Just to add something to the debate:
"Iranians come by their willingness to believe that foreigners are plotting against them honestly, since American and British intelligence agents did, in fact, conspire to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. More recently, Seymour Hersh reported just last year that the Bush administration was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on covert operations designed to destabilize the country’s government. Then last month a senior Democratic Congresswoman, Jane Harman, seemed to suggest that the United States should be encouraging separatist movements inside Iran. While Ms. Harman apologized for her remarks, a spate of recent bombings and attacks in Iran, possibly carried out by separatists, has made Iranians wonder if the Obama administration’s policy towards them might involve bombs as well as barbecues."
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/a-green-revolution-for-iran/?ref=world
"But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade. But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev. The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections. "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
Democratisation, NGOs and Colour revolutions http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/colour_revolutions_3196.jsp
In favor of foreign backed "revolutions" http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1560394,00.html
----------------- quote: Like the original Jacobin-Bolshevik version, it's a model made in Europe. These days, the Bush administration is rather aggressively pushing the idea of spreading velvet revolutions - now sometimes called "colour revolutions" - not just to the last remaining European dictatorship, Belarus, but also to countries in the Middle East. How should Europeans react? The last thing we should do, I think, is to leave talking of freedom entirely to Americans. After all, Solidarnosc is just one of many cases where Europeans have been on the front line in fighting for freedom. But fighting by peaceful means.
Instead, as the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, did eloquently in Poland this week, we should say plainly that the causes of Europe and freedom march together. Barroso, who himself vividly remembers the fall of the dictatorship in his native Portugal in 1974, talks of this as the European part of "a worldwide movement to freedom". And from Portugal in 1974 to Ukraine now, the hope of rejoining Europe has helped inspire such revolutions, while the process of preparing for membership of the EU has helped stabilise and secure fragile democracies in transition.
In short, we have our specifically European version of regime change. We should be proud of it, and we should promote it vigorously. -----------------
"It is however clear that popular uprisings can be manipulated in the interests of particular sections of society and, indeed, foreign powers (as clearly happened in some of the colour-coded revolutions in Eastern Europe) and, of course, they can impose greater tyrannies than those they replace."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2007/sep/30/featuresreview.review8
FC