[Peace-discuss] Hawaii to Iraq

[C. G. Estabrook]

I think the problem is that Kinzer sees the 14 takeovers he
analyzes as principally blunders rather than a rational (in
one sense) desire for domination: the USG simply
misunderstands its interest, which is of course to secure the
best for all concerned...

He said that he was able to tease out certain patterns that
recur over and over again.  The crucial element was the US
assumption that any regime that would harass an American
company must be anti-American, repressive, dictatorial, and
probably the tool of some foreign power or interest that wants
to undermine the United States.  He said that one of the main
themes of the book is how these interventions in the long run
always produce reactions and ultimately lead to the emergence
of regimes that are much more anti-American than the regimes
the U.S. originally set out to overthrow. It's a blunder, he
thinks, when we frustrate people's legitimate nationalist
aspirations, because we wind up not only casting those
countries into instability, but severely undermining our own
national security.

For Kinzer the problem is one of misinterpretation: the U.S.
sees foreign nations as constantly seeking to undermine the
United States -- a matter of seeing the world in a Hobbesian
way, that there are terrible dangers everywhere, and it's very
important for the U.S. to go out and attack here and attack
there before those dangers come to shore. Clausewitz, he says,
had a great phrase for this -- “suicide for fear of death.”
You are so afraid of what's happening to you in the world or
what might happen to you that you go out and launch
operations, which actually produce the result that you were
afraid might happen if you didn't do these things.

The principal question then becomes, how does this mistake
happen? Why did we so tragically misjudge nationalist
movements in developing countries, like Iran and Guatemala and
later Chile? Why did we interpret them as part of an
international conspiracy, which they were not?

His answer is -- a deficiency in the education of American
statesmen and diplomats!  They study the history only of
European diplomacy. They're familiar with alliance politics
and wars of conquest and big powers that use small powers
secretly for their own means, but the desire of poor people in
poor countries to control their own natural resources has
never been a part of European history. It's not a syndrome
that Americans who study Europe are familiar with, and that,
along with an instinctive desire to protect American
companies, leads them to misjudge nationalist movements and
misinterpret them as part of a global conspiracy to undermine
the United States.  Our intervention ultimately leads us to
regimes much worse than the ones we originally set out to
overthrow.

That seems to me not too far from Lewis' "blundering efforts
to do good."  Regards, CGE


On 4/23/06, Robert Naiman <naiman.uiuc at gmail.com> wrote--  
>
>No, I think if you watch the DN interview, you'll find that
this is
>not correct, unless you think that doing the bidding of
multinationals
>constitutes "efforts to do good." I don't think Kinzer thinks
this.
>
>This is not to say that I am holding him up as a moral or
political
>exemplar. The very notion that there is a US national
interest that
>one could get right or wrong is of course inherently suspect.
I think
>Kinzer is worth reading and noting not because he is a hero
of the
>Revolution, but because as former NYT foreign correspondent,
when he
>says what we all know, and carefully documents it, it's a big
deal.
>
>On 4/22/06, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
>> Exactly right.  Kinzer's position seems similar to that of the
>> left-liberal extreme of respectable opinion regarding Vietnam,
>> e.g., Anthony Lewis in the NYT in 1969, that the war had begun
>> with "blundering efforts to do good" but had become a
>> "disaster" -- at a time when 70% of the public regarded it as
>> "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a mistake." --CGE
>>
>>
>> David Green wrote:
>>
>> > I think that Kinzer does a great service, but I would
>> > have at least one concern. From the portions of the
>> > interview yesterday on DN that I saw, he seems to be
>> > saying that--for example--if only we hadn't overthrown
>> > Mossadegh in 1953, we would have had a liberal
>> > democracy in Iran all these years, and wouldn't the
>> > whole Middle East look different, implying that our
>> > leaders would be happy with that. Well, yes it would,
>> > and no they wouldn't, and that's exactly why we
>> > wouldn't allow that to happen. Kinzer still subscribes
>> > (I think) to the "good intentions gone wrong" version
>> > of history, rather than imperial intentions done well,
>> > if messily, with too many dead bodies left behind. We
>> > put a lot of effort into making sure that Arab
>> > nationalism could not set a bad example for the Middle
>> > East--in Iraq in 1958, in Egypt in 1967, etc. We put a
>> > lot of effort into making sure that Saudi Arabia does
>> > not become democratic, or Kuwiat, for that matter.
>> >
>> > David Green
>>
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>
>
>--
>RN
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