Overthrow:America's Century of Regime Change: Hawaii to Iraq

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer

Book Description

"Detailed, passionate and convincing . . . [with] the pace and grip of a good thriller."?-Anatol Lieven, The New York Times Book Review

"Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is but the latest example of the dangers inherent in these operations.

In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose foreign regimes. He details the three eras of America's regime-change century?-the imperial era, which brought Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras under America's sway; the cold war era, which employed covert action against Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile; and the invasion era, which saw American troops toppling governments in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Kinzer explains why the U.S. government has pursued these operations and why so many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences, making Overthrow a cautionary tale that serves as an urgent warning as the United States seeks to define its role in the modern world.

About the Author

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has reported from more than fifty countries on four continents. He served as the New York Times bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua, and as the Boston Globe Latin America correspondent. His previous books include All the Shahs Men, Crescent and Star, and Blood of Brothers. He is also the co-author of Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. He lives in Chicago.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Why does a strong nation strike against a weaker one? Usually because it seeks to impose its ideology, increase its power, or gain control of valuable resources. Shifting combinations of these three factors motivated the United States as it extended its global reach over the past century and more. This book examines the most direct form of American intervention, the overthrow of foreign governments.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not an isolated episode. It was the culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological, political, and economic reasons. Like each of these operations, the "regimechange" in Iraq seemed for a time?-a very short time?-to have worked. It is now clear, however, that this operation has had terrible unintended consequences. So have most of the other coups, revolutions, and invasions that the United States has mounted to depose governments it feared or mistrusted.

The United States uses a variety of means to persuade other countries to do its bidding. In many cases it relies on time-honored tactics of diplomacy, offering rewards to governments that support American interests and threatening retaliation against those that refuse. Sometimes it defends friendly regimes against popular anger or uprisings. In more than a few places, it has quietly supported coups or revolutions organized by others. Twice, in the context of world wars, it helped to wipe away old ruling orders and impose new ones.

This book is not about any of those ways Americans have shaped the modern world. It focuses only on the most extreme set of cases: those in which the United States arranged to depose foreign leaders. No nation in modern history has done this so often, in so many places so far from its own shores.

The stories of these "regime change" operations are dazzlingly exciting. They tell of patriots and scoundrels, high motives and low cynicism, extreme courage and cruel betrayal. This book brings them together for the first time, but it seeks to do more than simply tell what happened. By considering these operations as a continuum rather than as a series of unrelated incidents, it seeks to find what they have in common. It poses and tries to answer two fundamental questions. First, why did the United States carry out these operations? Second, what have been their long-term consequences?

Drawing up a list of countries whose governments the United States has overthrown is not as simple as it sounds. This book treats only cases in which Americans played the decisive role in deposing a regime. Chile, for example, makes the list because, although many factors led to the 1973 coup there, the American role was decisive. Indonesia, Brazil, and the Congo do not, because American agents played only subsidiary roles in the overthrow of their governments during the 1960s. Nor do Mexico, Haiti, or the Dominican Republic, countries the United States invaded but whose leaders it did not depose.

America's long "regime change" century dawned in 1893 with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. This was a tentative, awkward piece of work, a cultural tragedy staged as comic opera. It was not a military operation, but without the landing of American troops, it probably would not have succeeded. The president of the United States approved of it, but soon after it happened, a new president took office and denounced it. Americans were already divided over whether it is a good idea to depose foreign regimes.

The overthrow of Hawaii's queen reignited a political debate that had first flared during the Mexican War half a century before. That debate, which in essence is about what role the United States should play in the world, rages to this day. It burst back onto the front pages after the invasion of Iraq.

No grand vision of American power lay behind the Hawaiian revolution of 1893. Just the opposite was true of the Spanish-American War, which broke out five years later. This was actually two wars, one in which the United States came to the aid of patriots fighting against Spanish colonialism, and then a second in which it repressed those patriots to assure that their newly liberated nations would be American protectorates rather than truly independent. A radically new idea of America, much more globally ambitious than any earlier one, emerged from these conflicts. They marked the beginning of an era in which the United States has assumed the right to intervene anywhere in the world, not simply by influencing or coercing foreign governments but also by overthrowing them.

In Hawaii and the countries that rose against Spain in 1898, American presidents tested and developed their new interventionist policy. There, however, they were reacting to circumstances created by others. The first time a president acted on his own to depose a foreign leader was in 1909, when William Howard Taft ordered the overthrow of Nicaraguan president José Santos Zelaya. Taft claimed he was acting to protect American security and promote democratic principles. His true aim was to defend the right of American companies to operate as they wished in Nicaragua. In a larger sense, he was asserting the right of the United States to impose its preferred form of stability on foreign countries.

This set a pattern. Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons?-specifically, to establish, promote, and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference.

Huge forces reshaped the world during the twentieth century. One of the most profound was the emergence of multinational corporations, businesses based in one country that made much of their profit overseas. These corporations and the people who ran them accumulated great wealth and political influence. Civic movements, trade unions, and political parties arose to counterbalance them, but in the United States, these were never able even to approach the power that corporations wielded. Corporations identified themselves in the public mind with the ideals of free enterprise, hard work, and individual achievement. They also maneuvered their friends and supporters into important positions in Washington.

By a quirk of history, the United States rose to great power at the same time multinational corporations were emerging as a decisive force in world affairs. These corporations came to expect government to act on their behalf abroad, even to the extreme of overthrowing uncooperative foreign leaders. Successive presidents have agreed that this is a good way to promote American interests.

Defending corporate power is hardly the only reason the United States overthrows foreign governments. Strong tribes and nations have been attacking weak ones since the beginning of history. They do so for the most elemental reason, which is to get more of whatever is good to have. In the modern world, corporations are the institutions that countries use to capture wealth. They have become the vanguard of American power, and defying them has become tantamount to defying the United States. When Americans depose a foreign leader who dares such defiance, they not only assert their rights in one country but also send a clear message to others.

The influence that economic power exercises over American foreign policy has grown tremendously since the days when ambitious planters in Hawaii realized that by bringing their islands into the United States, they would be able to send their sugar to markets on the mainland without paying import duties. As the twentieth century progressed, titans of industry and their advocates went a step beyond influencing policy makers; they becamethe policy makers. The figure who most perfectly embodied this merging of political and economic interests was John Foster Dulles, who spent decades working for some of the world's most powerful corporations and then became secretary of state. It was Dulles who ordered the 1953 coup in Iran, which was intended in part to make the Middle East safe for American oil companies. A year later he ordered another coup, in Guatemala, where a nationalist government had challenged the power of United Fruit, a company his old law firm represented.

Having marshaled so much public and political support, American corporations found it relatively easy to call upon the military or the Central Intelligence Agency to defend their privileges in countries where they ran into trouble. They might not have been able to do so if they and the presidents who cooperated with them had candidly presented their cases to the American people. Americans have always been idealists. They want their country to act for pure motives, and might have refused to support foreign interventions that were forthrightly described as defenses of corporate power. Presidents have used two strategies to assure that these interventions would be carried out with a minimum of protest. Sometimes they obscured the real reasons they overthrew foreign governments, insisting that they were acting only to protect American security and liberate suffering natives. At other times they simply denied that the United States was involved in these operations at all.

The history of American overthrows of foreign governments can be divided into three parts. First came the imperial phase, when Americans deposed regimes more or less openly. None of the men who overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy tried to hide their involvement. The Spanish- American War was fought in full view of the world, and Preside...

Editorial Reviews
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 unusually moderate tones, which may earn him an audience larger 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 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.

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 bad -- 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.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer has produced a book on foreign policy that can sit comfortably beside "edgy fiction, juicy memoirs or newsy exposes" (San Francisco Chronicle). His wide range of inquiry opens him up for some nitpicking: too much focus on American policy without considering the corresponding foreign policy; a tendency towards caricature; and entries on Iraq and Afghanistan that yield little new insight. But if reviewers feel that Kinzer's thesis isn't blindingly original?-he has covered some of this material in his previous books All the Shah's Men and Bitter Fruit?-they concur that his amalgamation of the materials is unparalleled and, more important, a thrill to read.
<BR>Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile

Stephen Kinzer examines the American overthrow of 14 foreign governments over 110 years as a buildup to his scathing attack on the Bush Administration's mission of regime change in Iraq. Kinzer has a knack for selecting material that keeps his story interesting, as well as for presenting his facts in a logical manner. Narrator Michael Prichard avoids characterizing quoted voices; instead he uses skilled inflections to erase any doubt about who is speaking. He never hurries and sounds so involved that listeners will feel the same. Further, Prichard treats the irony and hubris of history with such equanimity that he adds the subtlest touch of humor. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist

Narrating 12 instances of American toppling of foreign governments, Kinzer strives to detect motivations common to the incidents, settling frequently on the protection of American international business. Some of Kinzer's cases simply don't fit the model of the nefarious corporation (the 1963 coup against South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem; the 1983 invasion of Granada). Yet others manifestly do, such as the agitation of American banana interests over the communist leanings of Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz. Perhaps better read as a series of discrete histories, Kinzer's book indubitably reminds Americans that their country has forced the fall of governments it doesn't like for more than a century. Commenting negatively on justifications for interventions, Kinzer dramatizes their precipitating events and decision makers. William McKinley, William Howard Taft, John Foster Dulles, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush are the main protagonists; the Mossadeghs and Noriegas, their antagonists. From a former foreign correspondent, this is fluidly composed popular history with a censorious point of view. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.