Today I was
listening to KPFT Radio. They were discussing Stephen
Kinzer's new book
"Overthrow : America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" -
Stephen Kinzer .
I don't know
Stephen Kinzer but was plesantly surprised to hear the same analysus is
being made by him about USA's foreign policy in the name of 'regime change' for
the last 110 years starting with the story how America annexed Hawaii in 1893
down to Iraq War now.
Interesting!!!
Good book and
will make good reading which will add to your wisdom of the modern
civilization.
The following
is an partial excerpt from the book review in Amazon.Com
RB
Amazon.Com editorial review:
" The recent ouster of Saddam
Hussein may have turned "regime change" into a contemporary buzzword, but it's
been a tactic of American foreign policy for more than 110 years. Beginning with
the ouster of Hawaii's monarchy in 1893, Kinzer runs through the foreign
governments the U.S. has had a hand in toppling, some of which he has written
about at length before (in All the Shah's Men, etc.). Recent invasions of
countries such as Grenada and Panama may be more familiar to readers than
earlier interventions in Iran and Nicaragua, but Kinder, a foreign correspondent
for the New York Times, brings a rich narrative immediacy to all of his
stories. Although some of his assertions overreach themselves—as when he
proposes that better conduct by the American government in the Spanish-American
War might have prevented the rise of Castro a half-century later—he makes a
persuasive case that U.S. intervention destabilizes world politics and often
leaves countries worse off than they were before. Kinzer's argument isn't new,
but it's delivered in unusually moderate tones, which may earn him an audience
larger than the usual crew of die-hard leftists."
From The Washington
Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Do you think George W. Bush and the
neoconservatives inducted "regime change" into American foreign policy's hall of
fame? Think again. Long before Iraq, U.S. presidents, spies, corporate types and
their acolytes abroad had honed the art of deposing foreign governments.
As Stephen Kinzer tells the story in Overthrow, America's
century of regime changing began not in Iraq but Hawaii. Hawaii? Indeed. Kinzer
explains that Hawaii's white haole minority -- in cahoots with the U.S. Navy,
the White House and Washington's local representative -- conspired to remove
Queen Liliuokalani from her throne in 1893 as a step toward annexing the
islands. The haole plantation owners believed that by removing the queen (who
planned to expand the rights of Hawaii's native majority) and making Hawaii part
of the United States, they could get in on a lucrative but protected mainland
sugar market. Ever wonder why free trade has such a bad name?
Over the decades, a version of this story repeats, and repeats.
Kinzer, a New York Times reporter, writes that the United States has thwarted
independence movements in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Nicaragua;
staged covert actions and coups d'etat in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam and
Chile; and invaded Grenada, Panama and obviously Afghanistan and Iraq. Over 110
years, Kinzer argues, the United States has deployed its power to gain access to
natural resources, stifle dissent and control the nationalism of newly
independent states or political movements.
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