By Stephen Kinzer's count, the US has toppled foreign governments 14 times in the 110 years between the 1893 coup in Hawaii and the occupation of Iraq, making regime change by force as American as apple pie. But Kinzer says the results are always damaging to the countries involved, and to American security as well.
Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, has written on this subject before, in books on US intervention in Iran and Guatemala. In Overthrow he surveys all 14 cases in an admirably written page-turner.
Although the book does not add to historical knowledge of the individual cases, it may be the first to bring them together in a comparison over time. This makes the narrative more interesting than a single case study, but also more depressing.
In Kinzer's treatment there are no bright spots. In one instance after another, arrogant Americans are shown tossing out legitimate governments and installing corrupt brutes who turn out to cause more problems for foreign policy than did the ousted leaders.
Kinzer's main explanation for these recurrent misadventures is greed. The prime villains are United Fruit, ITT, Aramco, Halliburton and other corporations and plutocrats operating through like-minded officials. He proceeds from the classic theory first advanced by the British economist J.A. Hobson, and most prom-inently in Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that overproduction causes a scramble for new markets and "a policy of forcing foreign nations to buy American products." This may be convincing for the early cases, but Kinzer underestimates the relative force of geopolitical concerns during the Cold War, when, he claims, economic motives played just as strong a role as ever.
Actually Kinzer cannot quite make up his mind. At the beginning he contends that things like spreading democracy, Christianizing heathen nations, "establishing military bases around the world and bringing foreign governments under American control were never ends in themselves" but were "ways for the United States to assure itself access to the markets, resources and investment potential of distant lands." But later he says, "Americans overthrew governments only when economic interests coincided with ideological ones," and details cases in which intervention came not just from greed but from humanitarian hubris as well. At the outset he discounts moralism, but later he credits "the power of the noble idea of American exceptionalism."
The easy answer is that everything mattered, but without clarifying which causes are necessary or sufficient, the story does not tell us which levers we should look to first to change the pattern.
We should not ask good journalism to proceed like social science, but on especially contro-versial cases more fastidious analysis would help. Consider Chile. Kinzer emphasizes that his book covers only cases where the US role was decisive in deposing governments, not those where US agents played "subsidiary roles." On this basis he refuses to count the coup against the right-wing Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, even though the US supplied weapons to plotters at one point, direct action beyond what the US did in 1973 to help bring down the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, which is covered in the book.
Washington can be tagged with a decisive role in the Chile coup only by blurring together the events of 1970 and 1973. In 1970, former US president Richard Nixon did encourage a coup to prevent Allende from taking office after the Chilean election, but the scheme failed. Although plotters accidentally killed the army commander, the coup never got off the ground.
In the next three years, Washington undertook covert action programs that funneled money to anti-Allende newspapers, parties and private groups. The definitive investigation under Senator Frank Church, however, found no evidence that the US instigated or aided the military coup.
Kinzer notes that a truckers' strike that contributed to disorder preceding the coup was "supported in part by CIA funds," but he does not report that these funds were diverted, against CIA rules, by a private-sector group that had received them for other purposes. US intelligence got advance warning of the coup, but in the weeks beforehand almost everyone in Chile knew it was coming.
The horrors of the Pinochet regime, the movie Missing, the record of previous covert actions and Nixon's happiness with Allende's ouster generated the folklore that Washington had done to Allende just what it did to Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. But no such evidence has yet come to light, even in the 17,000 pages of documents declassified in the Clinton administration. Among those, as the Latin America specialist Mark Falcoff has pointed out, were secret recordings of Nixon and Henry Kissinger supporting their claim that the US did not have a hand in the coup.
Distinctions between coup support and other covert actions may strike some as hair splitting. But the difference is significant, and readers should remember that some assertions about the record are more controversial, and reality more complex, than a broad survey conveys. If the record of his 13 other cases is clear of such confusions, however, the overall story is just as bad, and sad, as Kinzer says.
Richard Betts is director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University, and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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