Re: Thwarting Democracy in Iran and Guatemala

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

how politically incorrect! it's not called a "coup." It's called "regime change."
Jim

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: Yoshie Furuhashi [mailto:furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx] 
	Sent: Sun 11/30/2003 6:31 AM 
	To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
	Cc: 
	Subject: [PEN-L] Thwarting Democracy in Iran and Guatemala
	
	

	I missed the conference on "Thwarting Democracy in Iran and Guatemala":
	
	"Thwarting Democracy in Iran and Guatemala: What Have We Learned
	Fifty Years After the U.S. Sponsored Coups? An Exploration" (November
	13-15, 2003), Northeastern Illinois University,
	<http://www.neiu.edu/~IranGuat/home.html>.
	
	Did anyone get to attend it?
	
	*****   New York Times   November 30, 2003
	
	IRAN AND GUATEMALA, 1953-54
	
	Revisiting Cold War Coups and Finding Them Costly
	
	By STEPHEN KINZER
	
	SOON after the C.I.A. installed him as president of Guatemala in
	1954, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas visited Washington. He was unusually
	forthright with Vice President Richard M. Nixon. "Tell me what you
	want me to do," he said, "and I will do it."
	
	What the United States wanted in Guatemala - and in Iran, where the
	C.I.A. also deposed a government in the early 1950's - was
	pro-American stability. In the long run, though, neither Colonel
	Castillo Armas nor his Iranian counterpart, Shah Mohammed Reza
	Pahlavi, provided it. Instead, both led their countries away from
	democracy and toward repression and tragedy.
	
	How did this happen? From the perspective of half a century, what is
	the legacy of these two coups?
	
	Several dozen scholars, including leading experts on Iran and
	Guatemala, gathered in Chicago this month to consider those
	questions. Their conclusions were grim. All agreed that both coups -
	the first that the C.I.A. carried out - had terrible long-term
	effects.
	
	"It's quite clear that the 1953 coup cut short a move toward
	democracy in Iran," said Mark J. Gasiorowski, a historian at
	Louisiana State University who began studying that coup in the
	1980's. "The United States bears responsibility for this."
	
	Iranians wrote a constitution and elected a parliament early in the
	20th century. Their progress toward democracy stopped after the
	Pahlavi dynasty took the throne with British help in 1921, but
	resumed after World War II. By the time of the 1953 coup, Iran was
	more free than at any time before or since.
	
	The verdict on Guatemala was even harsher. Within a few years after
	the 1954 coup, Guatemala fell into a maelstrom of guerrilla war and
	state terror in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
	
	"The C.I.A. intervention began a ghastly cycle of violence,
	assassination and torture in Guatemala," said Stephen G. Rabe, a
	historian from the University of Texas at Dallas and author of
	"Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism."
	
	"The Guatemalan intervention of 1954 is the most important event in
	the history of U.S. relations with Latin America," Mr. Rabe said. "It
	really set the precedent for later interventions in Cuba, British
	Guiana, Brazil and Chile. The tactics were the same, the mindset was
	the same, and in many cases the people who directed those covert
	interventions were the same."
	
	President Harry S. Truman authorized creation of the C.I.A. in 1947,
	and during his administration it carried out covert actions. Truman
	refused, however, to authorize the overthrow of governments. That
	changed when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953.
	
	On Aug. 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran became
	the first victim of a C.I.A. coup. Ten months later, on June 27,
	1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the second.
	
	The recent Chicago meeting, at Northeastern Illinois University, was
	the first time scholars have considered these two coups together.
	Some of the participants have taken anti-interventionist positions in
	the past, but all are respected scholars in their fields. Several
	have devoted years to studying either the Guatemala coup or the one
	in Iran. Some now see them as constituting a single historical
	moment, the beginning of an era of C.I.A.-backed coups around the
	world.
	
	Eisenhower ordered these coups for a combination of economic and
	political reasons. Elected Iranian and Guatemalan leaders had
	challenged the power of large Western corporations, Mr. Mossadegh by
	nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and Mr. Arbenz by forcing
	the United Fruit Company to sell some of its unused land for
	distribution to peasants. American officials charged that both were
	leading their countries toward Communism, but recent research
	suggests that the likelihood of Communist takeovers in Iran and
	Guatemala was exaggerated.
	
	Mr. Mossadegh pursued a neutralist foreign policy and cooperated with
	Communist members of parliament to win approval of social reforms,
	but was not inclined to socialism. American officials who were
	assigned to monitor Communist movements in Iran during the 1950's
	admitted years later that they had routinely overstated the strength
	of these movements.
	
	Mr. Arbenz was more sympathetic to socialist ideas, and bought
	weapons from Czechoslovakia after Washington blocked access to other
	sources. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought to link him to
	a Soviet bid for influence in the Americas. "Fifty years later," Mr.
	Rabe said, "still no link has been established."
	
	After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United
	States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country. "There
	was no democratic agenda," asserted Cyrus Bina, an economist from the
	University of Minnesota at Morris. Both countries fell into
	dictatorship and bloody upheaval.
	
	In Iran, the shah's regime imprisoned dissidents and alienated
	religious leaders by imposing secular reforms. Many democrats and
	leftists made common cause with fundamentalist clerics. "The only way
	they were able to develop was in the mosque," Mr. Bina said.
	
	Fariba Zarinebaf, a historian at Northwestern University, said the
	most profound long-term result of the 1953 coup may be that it led
	many Iranian intellectuals to conclude that although Western leaders
	practiced democracy at home, they were uninterested in promoting it
	abroad. "The growing disillusion of Iranian intellectuals with the
	West and with Western-style liberal democracy was a major development
	in the 1960's and 70's that contributed to the Islamic revolution,"
	she said.
	
	If the overthrows in Iran and Guatemala marked the beginning of the
	coup era 50 years ago, this year's invasion of Iraq suggests that the
	era has ended. Governments like Saddam Hussein's learned to protect
	themselves against coups, participants at the conference said.
	"Conditions in the world are more constricting today and it is more
	difficult, I believe, to pull off coups," said Douglass Cassel, a
	Northwestern University law professor. In Iraq this year, the United
	States invaded instead. That option would probably have been closed
	during the cold war, when the Soviet Union was likely to have opposed
	it. . . .
	
	<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/weekinreview/30KINZ.html>   *****
	--
	Yoshie
	
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