jenk

Aahz emailed this one to me:

Overthrow is the history of forcible regime changes by the United States and its local allies over the past 110 years, starting with the undermining of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, passing through Cuba (1898), the Philippines (1898), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and elsewhere, and ending with present-day Iraq.

[I]t helps explain why, outside of Eastern Europe, American pronouncements about spreading democracy and freedom [...] are met with widespread incredulity.

What's most depressing about Kinzer's book, however, is [...] if you are going to use the argument that making a successful geopolitical omelet requires breaking eggs, you'd better have something edible to show for all the shattered shells lying around. [...]

In several cases, while the coups themselves were highly successful, the long-term results proved disastrous not just for America's reputation abroad but for American interests as well. That was true, for example, of the C.I.A.'s overthrow of the democratic nationalist prime minister of Iran [...] and the restoration of autocratic rule by the shah. [A]s a result, the role of opposition to the shah was assumed by religious fundamentalists, and ended in the disastrous revolution of 1979. The deep Iranian popular fear of the United States that was fed by the 1953 coup continues to haunt American-Iranian relations to this day. [...]

I must confess that I put down this fine book with a feeling of deep disheartenment. For what, after all, is the point of such meticulously reported studies if the American public is repeatedly going to wipe such episodes from its collective consciousness, and the American establishment is going to make similar mistakes over and over again, first in the cold war and now in the "war on terror" each time covering its actions with the same rhetoric of spreading "freedom" and combating "evil"?

As Kinzer writes of the Iranian hostage crisis, "because most Americans did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953, few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they called 'the great Satan.'" They still don't.
- From Anatol Lieven's review of Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer. Full review is at The New York Times.

Fear of communism made us overthrow the democratic PM of Iran and put the shah back in power. When the Ayatollah overthrew the shah, we backed Hussein...and now we're in Iraq to "save" it from Hussein! What next - another coup in Iran?

As