators to take to Moscow’s
streets.

In December
also, a top Chinese official charged U.S. Consul General Stephen
Young in Hong Kong with trying to spread disorder. “Wherever (Young)
goes, there is trouble and so-called color revolutions,” said the
pro-Communist Party Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po.

Beijing, added
the Post, has been “jittery following this year’s Arab Spring and
calls on the Internet for the Chinese to follow suit with a ‘jasmine
revolution.'” The Jasmine Revolution was the uprising that forced
Tunisia’s dictator to flee at the outset of the Arab Spring.

Yet one need
not be an acolyte of the Egyptian, Chinese or Russian regimes to
wonder if, perhaps, based on history, they do not have a point.

Does the United
States interfere in the internal affairs of nations to subvert regimes
by using NGOs to funnel cash to the opposition to foment uprisings
or affect elections? Are we using Cold War methods on countries
with which we are not at war — to advance our New World Order?

So it would
seem. For, repeatedly, Freedom House, IRI and NDI have been identified
as instigators of color-coded revolutions to replace autocrats with
pro-American “democrats.”

Ukraine’s Orange
Revolution was marked by mass demonstrations in Kiev to overturn
the election of a pro-Russian leader and bring about his replacement
by a pro-Western politician who sought to move his country into
NATO. The Orange Revolution first succeeded, but then failed.

A U.S.-engineered
Rose Revolution in 2002 overthrew President Eduard Shevardnadze
of Georgia and brought about his replacement by Mikheil Saakashvili,
who then invaded South Ossetia, to be expelled by the Russian Army.

Following the
assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a Cedar Revolution,
featuring massive demonstrations in Beirut against Syria, effected
the withdrawal of its occupation army from Lebanon.

In Belarus,
however, marches on parliament failed to overturn an election that
returned Alexander Lukashenko to power.

The Tulip Revolution
brought about the overthrow of President Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan.
But that, too, did not turn out as well as we hoped.

When one considers
the long record of U.S. intervention in nations far from our borders,
that an ex-chairman of Freedom House is the former CIA Director
James Woolsey, that the longtime chairman of IRI is the compulsive
interventionist John McCain, who has been trading insults with Putin,
and that Kenneth Wollack, president of NDI, was once director of
legislative affairs for the Israeli lobby AIPAC, it is hard to believe
we are clean as a hound’s tooth of the charges being leveled against
us, no matter how suspect the source.

One recalls
that, in 1960, when the United States said a weather plane had strayed
off course, and Nikita Khrushchev said it was a U.S. spy plane they
had shot down, the Butcher of Budapest turned out to be telling
the truth.

Instead, why
is the U.S. government funding Freedom House, IRI and IDI, if not
to bring about change in countries whose institutions or policies
do not conform to our own?

As
Leon Trotsky believed in advancing world communist revolution, neocons
and democratists believe we have some inherent right to intervene
in nations that fail to share our views and values.

But where did
we acquire this right?

And if we are
intervening in Egypt to bring about the defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood
and Salafis, and the Islamists win as they are winning today, what
do we expect the blowback to be? Would we want foreigners funneling
hundreds of millions of dollars into our election of 2012?

How would Andrew
Jackson have reacted if he caught British agents doing here what
we do all over the world?

January
4, 2012

Patrick
J. Buchanan [send
him mail] is co-founder and editor of The
American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books,
including Where
the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his
website.

Copyright
© 2012 Creators Syndicate

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