Overthrow
 

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).

© Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

See 'Killing Hope' by William Blum. He documents US interventions abroad since 1945. His list is much longer.

Hey, I see this afore!

why not complete the list....

Germany, Japan, etc........

and to be fair...you should report what the lefties have been responsible for............line 20 million deaths in the Soviet Union alone...plus millions in China...etc.

Good thread Z.

Even though Zaire/Congo is not officially included, we've had dirty fingers there as well.

Former Wall St. reporter Jonathan Kwitny wrote a nifty book some time back:
"Endless Enemies: the Making of an Unfriendly World." He had some good stuff on Zaire, and some of the nonsensical projects foisted on that nation with the help of large bribes to Mobutu and the self-interesed "help" of large American and multi-national corps. only too happy to sell $billion ice-makers to eskimos, or projects roughly that inane.

Not surprising that your thread and Kinzer would not attract a lot of attention -- after all, Kinzer is a hate-America first kind of guy.

ok, everyone on the left of the room put your heads in the sand......



now everyone on the right side of the room whip it out and pee in the sand....:eek:

If China and the Soviets are the lefties, the righties would be Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy.

I think we fall somewhere in the middle.

Enormous irony dept: BHD lamenting the misfortune of people having their head in the sand.

Oh cruel world! :bigcry:

..........how will you know when this was accomplished..........since you will never be able to see it.......:confused:

BHD...my hero.

I am going to drink lots of soda, followed by some Coronas (I already bought some in anticipation of the illegal alien boycott day, which interesting enough is on May Day, a day long revered in communist Soviet Union and Castro's Cuba)...I'll follow it up with several cups of coffee harvested from the rain forest (hopefully from a country where the US has changed the government to satisfy some corporate mandate)...

I hope to have enough piss (and maybe a little vinegar to boot) to piss on the sand where they have conveniently buried their heads in a sufficient amount to drown their collective chorus of hand wringing about alleged American corporate intervention.

I would pay good money to see the US engage in a little bit of government change in Cuba.

In fact, I am still pissed off (there goes that reference again) that Eisenhower did not have huevos big enough to do a little government change prior to Castro's take over...or that JFK was too busy doing Marilyn Monroe, and assorted other Mafia girls, to care enough to see what Castro was doing in Cuba.

Oh lordy Lord...

I remember getting into a heated debate, back in my college days, when a professor repeatedly referred to Russian/Communist intervention as "nation building" and good for the people. The same professor referred to the US as an interventionist nation, hell-bent on raping other countries.

Normally I would not have many allies in these debates (many of my classmates feared the prof's ability to screw them over when it came to grade time). On this particular issue I was joined in by the son of a Hungarian refugee who was a tank commander when the Soviets invaded...er, sorry, liberated Hungary.

His father fought the Soviets, hoping to hold off long enough for the US to do a little intervention itself. When the US turned its back on the HUngarian people, his father fled to Austria and eventually to the US.

His son, my classmate, was just a baby then and he had to be smuggled out of Hungary by his mother. They were eventually reunited in New York. He showed me a nice picture of his family, on a Sunday afternoon, posing in front of the Statute of Liberty. Ah yes, America the raping interventionist!!!

My classmate and I gave this a**hole professor hell. He finally had to back down and run (in a manner of speaking), tail between his legs, like a dog.

The professor, of course, had his final revenge though. My friend and I both got C's. His and mine only C grades in college.

Gotta love academia....

Like I said before, BHD, you ARE my hero. I'll join you at the pissing trough!

MInd you, however, I am not defending corporate interests.

I blame corporate interests for shipping good jobs to foreign countries...and I blame corporate interests for supporting the avalanche of illegal aliens now swarming our borders.

I just get a little tired (actually, more than just a little tired) of all of this bad US bashing bulls**t.

Z, please don't forget about Bosnia. I am sure it was just an oversight.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the overthrow of South Vietnam. Think I missed that one. And, does the overthrow of the overthrow of South Korea count?

Well, the US did sort of let the generals whack Diem without stopping them. Iirc, JFK approved the blind eye policy and Diem was assassinated in early November of '63. A few weeks later, the Kennedy clan took a dimmer view of regicide.