When it comes to intervention, tinkering with regimes or choosing sides of a conflict to support in wars to protect political and material interests, the United States could have a better record over the last several decades. Not only is its bad record continuing in the current conflict with Libya, but leaders have ignored this history.

One of the first blatant instances where the United States tried to protect its interests was in 1953. Using the CIA, the United States staged a coup on Iran’s new democratically elected president, Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who desired to modernize Iran by gaining control over the country’s oil supplies, which were managed by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Instead, the United States saw this as a danger to their source of inexpensive oil, so the CIA staged a coup and installed the shah under the false premise that the United States was containing communism. The shah, with the help of the CIA, employed a secret police to silence opposition. Later, the shah was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution, and justifiable hatred toward America ensued. Instead of protecting our interests, in the long run, we destroyed America’s image and credibility.

Up until several months ago, the United States remained hardly opposed to Egypt’s former president, Hosni Mubarak. This is just simply another instance when the United States tried to look after its political interests and ended up backing the wrong leader only to change its stance later.

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide, a point of comparison to the current situation in Libya, was a situation where the United States did not have significant interest. More than 800,000 people were slaughtered in approximately 100 days of fighting. America, in this situation, purposefully chose to ignore reliable evidence produced months beforehand that signaled that a massive, violent civil war would occur. Leaders like former President Bill Clinton avoided using the term ‘genocide’ to avoid the obligation to intervene. The United States could have cared less, politically speaking, about the hundreds of thousands killed in Rwanda because there was no interest in that region.

In Libya, though, the United States is not trying to ensure peace in the country. Rather, we have an unspoken preference to who wins in Libya, despite President Barack Obama’s reluctance to directly carry out ‘regime change.’ In Libya, there is little evidence suggesting anything near Rwanda’s organized, purposeful ethnic cleansing.

Rwanda was not specifically mentioned in Obama’s remarks on Libya last week. Though the heart of the message was the United States has a role as a world leader to prevent human rights abuses, the United States is essentially picking a side of an argument. There was even debate among politicians on whether or not to arm Libyan rebels. If the United States were actually committed to stopping a humanitarian crisis, it would attempt to make peace, rather than indirectly support a political group about which the United States has very little information. In a New York Times article on Thursday, we know CIA agents have been involved with British intelligence to plan out where attacks against the Moammar al Gadhafi regime should take place. All the while, Obama and most other leaders have not defined a clear goal in Libya — just like his predecessor who proclaimed ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq.

Worse, though, are the reports that innocent Libyan civilians are being killed as a result of NATO bombings. Just like in Yugoslavia, somehow we have found that, paradoxically, bombing to promote humanitarian ideals is acceptable. In both circumstances, there are no justifications for the killings.

History has shown that these efforts to protect our political and material interests often backfire. Leaders need to more carefully examine the past. There is nothing wrong with genuinely stopping possible genocide. Acting out of desire to protect interests other than for pure humanitarian concern is not advantageous.

Harmen Rockler is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. His column appears online biweekly, and he can be reached at horockle@syr.edu.

Published on April 3, 2011 at 12:00 pm