[lit-ideas] From the NYRB

From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "lit-ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 17:07:12 -0400
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18973
 
Kinzer describes three periods of American intervention: first the "Imperial 
Era" between 1893 and 1910 (in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, 
Nicaragua, and Honduras); second, the "Covert Action period" between 1953 and 
1973 (in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile); and third, the "Invasions" 
since 1983 (in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq). The original announced 
aim was to help anti-colonial patriots to achieve success, as in Cuba and the 
Philippines; and then, to the patriots' surprise, the US would establish an 
authoritarian protectorate. The reasons for doing so were usually presented as 
extending the advantages of American democratic principles and protecting US 
security. In practice, as Kinzer shows, the principal aims were to establish 
the right of US business to act as it wished, to satisfy a new national 
ambition for expansion, and to add to the strength of the US economy.
 
Kinzer quotes a letter from John L. Stevens, the American minister in Honolulu, 
on January 16, 1893, to Captain Gilbert Wiltse, the commander of the cruiser 
Boston. He comments, "Its single sentence is a dry classic of diplomatic 
mendacity, full of motifs that Americans would hear often in the century to 
come." 
 
The letter reads:
 
In view of the existing critical circumstances in Honolulu, indicating an 
inadequate legal force, I request you to land marines and sailors from the ship 
under your command for the protection of the United States legation and the 
United States consulate, and to secure the safety of American life and property.
 
That, effectively, was the end of the courageous Queen Liliuokalani's 
resistance to the American annexation of Hawaii.  Although there were 
impassioned opponents of such actions in the United States, William James among 
them, Kinzer shows that the expansionist mood of the 1890s was already 
producing justifications that sound all too familiar today. American presidents 
and military officers, then as now, said they were intervening in struggles of 
"good and evil" for humanity's sake and had God's guidance in doing so. "The 
parallels between McKinley's invasion of the Philippines and Bush's invasion of 
Iraq were startling." 
 
Kinzer writes:
 
Both presidents sought economic as well as political advantage for the United 
States. Both were also motivated by a deep belief that the United States has a 
sacred mission to spread its form of government to faraway countries. Neither 
doubted that the people who lived in those countries would welcome Americans as 
liberators. Neither anticipated that he would have to fight a long 
counterinsurgency war to subdue nationalist rebels. Early in the twenty-first 
century, ten decades after the United States invaded the Philippines and a few 
years after it invaded Iraq, those two countries were among the most volatile 
and unstable in all of Asia. 
 
Kinzer's book is particularly enlightening about the consequences of such 
unilateral interventions. He writes:
 
If it were possible to control the course of world events by deposing foreign 
governments, the United States would be unchallenged. It has deposed far more 
of them than any other modern nation. The stories of what has happened in the 
aftermath of these operations, however, make clear that Americans do not know 
what to do with countries after removing their leaders. They easily succumb to 
the temptation to stage coups or invasions but turn quickly away when the 
countries where they intervene fall into misery and repression.
[lit-ideas] From the NYRB

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