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A Century of Interventionism and Regime Change
by Anthony Gregory
by Anthony Gregory
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Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer (New York: Times Books, 2006); 400 pages; $27.50.
Since September 11, the U.S. government has overthrown the
governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. Most Americans appear to think of these
actions as defensible in principle and, at any rate, see them as reactions to
the terrorist aggression of 9/11.
The overwhelming history of U.S. conduct in other countries rarely
occurs to the average American. Aside from some obvious instances, such as the
Vietnam War and the nearly universally approved U.S. intervention into World
War II, the history of U.S. foreign policy does not get the attention and
consideration it deserves.
So when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by hijacked
commercial airplanes five years ago, the majority of the American public
reacted with shock and surprise, as well as anger and fear. It was as though
history had begun with those terrorist attacks. Americans were genuinely
confused as to why innocent America would be the target of any such murderous
assault. The only explanation that many were prepared to believe was that
terrorists hate Americans for their freedom, and thus the war on terror would
be a war to defend and reaffirm such freedom.
Indeed, with the continuing calamity in Iraq making the daily
headlines, many Americans have traded one misconception for another. Whereas
five years ago, they had thought that the United States was a more or less
innocent, benign, or even benevolent force in world affairs, and so the
militaristic response to such anti-American terrorist attacks represented some
sort of anomalous behavior, many who have turned against the Iraq War have
stumbled into a similarly formed but quite different misunderstanding.
How could George W. Bush have done this? many wonder. This
president has attacked a country that did not attack the United States or pose
any threat to American freedom or American lives, has overthrown a sovereign
government, has unleashed catastrophe in the region, has radicalized America's
enemies, and has all the while, it now seems, been less than forthcoming about
his reasons for doing so. Now it is President Bush who is the anomaly. His
partisan detractors criticize him as though he were the only man in the White
House ever to do such an outrageous thing.
This misconception is perhaps as dangerous as the one that led so
many Americans to believe that terrorists struck on 9/11 because they hated
American liberty. To understand America's current challenges in the world
requires context that, unfortunately, all too many Americans do not have.
We can all better comprehend why it is that so many foreigners hate
us when we look carefully at the history of U.S. foreign policy, and we can
better know what to do about it if we do not blame all of our current
difficulties on the person of George W. Bush.
We should all be grateful, then, for Stephen Kinzer's new book,
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In it we see
how history has unfolded over the past century with repeating patterns emerging
with frightening frequency.
A history of interventionism
Kinzer sketches out an engaging, very tightly written narrative of
U.S. involvement in overthrowing the governments of Hawaii, Cuba, Nicaragua,
Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and
Iraq. In nearly every historical case, we can see parallels to the contemporary
interventions in Afghanistan and especially Iraq.
In sketching out the beginning of America's hyper-aggressive
foreign policy, Kinzer touches on something that is rarely touched on in public
schools or political speeches. Americans at one time, by and large, maintained
a philosophical aversion to imperialistic adventures. Granted, they were not
always peaceful, but they had no pretentions of being the global cop. There had
been the Mexican War and the sweeping across the middle of North America in the
spirit of Manifest Destiny. But "the idea of going farther ... was something
quite new." As the author explains, there was a consensus against seizing
Hawaii in 1893, which struck Americans as imperialistic, even un-American.
Five years later, this consensus evaporated. Almost overnight, it
was replaced by a national clamor for overseas expansion. This was the quickest
and most profound reversal of public opinion in the history of American foreign
policy.
Public sentiment is crucial in determining how much politicians can
achieve in the realm of their imperial ambitions. And just as a public
favorable toward intervention will translate into more intervention, the
ravages of war can corrupt public morality. This is perhaps most evident in the
American counter-insurrection in the Philippines in the immediate aftermath of
the Spanish-American War, where, as in Cuba, Americans initially claimed to be
fighting to defend the rights to self-determination of a colonized people
against the Spanish, only later to renege on their promises and impose their
own occupation in Spain's stead.
The pretext had changed to one of civilizing the uncivilized.
Americans saw Filipinos as savages, hardly human. And after multiple reports of
terrible torture, abuse, and massacres of innocent Filipinos, which some
pundits came to see as a sign that Americans had become what they claimed to be
fighting against, the defenders of U.S. conduct overseas responded in a manner
similar to what we hear from defenders of the Iraq War.
Extreme conditions, they insisted, had forced soldiers to act as
they did. The New York Times argued that "brave and loyal officers" had reacted
understandably to the "cruel, treacherous, murderous Filipinos." The St. Louis
Globe-Democrat said that ... "the transgressions have been extremely slight."
... A second theme that echoed through the press was that any atrocities
committed in the Philippines had been aberrations. They were "deplorable," the
St. Paul Pioneer Press conceded, but had "no bearing on fundamental questions
of national policy."
Interventionism and torture
Such lines of argument seem remarkably close to the reactions of
certain right-wing radio hosts following revelations of the Abu Ghraib torture
scandal and the Haditha massacre. "The scandal over torture and murder in the
Philippines ... might have led Americans to rethink their country's worldwide
ambitions," writes Kinzer, "but it did not. Instead, they came to accept the
idea that the soldiers might have to commit atrocities in order to subdue
insurgents and win wars." Perhaps the next torture-and-murder scandal will snap
Americans out of their acceptance of the U.S. empire, but at this point it
seems doubtful.
Such brutality runs through most American interventions, to varying
extents. On top of all the "collateral damage" in these interventions - from
the innocents slaughtered in a mental hospital during Reagan's invasion of
Grenada to the innocents killed in Bush's Shock and Awe - U.S. soldiers have
committed nefarious acts, once in the corrupting atmosphere of the battlefield.
Just as horrifying, the U.S. government has bankrolled murderous regimes, from
Iran to Chile, and has even funded their campaigns of terror against
sympathizers of political programs considered too radical by the United States.
In Guatemala, starting in 1960,
[many] were tortured to death on military bases. In the
countryside, soldiers rampaged through villages, massacring Mayan Indians by
the hundreds. This repression raged for three decades, and, during that period,
soldiers killed more civilians in Guatemala than in the rest of the hemisphere
combined.
During this time, "the United States provided Guatemala with
hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid. Americans trained and armed
the Guatemalan army and police" and otherwise supported the terror. This was
all because during the Cold War being anti-communist was a key to support and
acceptance from Washington, even if one's regime was truly tyrannical, and
being perceived as sympathetic to communism was a cause to be overthrown, even
if such perceptions were dubious.
The rationales for intervention
The reasons for such rampant American interventionism, as Kinzer
argues, fall mainly into two categories: economics and ideology. Corporate
interests have exercised enormous power over U.S. foreign policy, contributing
hugely to why William Howard Taft overthrew Zelaya's government in Nicaragua,
why the Eisenhower administration overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh
in Iran, and why Richard Nixon overthrew Allende in Chile.
The importance of private interests in public policy is paramount,
and libertarians and free-market thinkers would do themselves well to see the
frequency of conspiracy between the U.S. warfare state and big corporations,
which are not, despite the common misconceptions, overwhelmingly favorable
toward free markets. On the contrary, the neo-mercantilism so prevalent in the
history of U.S. foreign policy - from United Fruit in Latin America to
Halliburton in Iraq - benefits big business by socializing costs and risks,
thus forcing taxpayers and foreigners to pay for corporate profits.
Kinzer touches on the contradictions in government-advanced
capitalism practiced in the name of "free enterprise." In the case of Honduras,
the
suffocating control that Americans maintained over Honduras
prevented the emergence of a local business class. In Guatemala, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, coffee planters slowly accumulated capital, invested
in banks and other commercial enterprises, and went on to assert civic and
political power. That never happened in Honduras. The only option available to
energetic or ambitious Hondurans was to work for one of the banana companies.
The companies were triumphs of the American free market, but they used their
power to prevent capitalism from emerging in Honduras.
The only problem with this analysis, of course, is that the
companies were most certainly not triumphs of the American free market, but
rather depended on corporate welfare and U.S. intervention abroad to maintain
their economic power.
Money is not the only reason the U.S. government has overthrown
foreign states. Corporate
influence alone ... was never enough. Americans overthrew
governments only when economic interests coincided with ideological ones. In
Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the
American ideology was that of Christian improvement and "manifest destiny."
Decades later, in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, it was
anti-Communism.
In the case of anti-communism, private enterprise supported by the
state often coincided easily with an opposition to leftist socialism abroad.
This did contradict principles of the free market, but perhaps the promotion of
"democracy" has been the greatest of the frauds in selling U.S. imperialism to
the American public. In three cases - Iran, Guatemala, and Chile - the United
States overthrew a socialistic but nevertheless popularly elected head of state
and replaced him with a right-wing tyrant friendly to the U.S. government who
came to rule his nation through incredible violence and terror.
From a moral perspective, the socialistic tendencies of those
replaced - most notably, the desire to nationalize assets owned by Western
companies - could not justify such intervention, any more than Franklin
Roosevelt's comparable socialization of the American economy during the New
Deal could justify a foreign invasion of America and the installation of a
puppet regime friendly to a foreign power. Putting it in these terms might help
Americans to understand how farcical is the claim that U.S. wars are all about
promoting democracy.
Even when the United States helps to establish elections or new
civic institutions, it typically imposes far more control over its occupied
countries than anyone in America would tolerate from a foreign power. The Platt
Amendment in Cuba after the Spanish-American War, which gave the U.S.
government all manner of de facto control over the "independent" Cuban people,
and the recent U.S.-regulated deliberations in Iraq illustrate this.
Interventionism and blowback
Aside from violating the principles of the free market, democracy,
and nonintervention, U.S. adventures overseas have also produced terrible
backlashes. This happened throughout Latin America, as revolutionaries such as
Che Guevara became radicalized at the sight of U.S. disasters in his region. We
see it today in the war on terror, with al-Qaeda active in Iraq, a country
where it previously was nowhere to be found.
But such backlash is probably clearest in the example of Iran,
where, as Kinzer reminds us, the U.S. government overthrew the democratically
elected leader in favor of its ally, the shah. This created such anti-American
sentiment in Iran and the rest of the Middle East, culminating first in the
radical Iranian revolution in 1979, which very likely produced far worse
results than we would have seen had the United States left Iran alone, and
leading to the current conflicts between the United States and the Middle East.
As Kinzer sums it up, the shah's
repression ultimately set off a revolution that brought radical
fundamentalists to power.... [These] radicals sponsored deadly acts of terror
against Western targets.... Their example inspired Muslim fanatics around the
world, including in neighboring Afghanistan, where the Taliban gave sanctuary
to militants who carried out devastating attacks against the United States on
September 11, 2001.
The patterns continue. Kinzer does a great job of exploring the
issues of the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions as well, but the most
fascinating material, and the least discussed in other books coming out these
days, concerns earlier interventions where we see so many of the same themes
repeating over and over - ones that are uncomfortably evocative of U.S.
foreign-policy crises today. The answer to those problems is for America to
adopt a noninterventionist foreign policy as quickly as possible. As bad as
things look now, they could get worse. Kinzer informs his readers that, during
the crucial deliberations over U.S. policy in Vietnam in the Kennedy White
House, officials came to decide "between two awful alternatives": either
supporting Diem, the U.S. ally who was losing his grasp on South Vietnam, or
overthrowing him.
The United States could simply have washed its hands of the
crisis and left it for the Vietnamese to resolve. That would probably have led
to the establishment of Communist or pro-Communist rule over the entire
country, but that is what ultimately happened anyway. A withdrawal at this
point would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, avoided the devastation
of Vietnam, and spared the United States its greatest national trauma since the
Civil War.
Instead of pulling out of Vietnam, the U.S. government chose to
overthrow its ally and ended up in an escalating and terrible war. Today, we
see a perverse situation in the Middle East, where the United States has
remarkably empowered the radical mullahs in its ousting of the same secular
regime it had previously supported because the radical mullahs were supposedly
not so bad. If the United States isn't yet involved in another Vietnam, now is
the time to prevent it. It is time to get out. For this to happen, Americans
must reclaim the anti-interventionist leanings they abandoned sometime around
the Spanish-American War. Kinzer says the anti-interventionists lost that
battle, and thus the struggle over America's foreign-policy orientation, "not
because they were too radical but because they were not radical enough."
To win the debate, to help restore America to its proper place as a
country of peace and freedom, we must be radical in our opposition to U.S.
interventionism. Overthrow is a very important piece of intellectual ammunition
for this battle.
January 9, 2007
Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is a writer and musician who lives
in Berkeley, California. He is a research analyst at the Independent Institute.
See his webpage for more articles and personal information.
Copyright © 2007 Future of Freedom Foundation
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