[Peace-discuss] Kinzer vs. Gross/NPR

[David Green]

Published on Saturday, April 22, 2006 by
CommonDreams.org  

Overthrow  

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman 
  
Hawaii
Cuba
Philippines
Puerto Rico
Nicaragua
Honduras
Iran
Guatemala
South Vietnam
Chile
Grenada
Panama
Afghanistan
Iraq 

What do these 14 governments have in common? 

You got it. 

The United States overthrew them. 

And in almost in every case, the overthrow can be
traced to corporate interests. 

In Hawaii, the sugar companies didn't want to pay
export duties -- so they overthrew the queen of Hawaii
and made it part of the United States. 

In Guatemala, United Fruit wanted Arbenz out. 

Out he went. 

In Chile, Allende offended the copper interests. 

Allende -- dead. 

In Iran, Mossadegh offended major oil interests. 

Mossadegh out. 

In Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya was bothering
American lumber and mining companies. 

Zelaya -- out. 

In Honduras, an American banana magnate organized the
coup of the Honduran government. 

And on down the list. 

Democratic Party critics charge that the Bush
administration is ripping the United States from a
long history of diplomacy by violently overthrowing
governments. 

Not true, says former New York Times foreign
correspondent Stephen Kinzer. 

Kinzer says that in fact the opposite is true. 

"Actually, the United States has been overthrowing
governments for more than a century," Kinzer said in
an interview. 

He documents this in a new book: Overthrow: America's
Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times
Books, 2006). 

Overthrow is the third in a series of regime change
books by Kinzer. 

His previous two: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup
and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003), and Bitter
Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in
Guatemala (1982). 

Together, they would make a remarkable "regime change"
boxed set for the holidays. 

Kinzer left the Times last year. He says that the
parting was "perfectly amicable" -- although he
doesn't sound convincing when he says this. 

What is clear is that Kinzer is not comfortable with
establishment rationales for the American imperial
project. 

This became clear during an interview Kinzer gave on
NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross earlier this month. 

Gross tried to get Kinzer to concede that if we hadn't
overthrown these governments, the Soviets would have
taken over, or today, radical Islam will take over. 

Kinzer didn't give an inch. 

For example, Gross said that had we not overthrown
these 14 governments, "the Soviets might have won the
Cold War." 

"I don't think that's true at all," Kinzer responded.
"In the first place, the countries whose governments
we overthrew, all countries that we claimed were pawns
of the Kremlin, actually were nothing of the sort. We
now know, for example, that the Kremlin had not the
slightest interest in Guatemala at all in the early
1950s. They didn't even know Guatemala existed. They
didn't even have diplomatic or economic relations." 

"The leader of Iran who we overthrew was fiercely
anti-communist. He came from an aristocratic family.
He despised Marxist ideology." 

"In Chile, we always portrayed President Allende as a
cat's paw of the Kremlin. We now know from documents
that have come out that the Soviets and the Chinese
were constantly fighting with him and urging him to
calm down and not be so provocative towards the
Americans. So, in the first place, the Soviets were
not behind those regimes. We completely overestimated
the influence of the Soviet Union on those regimes." 

When Gross asked Kinzer what he thought of the "spread
of radical Islam," Kinzer didn't hesitate. 

"We sometimes like to think that our interventions in
these countries don't have effects, but when we break
down the doors of foreign countries and impose our own
leaders, as we did in Iran and as we've recently done
in Iraq, we outrage a lot of people," Kinzer said. "We
like to think that everybody will soon calmly come to
realize that by rational standards, this was a good
thing to do. But that doesn't happen. We are not able
to change cultures as easily as we are able to change
regimes." 

The United States had a hand in many other overthrows,
but Kinzer limited his cases to those where the United
States was the primary mover and shaker. 

So, for example, while the United States played a role
in the overthrow of Lumumba in the Congo, Kinzer says
that it was primarily an operation by Belgium on
behalf of large Belgian mining interests. 

This might be the most important book to read as the
United States approaches a showdown with Iran. 

President Bush says he's trying to bring democracy to
Iran. 

In fact, Iranians had democracy once. 

And we crushed it. 

Kinzer is on tour promoting his book. 

And he's got a gig at Northwestern University in
Chicago, where he lives. 

He's teaching a course in regime change. 

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington,
D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational
Monitor. Mokhiber and Weissman are co-authors of On
the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction
of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press). 

 


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