[Marxism] Stephen Kinzer's "Overthrow"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(If you read this review of Stephen Kinzer's latest and obviously useful 
book carefully, you'll figure out that there's an implicit assumption that 
is at odds with its ostensibly progressive aims. Namely, he dwells at 
length on the unintended negative consequences of US interventions even 
when they are initially successful. For example,  the review states, "In 
the case of Cuba, the decision in 1898 to betray the Cuban rebels against 
Spain and impose American hegemony on the island fueled an anti-American 
nationalism that continues to preserve the Communist regime. Mass support 
for governments like those of Castro and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has also 
been fed by other American interventions in the region." So, if there was 
not a spasm of anti-American nationalism, would the interventions have been 
worth it? One gathers that this book is just another expression of liberal 
outrage over an intervention gone wrong. One wonders if Kinzer would have 
taken the trouble to write it if the occupation of Iraq had gone smoothly. 
Kinzer co-wrote "Bitter Fruit," a powerful account of the role of the USA 
in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala at the very time he was 
writing anti-Sandinista propaganda for the NY Times in the guise of 
objective reporting. So we are obviously dealing with a complex writer.)


NY Times Book Review, April 16, 2006
'Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq,' by 
Stephen Kinzer
Depose and Conquer
By ANATOL LIEVEN

A senior member of a Washington research group once told me that he "could 
not believe" that the United States would ever help the Pakistani military 
overthrow a democratically elected government in Pakistan if that 
government refused to help in the war on terror. Now there's a man who 
really needs to read the latest book by the former New York Times 
correspondent Stephen Kinzer. "Overthrow" 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.

Kinzer has written a detailed, passionate and convincing book, several 
chapters of which have the pace and grip of a good thriller. It should be 
essential reading for any Americans who wish to understand both their 
country's historical record in international affairs, and why that record 
has provoked anger and distrust in much of the world. Most important, it 
helps explain why, outside of Eastern Europe, American pronouncements about 
spreading democracy and freedom, as repeatedly employed by the Bush 
administration, are met with widespread incredulity.

What's most depressing about Kinzer's book, however, is not the drastic 
clash it describes between professed American morality and actual American 
behavior. For, after all, the historical record of other democratic 
imperial powers, like Britain and France, has been even worse than that of 
the United States. Operating in the real world as a great power is not a 
business for the overly fastidious.

But if you are going to use the argument that making a successful 
geopolitical omelet requires breaking eggs, you'd better have something 
edible to show for all the shattered shells lying around. As Kinzer makes 
clear, the problem is that all too many of the interventions he recounts 
were not just utterly ruthless; they were utterly unnecessary.

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.

In the case of Cuba, the decision in 1898 to betray the Cuban rebels 
against Spain and impose American hegemony on the island fueled an 
anti-American nationalism that continues to preserve the Communist regime. 
Mass support for governments like those of Castro and Hugo Chávez of 
Venezuela has also been fed by other American interventions in the region.

Of these, the ugliest 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.

I must confess that I put down this fine book with a feeling of deep 
disheartenment. For what, after all, 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.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in 
Washington. His latest book is "America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of 
American Nationalism."


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