Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq |
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Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
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by Stephen Kinzer
Sales Rank: 10371
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List Price: $16.00
$10.88
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on 8-5-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 416 pages
Published by: Times Books February 6, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0805082409
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0805082401
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
Weighs: 13.4 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
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 Kinzer, 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 very moderate tones, which may earn him an audience greater than the usual crew of die-hard leftists. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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 terrible 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.
Kinzer's narrative abounds with unusual anecdotes, vivid description and fine detail, demonstrating why he ranks among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling, especially for those on the left. His 1982 book Bitter Fruit (which he co-authored with Stephen Schlesinger) described the 1954 CIA covert action campaign that overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. The book became a classic on college campuses in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration used attempts to "roll back" Soviet-backed communism as the rationale for funding the Nicaraguan contras and a massive counterinsurgency campaign against leftist rebels in El Salvador. For many Americans who cut their political teeth not on Vietnam but on the Central American wars (as well as for the Latin Americans who witnessed these displays of imperial hubris more directly), such interventions raised profound doubts that American meddling -- whether packaged as rollback, preemption or democracy promotion -- could possibly be worth the human or political cost.
Kinzer fills in the blanks left by those historians and policymakers for whom America's rise is mainly about the macho stuff of maneuvering around the other big guys on the block, be they France, Spain, Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union or China. Overthrow cautions against such parochial thinking and warns that the consequences of playing fast and loose with American power are almost always terrible -- for the stability or the democratic aspirations of the target countries, for the well-being of their citizens and, because of the often vicious anti-American backlashes, for the welfare of the United States itself. Even so, Kinzer asks at each juncture whether a different cast of characters -- in the White House, at the CIA or on the ground -- would have acted more cautiously. He concludes that although the particular instincts or politics of this or that American president often helped shape U.S. behavior abroad, a reckless imperial impulse is simply part of America's DNA.
Provocative as all this history is, Overthrow stumbles when its tone shifts from lively storytelling to World Book Encyclopedia entry. It also sometimes slips into deliciously tempting caricature: John Foster Dulles, the evangelical Christian, Wall Street power broker, sits cozily in his wood-paneled library, using his finger to stir his evening Scotch and contemplate where next to fling American power; Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is venal and sadistic one minute, a crybaby the next.
Although Kinzer's objective is to highlight the downside of covert and overt overthrows, he provides a better sense of what made the Americans tick than of what motivated those they tried to push around. Surely these foreign leaders, whom Kinzer depicts as U.S. victims and pawns, had their own strategies for dealing with American power, understanding (just as America's great-power rivals or Cold War allies did) that the United States could be -- had to be -- manipulated to their own ends. With some notable exceptions, Overthrow does not tell us enough about the domestic environments that shaped the perspectives of those leaders whom the United States was busy overthrowing, isolating or provoking.
Too tall an order? Perhaps. But it goes to what fans of gunboat diplomacy will see as a fundamental weakness of Kinzer's book: the assumption that regime change is necessarily harmful for the United States and the target country. After all, they will argue, Panama now controls its own canal and has a democratically elected, center-left government. Chile's democracy and economic probity are a model for Latin America. Afghanistan (and even Iraq) could defy the odds and emerge as stable and somewhat democratic. To be sure, eliminating the Taliban was hardly an objectionable use of U.S. power. But even in Afghanistan, the United States laid the groundwork for the Taliban's return by so quickly shifting troops and resources to Iraq, demonstrating the difficulty that the United States has in coping with the consequences of even a successful and morally correct intervention.
Unfortunately, the very audience that should read this book -- those who theologically defer to the shifting diktats of the national interest and still endorse deploying U.S. military power to remake countries -- is the least likely to bother picking it up. Twenty years ago, Bitter Fruit motivated a generation to think seriously about the impact of U.S. interventions in the southern hemisphere. I have a sad suspicion that, with Iraq's seemingly endless toll, Overthrow will likewise become required reading.
Reviewed by Julia E. Sweig
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Hardcover)
EDITED 27 June 2007 to add thoughts from second reading (accidental). While at the beach, ran out of books, bought this not remembering I had already read it, and found new value. Using the new link feature to insert links to the books originally listed. This is a timely review, although the facts are well known to those who follow international affairs. In this second (as if new) reading, the following quote stayed with me from page 317: "Most American sponsored 'regime change' operations have, in the end, weakened rather than strengthened, American security." I list the countries covered by this book: Hawaii, Cuba, Nicarague, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Viet-Nam, Chile, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. I focus more on Hawaii, in 1893, the first of a new range of intrusive overthrows (beyond the land expansion actions the author chooses not to cover). I am struck--moved--by the duplicitious immoral actions of both the white landowners and the white US government representatives against the people of Hawaii. The author discusses how Hawaiians were at the time bound by obligations, ritual, and a reverence for nature. I am reminded of how we and the Spanish genocided the native Americans, north and south, individuals who had decades if not centuries of refined knowledge on how to shape and nurture the Earth in harmony with their needs. This time around, the author's emphasis on how the legal right to buy land led to the loss of local indigenous control and rights. I now firmly believe that foreign and absentee landlords should be eliminated. This time around, I note the author's emphasis on how corporations are a form of national army, capturing wealth in different ways from an armed force. This time around, I think of how Dick Cheney has raped the American dream, in so violent and so public a fashion, that America's "lost innocence" can not longer be denied. This time around, I discover and reflect (being at the beach) on the superb bibliography. For a broader and perhaps more disturbing overview of the costs to America of corporate-driven foreign policy, see The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions Confessions of an Economic Hit Man Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy Why We Fight The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
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