| You need to think a little more critically about the actual mechanics of regime change and pulling off a coup d'etat. Also it wouldn't hurt to lose the arrogance. Running a country is not easy. You need to command loyalty from a group of people that can safeguard your place in the nation. Not just an army, but also groups of people who can fund and support that army. It's as true for a tiny island nation as it is for the USA. European colonialism had outsized effects on the Caribbean for that reason, way easier to keep a nation of 10,000 under your thumb than to control millions. The CIA has resources comparable to a small army, but it must project these resources thinly across all the countries the US wishes to influence. It can buy guns and train limited numbers of rebels, but it cannot create a ruling party where before there was none. It can alter the course of politics in a nation, but that influence can't come close to actual control unless the nation is very small. Once in awhile they got lucky, and their group of trigger-happy idiots overwhelmed the other group of trigger-happy idiots. It's arguable as to exactly how much damage this does. Obviously it has a negative effect, political chaos is generally worse for a people than stability. Try to measure the effects in aggregate though, and comparing them to what would have happened otherwise, and it's hard to really tell. Political upheaval can destroy individual lives, but generally the industries underneath are left alone, it makes no sense, say, for a rebel group to destroy farmland, or a factory. Your efforts are much better directed at military targets, you're going to want that factory to keep making things once you're in power, being needlessly destructive hurts your interests too. |