Spreading Freedom
Depose and Conquer
It's nice to know that somebody realizes the Bushies didn't invent American imperialism:
"Overthrow" by Stephen Kinzer is the history of forcible regime changes by the United States and its local allies over the past 110 years, starting with the undermining of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, passing through Cuba (1898), the Philippines (1898), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and elsewhere, and ending with present-day Iraq.
It should have been obvious that the damage to the countries concerned was likely to be out of all proportion to the possible gains to the United States. But during the cold war, ignorant and ideological official cliques in Washington repeatedly convinced themselves that "you are with us or you are against us," and that a range of nationalist governments around the world, anti-American to a greater or lesser degree, were part of the Soviet global conspiracy and had to be destroyed.
In several cases, while the coups themselves were highly successful, the long-term results proved disastrous — not just for America's reputation abroad but for American interests as well. That was true, for example, of the C.I.A.'s overthrow of the democratic nationalist prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh — accused quite falsely of being pro-Communist — and the restoration of autocratic rule by the shah.
That operation, run by Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy Roosevelt's grandson) was brilliantly executed, bringing about Mossadegh's downfall even after the shah himself had lost his nerve and fled to Italy. But as a result, the role of opposition to the shah was assumed by religious fundamentalists, and ended in the disastrous revolution of 1979. The deep Iranian popular fear of the United States that was fed by the 1953 coup continues to haunt American-Iranian relations to this day.
The ugliest American intervention in Latin America was the overthrow of the democratic socialist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954 and its replacement by a military dictatorship representing the interests of the local oligarchy and the United Fruit Company. The result was a genuinely Communist insurrection and a savage American-backed military campaign of repression that cost the lives of more than 100,000 Maya Indians — something that in other circumstances would certainly have been described in the United States as genocide.
What, though, is the point of such meticulously reported studies if the American public is repeatedly going to wipe such episodes from its collective consciousness, and the American establishment is going to make similar mistakes over and over again, first in the cold war and now in the "war on terror" — each time covering its actions with the same rhetoric of spreading "freedom" and combating "evil"?
As Kinzer writes of the Iranian hostage crisis, "because most Americans did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953, few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they called 'the great Satan.' " They still don't.
It's nice to know that somebody realizes the Bushies didn't invent American imperialism:
"Overthrow" by Stephen Kinzer is the history of forcible regime changes by the United States and its local allies over the past 110 years, starting with the undermining of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, passing through Cuba (1898), the Philippines (1898), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and elsewhere, and ending with present-day Iraq.
It should have been obvious that the damage to the countries concerned was likely to be out of all proportion to the possible gains to the United States. But during the cold war, ignorant and ideological official cliques in Washington repeatedly convinced themselves that "you are with us or you are against us," and that a range of nationalist governments around the world, anti-American to a greater or lesser degree, were part of the Soviet global conspiracy and had to be destroyed.
In several cases, while the coups themselves were highly successful, the long-term results proved disastrous — not just for America's reputation abroad but for American interests as well. That was true, for example, of the C.I.A.'s overthrow of the democratic nationalist prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh — accused quite falsely of being pro-Communist — and the restoration of autocratic rule by the shah.
That operation, run by Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy Roosevelt's grandson) was brilliantly executed, bringing about Mossadegh's downfall even after the shah himself had lost his nerve and fled to Italy. But as a result, the role of opposition to the shah was assumed by religious fundamentalists, and ended in the disastrous revolution of 1979. The deep Iranian popular fear of the United States that was fed by the 1953 coup continues to haunt American-Iranian relations to this day.
The ugliest American intervention in Latin America was the overthrow of the democratic socialist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954 and its replacement by a military dictatorship representing the interests of the local oligarchy and the United Fruit Company. The result was a genuinely Communist insurrection and a savage American-backed military campaign of repression that cost the lives of more than 100,000 Maya Indians — something that in other circumstances would certainly have been described in the United States as genocide.
What, though, is the point of such meticulously reported studies if the American public is repeatedly going to wipe such episodes from its collective consciousness, and the American establishment is going to make similar mistakes over and over again, first in the cold war and now in the "war on terror" — each time covering its actions with the same rhetoric of spreading "freedom" and combating "evil"?
As Kinzer writes of the Iranian hostage crisis, "because most Americans did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953, few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they called 'the great Satan.' " They still don't.
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