[amc] Men's Fellowship breakfast
- From: wseverin1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Werner J. Severin)
- To: amc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 11:55:11 -0500
This is also another item touched on during the Thursday breakfast.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5325069
Author Kinzer Charts 'Century of Regime Change'
Fresh Air from WHYY, April 5, 2006 ? Stephen Kinzer has had a
peripatetic tenure at The New York Times. He has reported from more
than 50 countries and served as the paper's bureau chief in Turkey,
Germany and Nicaragua.
He employs that far-flung perspective to examine America's history of
regime change in his new book, Overthrow.
Though Iraq is the most recent example of the United States exerting
its power to alter another country's leadership, Kinzer notes that it
is certainly not the first. He notes that Iraq "was the culmination
of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew fourteen
governments that displeased them for various ideological, political,
and economic reasons." Kinzer discusses the book with Terry Gross.
Excerpt: 'Overthrow'
by Stephen Kinzer
Introduction
Why does a strong nation strike against a weaker one? Usually because
it seeks to impose its ideology, increase its power, or gain control
of valuable resources. Shifting combinations of these three factors
motivated the United States as it extended its global reach over the
past century and more. This book examines the most direct form of
American intervention, the overthrow of foreign governments.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not an isolated episode. It was the
culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew
fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological,
political, and economic reasons. Like each of these operations, the
"regime change" in Iraq seemed for a time -- a very short time -- to
have worked. It is now clear, however, that this operation has had
terrible unintended consequences. So have most of the other coups,
revolutions, and invasions that the United States has mounted to
depose governments it feared or mistrusted.
The United States uses a variety of means to persuade other countries
to do its bidding. In many cases it relies on time-honored tactics of
diplomacy, offering rewards to governments that support American
interests and threatening retaliation against those that refuse.
Sometimes it defends friendly regimes against popular anger or
uprisings. In more than a few places, it has quietly supported coups
or revolutions organized by others.
Twice, in the context of world wars, it helped to wipe away old
ruling orders and impose new ones.
This book is not about any of those ways Americans have shaped the
modern world. It focuses only on the most extreme set of cases: those
in which the United States arranged to depose foreign leaders. No
nation in modern history has done this so often, in so many places so
far from its own shores.
The stories of these "regime change" operations are dazzlingly
exciting. They tell of patriots and scoundrels, high motives and low
cynicism, extreme courage and cruel betrayal. This book brings them
together for the first time, but it seeks to do more than simply tell
what happened. By considering these operations as a continuum rather
than as a series of unrelated incidents, it seeks to find what they
have in common. It poses and tries to answer two fundamental
questions. First, why did the United States carry out these
operations? Second, what have been their long-term consequences?
Drawing up a list of countries whose governments the United States
has overthrown is not as simple as it sounds. This book treats only
cases in which Americans played the decisive role in deposing a
regime. Chile, for example, makes the list because, although many
factors led to the 1973 coup there, the American role was decisive.
Indonesia, Brazil, and the Congo do not, because American agents
played only subsidiary roles in the overthrow of their governments
during the 1960s. Nor do Mexico, Haiti, or the Dominican Republic,
countries the United States invaded but whose leaders it did not depose.
Americaís long "regime change" century dawned in 1893 with the
overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. This was a tentative, awkward
piece of work, a cultural tragedy staged as comic opera. It was not a
military operation, but without the landing of American troops, it
probably would not have succeeded. The president of the United States
approved of it, but soon after it happened, a new president took
office and denounced it. Americans were already divided over whether
it is a good idea to depose foreign regimes.
The overthrow of Hawaiiís queen reignited a political debate that had
first flared during the Mexican War half a century before. That
debate, which in essence is about what role the United States should
play in the world, rages to this day. It burst back onto the front
pages after the invasion of Iraq.
No grand vision of American power lay behind the Hawaiian revolution
of 1893. Just the opposite was true of the Spanish-American War,
which broke out five years later. This was actually two wars, one in
which the United States came to the aid of patriots fighting against
Spanish colonialism, and then a second in which it repressed those
patriots to assure that their newly liberated nations would be
American protectorates rather than truly independent. A radically new
idea of America, much more globally ambitious than any earlier one,
emerged from these conflicts. They marked the beginning of an era in
which the United States has assumed the right to intervene anywhere
in the world, not simply by influencing or coercing foreign
governments but also by overthrowing them.
In Hawaii and the countries that rose against Spain in 1898, American
presidents tested and developed their new interventionist policy.
There, however, they were reacting to circumstances created by
others. The first time a president acted on his own to depose a
foreign leader was in 1909, when William Howard Taft ordered the
overthrow of Nicaraguan president JosÈ Santos Zelaya. Taft claimed he
was acting to protect American security and promote democratic
principles. His true aim was to defend the right of American
companies to operate as they wished in Nicaragua. In a larger sense,
he was asserting the right of the United States to impose its
preferred form of stability on foreign countries.
This set a pattern. Throughout the twentieth century and into the
beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its
military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow
governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it
cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and
liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic
reasons -- specifically, to establish, promote, and defend the right
of Americans to do business around the world without interference.
Huge forces reshaped the world during the twentieth century. One of
the most profound was the emergence of multinational corporations,
businesses based in one country that made much of their profit
overseas. These corporations and the people who ran them accumulated
great wealth and political influence. Civic movements, trade unions,
and political parties arose to counterbalance them, but in the United
States, these were never able even to approach the power that
corporations wielded. Corporations identified themselves in the
public mind with the ideals of free enterprise, hard work, and
individual achievement. They also maneuvered their friends and
supporters into important positions in Washington.
By a quirk of history, the United States rose to great power at the
same time multinational corporations were emerging as a decisive
force in world affairs. These corporations came to expect government
to act on their behalf abroad, even to the extreme of overthrowing
uncooperative foreign leaders. Successive presidents have agreed that
this is a good way to promote American interests.
Defending corporate power is hardly the only reason the United States
overthrows foreign governments. Strong tribes and nations have been
attacking weak ones since the beginning of history. They do so for
the most elemental reason, which is to get more of whatever is good
to have. In the modern world, corporations are the institutions that
countries use to capture wealth. They have become the vanguard of
American power, and defying them has become tantamount to defying the
United States. When Americans depose a foreign leader who dares such
defiance, they not only assert their rights in one country but also
send a clear message to others.
The influence that economic power exercises over American foreign
policy has grown tremendously since the days when ambitious planters
in Hawaii realized that by bringing their islands into the United
States, they would be able to send their sugar to markets on the
mainland without paying import duties. As the twentieth century
progressed, titans of industry and their advocates went a step beyond
influencing policy makers; they became the policy makers. The figure
who most perfectly embodied this merging of political and economic
interests was John Foster Dulles, who spent decades working for some
of the worldís most powerful corporations and then became secretary
of state. It was Dulles who ordered the 1953 coup in Iran, which was
intended in part to make the Middle East safe for American oil
companies. A year later he ordered another coup, in Guatemala, where
a nationalist government had challenged the power of United Fruit, a
company his old law firm represented.
Having marshaled so much public and political support, American
corporations found it relatively easy to call upon the military or
the Central Intelligence Agency to defend their privileges in
countries where they ran into trouble. They might not have been able
to do so if they and the presidents who cooperated with them had
candidly presented their cases to the American people. Americans have
always been idealists. They want their country to act for pure
motives, and might have refused to support foreign interventions that
were forthrightly described as defenses of corporate power.
Presidents have used two strategies to assure that these
interventions would be carried out with a minimum of protest.
Sometimes they obscured the real reasons they overthrew foreign
governments, insisting that they were acting only to protect American
security and liberate suffering natives. At other times they simply
denied that the United
States was involved in these operations at all.
The history of American overthrows of foreign governments can be
divided into three parts. First came the imperial phase, when
Americans deposed regimes more or less openly. None of the men who
overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy tried to hide their involvement. The
Spanish-American War was fought in full view of the world, and
President Taft announced exactly what he was doing when he moved to
overthrow the governments of Nicaragua and Honduras. The men who
directed these "regime change" operations may not have forthrightly
explained why they were acting, but they took responsibility for
their acts.
After World War II, with the world political situation infinitely
more complex than it had been at the dawn of the century, American
presidents found a new way to overthrow foreign governments. They
could no longer simply demand that unfriendly foreign leaders accept
the reality of American power and step down, nor could they send
troops to land on foreign shores without worrying about the
consequences. This was because for the first time, there was a force
in the world that limited their freedom of action: the Soviet Union.
During the Cold War, any direct American intervention risked
provoking a reaction from the Soviets, possibly a cataclysmic one. To
adjust to this new reality, the United States began using a more
subtle technique, the clandestine coup díÈtat, to depose foreign
governments. In Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, diplomats
and intelligence agents replaced generals as the instruments of
American intervention.
By the end of the twentieth century, it had become more difficult for
Americans to stage coups because foreign leaders had learned how to
resist them. Coups had also become unnecessary. The decline and
collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the Red Army
meant that there was no longer any military constraint on the United
States. That left it free to return to its habit of landing troops on
foreign shores.
Both of the small countries Americans invaded in the 1980s, Grenada
and Panama, are in what the United States has traditionally
considered its sphere of influence, and both were already in turmoil
when American troops landed. The two invasions that came later, in
Afghanistan and Iraq, were far larger in scale and historical
importance. Many Americans supported the operation in Afghanistan
because they saw it as an appropriate reaction to the presence of
terrorists there. A smaller but still substantial number supported
the operation in Iraq after being told that Iraq also posed an
imminent threat to world peace. American invasions left both of these
countries in violent turmoil.
Most "regime change" operations have achieved their short-term goals.
Before the CIA deposed the government of Guatemala in 1954, for
example, United Fruit was not free to operate as it wished in that
country; afterward it was. From the vantage point of history,
however, it is clear that most of these operations actually weakened
American security. They cast whole regions of the world into
upheaval, creating whirlpools of instability from which undreamed-of
threats arose years later.
History does not repeat itself, but it delights in patterns and
symmetries. When the stories of American "regime change" operations
are taken together, they reveal much about why the United States
overthrows foreign governments and what consequences it brings on
itself by doing so. They also teach lessons for the future.
From the book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From
Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer. Reprinted by arrangement with Times
Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2006
by Stephen Kinzer
Werner J. Severin
3108 Silverleaf Drive
Austin, Tx. 78757-1611
(512) 452-5080
-------
Austin Mennonite Church, (512) 926-3121 www.mennochurch.org
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