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Date: April 26, 2024 at 18:26:54
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Overthrow: 100 Years of U.S. Meddling & Regime Change, from Iran to... |
URL: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/12/100_years_of_us_interference_regime |
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Overthrow: 100 Years of U.S. Meddling & Regime Change, from Iran to Nicaragua to Hawaii to Cuba
MARCH 12, 2018 Watch Full Show
As special counsel Robert Mueller continues his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, we take a look back at Washington’s record of meddling in elections across the globe. By one count, the United States has interfered in more than 80 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000. And that doesn’t count U.S.-backed coups and invasions. We speak to former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, author of “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As special counsel Robert Mueller continues his probe into Russian meddling into the 2016 election, we take a look back at Washington’s record of meddling in elections across the globe. By one count, the United States has interfered in more than 80 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000. And that doesn’t count U.S.-backed coups and invasions. Former CIA Director James Woolsey recently joked about the U.S. record of meddling overseas, during an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?
JAMES WOOLSEY: Oh, probably. But it was for the good of the system, in order to avoid the communists from taking over.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Yeah.
JAMES WOOLSEY: For example, in Europe in ’47, ’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians, we—CIA—
LAURA INGRAHAM: We don’t do that now, though? We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?
JAMES WOOLSEY: Well, mmm, yum, yum, yum, never mind. Only for a very good cause.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Can you do that—let’s do a vine video and—as former CIA director. I love it.
JAMES WOOLSEY: Only for very good cause—
LAURA INGRAHAM: OK.
JAMES WOOLSEY: —in the interests of democracy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The list of countries where the U.S. has interfered is long. In 1893, the U.S. helped overthrow the kingdom of Hawaii. Five years later, in 1898, the U.S. invaded and occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico. A year later, it was the Philippines. Early 20th century interventions included Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, all in the 1910s.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1953, the U.S. helped overthrow the Iranian government. A year later, in 1954, U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala, overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz. Then, in the '60s, the list grew to include, once again, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia and the Congo. And that's just a partial list. Even with the end of the Cold War, U.S. interference overseas did not end. Next week marks the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple the government of Saddam Hussein.
We now go to Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times foreign correspondent, who writes about world affairs for The Boston Globe. He’s the author of a number of books, including Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. He’s written the book Bitter Fruit about the coup in Guatemala. And his latest book is The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.
Stephen Kinzer, we welcome you back to Democracy Now! to talk, sadly, about the very same issue. I’m not quite sure where to begin, whether to go back to the beginning, but let’s start, since it was 65 years ago, in Iran, in 1953, in March of 1953. The U.S. was in full swing making plans for overthrowing the government of the democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Can you talk about what the U.S. did in Iran then? So well known throughout Iran, but most people in this country have no idea.
STEPHEN KINZER: Early in the 20th century, the people of Iran began moving towards democracy. It was a very difficult struggle. It was back and forth. But finally, after the Second World War, democracy did emerge in Iran. It was the one parenthesis, the one period of real democracy that we’ve had in Iran over the last hundred years. So, the problem came when the Iranians chose the wrong leader. They did something that the United States never likes: They chose a leader who wanted to put the interests of his own country ahead of the interests of the United States. And that alarmed the West, and particularly the United States.
Mosaddegh’s first move was to nationalize Iranian oil. We thought this would be a terrible example for the rest of the world. We didn’t want to start this process going in other countries. So, in order to set an example, the United States decided we would work with the British to overthrow the elected democratic government of Iran. We sent a senior CIA officer, who worked in the basement of the American Embassy in Iran organizing the coup. The coup finally succeeded in the summer of 1953. Mosaddegh was overthrown.
And, more important, the democratic system in Iran was destroyed forever. This was not just an attack on one person, but an attack on democracy. And the reason why we attacked that democracy is the democracy produced the wrong person. So, we like elections and democratic processes, but they have to produce the candidates we like; otherwise, our approval disappears.
AMY GOODMAN: And the person he sent—that the U.S., the Dulles brothers, sent in to Iran with the suitcases of money to begin the process, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson?
STEPHEN KINZER: That’s right. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something genetic in the Roosevelt family that predisposes them toward regime change. It is a kind of a quirk of history that the person who effectively projected the United States into the regime change era at the beginning of the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt, had a grandson who went to Iran in the 1950s and carried out a regime change operation there. And there were similarities—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to go—
STEPHEN KINZER: —between the operations that they carried out.
AMY GOODMAN: Before you go on, Stephen, I wanted to go to a part of a trailer from an upcoming documentary titled Coup 53 about the 1953 British-American coup in Iran and the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, directed by the Iranian physicist-turned-award-winning-documentary-filmmaker Taghi Amirani.
TAGHI AMIRANI: This man, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, he was our first democratically elected prime minister.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Nobody knows who Mosaddegh was. Democratically elected prime minister of Iran.
TAGHI AMIRANI: In 1952, Time magazine named him Man of the Year, because he had nationalized Iranian oil and kicked the British out.
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] Mosaddegh came along and threw them out. They were gone. Gone! Gone!!
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] The Iranian people had rejected the Shah’s rule with blood, with blood, and bare hands in front of tanks.
INTERVIEWER: You had a million dollars in cash to run the coup, right?
KERMIT ROOSEVELT: That’s right.
DAVID TALBOT: Kermit Roosevelt was prepared to do whatever he had to do, when he was given this mission by Allen Dulles to overthrow the democratic government of Iran.
ALLEN DULLES: But may I say this? At no time has the CIA engaged in any political activity or any intelligence activity that was not approved at the highest level.
AMY GOODMAN: That last voice, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA from 1952 to 1961. At the time, his brother—his brother, Secretary of State Dulles, was secretary of state. We’re talking about the overthrow of Iran for the British oil company that would later become British Petroleum. Is that right, Stephen Kinzer?
STEPHEN KINZER: Yes. That company is now called BP. So, you’re seeing long-term effects of these interventions, and what you’re seeing in Iran today 100 percent ties back to what we did in 1953. We like to have this idea that these operations are discreet, they’re not going to have any long-term effects. We’ll remove one government, place another favorable government in power, and anything will go fine. Everybody will forget it, and it won’t have any long-term effects. But if you look around the world, you can see that these kinds of operations to interfere in other countries’ politics, what the CIA calls “influence operations,” actually not only often wind up devastating the target country, but, in the end, undermine the security of the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stephen Kinzer, I’d like to move to another part of the world: Nicaragua. Most people are familiar, obviously, with the Reagan-era attempts to overthrow the Sandinista government or the period during the Roosevelt era of the attempts to get rid of Sandino as a force in Nicaragua. But, further back, José Santos Zelaya, at the beginning of the 20 century, could you talk about the efforts of the U.S. government to overthrow Zelaya?
STEPHEN KINZER: Zelaya was a fascinating figure, certainly the most formidable leader Nicaragua ever had. He was a slashing reformer. He was a liberal, a progressive. He built ports and roads, tried to build up a middle class in Nicaragua. He brought the first automobile into Nicaragua, the first streetlights. He organized the first baseball league. He was a true modernizer.
But he had one characteristic the United States really didn’t like. And that is, he wanted Nicaragua to have an independent foreign policy. When he needed to raise money for a planned railroad across Nicaragua, rather than seek loans from the Morgan bank in the United States as we wanted him to do, he floated the loan offers in London and in Paris. The United States tried to get those governments to forbid the offering of those loan agreements, but they refused. Sure enough, the money was raised. And America became very alarmed. Nicaragua was trying to diversify its international relations. It didn’t want to be just under the power of the United States. And that was a fatal decision by Zelaya.
Once he decided that he wanted to pull Nicaragua out from under the thumb of the United States, he became a target. And we did overthrow him in 1909. That was the beginning of a century of American interference in Nicaragua. I think you can argue that there’s no country in the world where the cycle of American intervention—imposition of a dictator, rebellion, repression, and a return of American power to impose another leader—is so clear, over such a long period of time, the way it is in Nicaragua.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times foreign correspondent, now writes the world affairs column for The Boston Globe.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about another invasion that is rarely talked about these days: the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 by Lyndon Johnson and the efforts of the United States, again, to control the affairs of the Dominican Republic over many, many years, because, obviously, there were two invasions of the Dominican Republic. There was one at the early part of the century that led to the rise of Trujillo, and then there was one after the fall of Trujillo to attempt regime change against President Juan Bosch, who had been elected into office.
STEPHEN KINZER: You have placed it very well, because if we remember this operation at all, we remember the American Marines landing on the beaches in the Dominican Republic. But the cause of that intervention was the foolish mistake of the Dominican people of electing a leader who was unpalatable to the United States. Juan Bosch was a figure a little bit like Zelaya had been half a century earlier in Nicaragua. He didn’t want the Dominican Republic to be under the thumb of the United States. He wanted it to be an independent country. And this was something the U.S. couldn’t tolerate.
All these movements in the Caribbean Basin have been—have had, as a fundamental part of their political program, measures to limit the power of foreign corporations in their countries, and often measures to limit the amount of land that foreigners can own in their country. These are the kinds of measures that are hateful to the American corporations that have gotten so rich from taking the resources of the Caribbean Basin, and leaders who promote those policies always find themselves in Washington’s crosshairs.
This is not just ancient history. We had an episode in Honduras in 2009 where a president who was very much in this line, trying to pull Honduras away from subservience to the United States, was overthrown in a coup by the military, dragged out of his house in the middle of the night in his pajamas, sent into exile. The U.S. was so happy, members of Congress even went to Honduras to congratulate the leader of the coup. And then, just last year, a new election was held to ratify the results of the coup. The election was so fraudulent that for the first time in the history of the Organization of American States, the OAS called for a new election. And the leader of the OAS, Almagro, had to do it, because he had been denouncing attacks on democracy in Venezuela and figured he couldn’t just stand by while something even worse was done in Honduras. Unfortunately, the United States doesn’t have that kind of shame, and we cheered that election. We refused the call for a new election. And Honduras today is under the rule of a regime that is the product of a coup, supported by the United States, against an elected government.
So, this is not something that we used to do in ancient history. This is something that’s happening right now. And that’s why those of us familiar with this history roll our eyes a little bit when we hear these outraged allegations that Russia has been doing something so dastardly as to try to influence our politics.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Kinzer, can you take us on a brief, kind of thumbnail journey from the overthrow of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines—all before the turn of the 20th century?
STEPHEN KINZER: This was a fascinating period, and it really was the moment when the United States went from being what you could call a continental empire—that is, inside North America—to being an overseas empire, a crucial moment of decision for the United States. That was not inevitable, but that was the choice we made.
So, in 1893, at the behest of sugar growers in Hawaii, the United States promoted the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. The idea was that Hawaii would then immediately become part of the United States. That didn’t happen, because there was a change of presidency in Washington, and the new president, Grover Cleveland, hated that intervention and didn’t want to take Hawaii in. Then, five years later, in 1898, when Grover Cleveland was gone, the Spanish-American War broke out. The United States became interested in the Pacific, because we destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Philippines. Then we decided we should take the Philippines for ourselves. We became interested in the China market. This was a real, fantastic Fata Morgana out there for American business. The American press was full of stories about how many nails we could sell in China, if we could get the Chinese to use nails; how much cotton we could sell there; how much beef we could sell there, if we could get the Chinese to eat beef. So, we decided we needed stepping stones to China. And that was the moment when we decided, “Let’s take Hawaii as we’ve taken the Philippines.”
So, that happened at the same time the United States was consolidating its rule over Cuba and Puerto Rico. In Cuba, we staged a presidential election, after we consolidated our power there in 1898. We found a candidate that we liked. We found him in upstate New York. He spoke good English, which is always essential for the people that we promote. We brought him back to Cuba. As soon as it became clear that the campaign was rigged, the other candidate dropped out. He became president of Cuba. Sure enough, six years later, the United States had to send troops back to Cuba to suppress protests against him. They occupied Cuba for three more years. Then they left. They had to come back again about six or seven years later, in 1917, because again the Cuban people had had the temerity to elect a leader who was unpalatable to the United States. So, this was a great model for an idea, a concept, that has reverberated through the whole period since then, which is: Have your elections, but you must elect someone we like; otherwise, we’re going to go to Plan B.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and then we’re going to come back with Stephen Kinzer and talk about James Woolsey’s latest comment. When asked on Fox if the U.S. is still interfering with people’s elections, he chuckles and says, “Only for a good cause.” Yes, we’re talking with Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times foreign correspondent, now writing a world affairs column for The Boston Globe, has written many books, one on the coup, U.S. overthrow of Guatemalan democratically elected government, called Bitter Fruit, one called Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, one specifically on Iran, All the Shah’s Men, and his latest book, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Nicaragua” by Bruce Cockburn, here on Democracy Now!. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times foreign correspondent, now writes for The Boston Globe. He’s author of a number of books, his latest, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to ask you, in terms of the Spanish-American War and, of course, of the bitter guerrilla war that developed in the Philippines in the 1899, 1900, the birth of the Anti-Imperialist League in the United States—it was a widespread movement of Americans opposed to this overseas empire. Could you talk about some of the figures and the impact of the Anti-Imperialist League? Because we don’t see that kind of organization these days, even though the U.S. empire continues to grow and make itself felt around the world.
STEPHEN KINZER: The story of the Anti-Imperialist League is a central part of my new book, The True Flag. And I like my books always to be voyages of discovery. I’m always looking for some really big story that shaped the world but that we don’t know about. And this really is one. Here’s a story that has almost completely dropped out of our history books.
But the Anti-Imperialist League was a major force in American life in the period around 1898, 1900. It was based in Boston, later moved to Washington, had chapters all over the United States. Some of the leading figures in the United States were members. The leaders of the Anti-Imperialist League included billionaires like Andrew Carnegie and social activists like Jane Addams and Samuel Gompers, Booker T. Washington. Grover Cleveland was a member. It was really a remarkable group. It staged hundreds of rallies, published thousands of leaflets, intensely lobbied in Washington, and actually had quite an impact.
This was a debate that seized the attention of the entire American people: Should we begin taking territories outside North America? Or should we now stop, now that we’ve consolidated our North American empire? Everybody in the United States realized this was a huge decision. It dominated newspaper coverage. When the treaty by which the United States took the Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico was brought before the Senate, there was a 34-day debate. That’s the center of my book. In this debate, you will see every argument, on both sides, that has ever been used, for the last 120 years. Every argument about why intervention is a good idea or a bad idea starts there. And the Anti-Imperialist League played a great role in that debate. And interestingly enough, that treaty, that set us off on the path of global empire, was passed in the Senate by a margin of one vote more than the required two-thirds majority.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, the—
STEPHEN KINZER: And when it was challenged in the Supreme Court, it was five to four.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, the most eloquent spokesman—the most elegant spokesman for the Anti-Imperialist League was none other than Mark Twain, no?
STEPHEN KINZER: This is another discovery I made while I was writing my book. I grew up with what I now realize was a partial, a kind of false, image of Mark Twain. I always thought of him as Mr. Nice Guy. He’s a sweetheart. He’s everybody’s favorite old uncle, who has nice curly white hair and rocks on his porch and tells nice, funny stories that everybody laughs at. This is not correct! This is not the real Mark Twain.
Mark Twain was an eviscerating anti-imperialist. He was militant. He was intent. He used to write that Americans fighting in foreign wars were carrying a polluted musket under a bandit’s flag. And he even wanted to change the flag of the United States, to change the stars to skull-and-crossbones symbols. So, I now realize that we have sort of sanctified and bleached Mark Twain for public consumption. Many of the quotes I use from Twain in my book do not appear in many biographies or anthologies. That part of Twain has been dropped out of his legacy, and I’m trying to recovery it, because he speaks to us today.
AMY GOODMAN: Makes me wonder if his books will start to be taken out of libraries around the country.
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Date: April 26, 2024 at 18:57:46
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Overthrow: 100 Years of U.S. Meddling & Regime Change, from Iran... |
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Thanks Akira- I was going to post these too.
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54016 |
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Date: April 26, 2024 at 18:32:43
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: part 2: As Ex-CIA Head Admits to U.S. Meddling in Elections... |
URL: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/12/as_ex_cia_head_admits_to |
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As Ex-CIA Head Admits to U.S. Meddling in Elections, Is Outrage over Russian Interference Overblown?
Former CIA Director James Woolsey recently admitted the U.S. meddles in overseas elections. During an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, Woolsey laughed about it and said the U.S. takes such action “only for a very good cause.” Woolsey made the comments shortly after 13 Russians were indicted for interfering with the U.S. election. We speak to former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, author of “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: But I want to go back to that clip we played earlier of former CIA Director James Woolsey speaking just a few weeks ago with Laura Ingraham on Fox News.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?
JAMES WOOLSEY: Oh, probably. But it was for the good of the system, in order to avoid the communists from taking over.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Yeah.
JAMES WOOLSEY: For example, in Europe in ’47, ’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians, we—CIA—
LAURA INGRAHAM: We don’t do that now, though? We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?
JAMES WOOLSEY: Well, mmm, yum, yum, yum, never mind. Only for a very good cause.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Can you do that—let’s do a vine video and—as former CIA director. I love it.
JAMES WOOLSEY: Only for very good cause—
LAURA INGRAHAM: OK.
JAMES WOOLSEY: —in the interests of democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: “Only for a very good cause in the interests of democracy.” That’s former CIA Director James Woolsey. So, if you could respond to what he says today, Stephen Kinzer? We’re not talking about history right now. And also talk about the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and Trump’s proposal to cut it by something like two-thirds in the 2019 budget.
STEPHEN KINZER: Well, that was a great clip. And I think maybe Woolsey is thinking back to one of his predecessors, Richard Helms, who was convicted of lying in court for denying that the United States had tried to influence the election in Chile. He didn’t want to lie, so he just laughed. And I saw him really trying to—trying to tell the truth, not trying to lie. Yes, it’s true, we are still intervening in foreign elections. And I think the ones he’s been thinking about are recent elections in Bulgaria, in Mongolia, in Slovakia.
The National Endowment for Democracy, which you mentioned, has taken over many of these functions from the CIA. It’s a pretty unknown agency. But it was founded by President Reagan in the early '80s for a particular reason. You'll remember that at that time the CIA had been suffering from many scandals, and it couldn’t operate the way it used to. So, how are we going to influence foreign elections? Well, we established this National Endowment for Democracy, which is now funded at over $170 million a year. And that’s all it does. It interferes in the politics of other countries.
Much of its money goes through something called the International Republican Institute, headed by John McCain, and the National Democratic Institute, headed by Madeleine Albright. So you have these relentless interventionists working under a larger board that includes people like Victoria Nuland, who was in Ukraine as assistant secretary of state handing out chocolate chip cookies to protesters, urging them to overthrow their government; Elliott Abrams, who was involved in the interventions in Nicaragua and elsewhere during the 1980s.
So, the National Endowment for Democracy has now taken on the job of interfering in the politics of other countries, for what Mr. Woolsey called “very good reasons,” when there’s a “very good cause,” to “defend democracy.” So, I liked his phrase. He said something like, “We only do it for a very good cause.” Well, that’s a very flexible definition. Every country can define what a good cause is from its point of view. So if you feel that you have the right to intervene in the politics of another country and try to shape the results of its election because it’s a good cause, then you have to realize that other countries will make the same rational calculation. We cannot be outraged when other countries are doing on a smaller scale what we’ve taught the world how to do over more than a hundred years.
AMY GOODMAN: Which takes us, of course, to Russia and Russia’s intervention in the United States’ elections, the allegations of them and what they’re doing. So, take this to the modern era, when we’re talking about cybersecurity, when we’re talking about interfering with elections, other countries, and the response of the U.S. to Russia doing this.
STEPHEN KINZER: I think the outrage at Russian interference is a lot of crocodile tears. It’s not a good thing. It’s not good to intervene in the elections of other countries. But it’s not something that’s ever going to go away. It’s something the United States does relentlessly. And I would pull back a little and ask ourselves, “Do we really think that Russia shaped the outcome of this election? Did Russia tell us how to vote? Did Russia pour money into opposition groups or political groups, the way we do in other parts of the country?”
Democracy is under siege in this country. But when you make the list of who are the threats to democracy, Russia is about number 25 on the list. Higher on the list: U.S. Supreme Court, Democratic Party, Republican Party, Congress. All the institutions inside the United States, that are eating away at our democratic core, are doing much more to undermine the freedoms that we take for granted than any foreign intervention.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, Stephen Kinzer, the information about the methods that Russia may have used to try to influence the elections, we would be crazy not to think that the CIA and the U.S. government has not employed the same methods—use of social media—in other countries, no? I mean, in elections around the world?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, didn’t Woolsey make that very point?
STEPHEN KINZER: Actually, this is one of the main jobs of the National Endowment for Democracy. It sends money and advisers into other countries, and it teaches them: How do you make computer lists? How do you organize demonstrations? How do you make political meetings? How do you start a newspaper? These are all the building tools that we try to spread in other countries where there are governments of which we don’t approve.
Now, the National Endowment for Democracy published a report in 2013 in which they said, “Russia continues to be the priority country.” Soon after that, the Russians banned National Endowment from Democracy—for Democracy from working in Russia. Now we are—the NED is working in all the countries around Russia. It’s working in Kosovo, in Serbia. It’s working in Moldova. It’s working in Ukraine. It’s working in Belarus. So, we are trying to foment anti-Russia movements in countries all around Russia, with the aim, ultimately, of having the big prize of somehow being able to turn Russia into a country that would be subservient to our wishes.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen, we have less than a minute, but you recently wrote a piece about the U.S. political institutions—FBI, CIA, State Department—so often targets of progressives concerned about these institutions, now being targeted by Republicans. Can you talk about this shift, in the last 45 seconds?
STEPHEN KINZER: One of my professors in college was Howard Zinn. He was always telling us that the Justice Department and the FBI and the CIA were engaged in conspiracies against American freedom. Now I’m hearing this from right-wing Republicans. It’s an amazing role reversal. Now, those Republicans, who always wanted to defend the institutional strength of the United States, want to rip down the institutions that undergird American democracy. So we’re now seeing the wrecking crew from the group of political operatives who used to believe that upholding institutions was the ultimate goal of the United States. Devin Nunes is sounding more like Angela Davis every day. It’s really a remarkable change to see this coming out of a Republican White House and a Republican Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: What a way to end the show. Stephen Kinzer, I want to thank you for being with us, but we are going to do Part 2 of our conversation, and we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org, as we didn’t talk about some of the countries the U.S. overthrew their democratically elected leaders, from Chile to Guatemala to Iraq to back to the 19th century. That does it for our show. Stephen Kinzer, author of The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, as well as the book Overthrow. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks for joining us.
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Date: April 26, 2024 at 18:36:07
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: 3: America’s History of Regime Change & Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism |
URL: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/14/extended_interview_stephen_kinzer_on_america |
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Web Bonus: Stephen Kinzer on America’s History of Regime Change and Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism
Web Exclusive MARCH 14, 2018
Stephen Kinzer
former New York Times foreign correspondent, now world affairs columnist for The Boston Globe. He is the author of several books, including Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and All the Shah’s Men. His latest, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, was recently released on paperback.
Web-only conversation with Stephen Kinzer, author of many books, including “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” and “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we continue our conversation with Stephen Kinzer, Part 2 of that conversation.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Stephen Kinzer, I’d like to ask you about one of, to my mind—you covered in your book Overthrow—one of the all-time unfair fights in world history, perhaps one of the most egregious examples of a large nation attacking a small nation. I’m talking about the invasion of Grenada in 1985, I think it was, under Ronald Reagan, a country that has maybe one-third of the population of the Bronx and assaulted by American troops. Could you talk about the invasion of Grenada?
AMY GOODMAN: ’83.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: '83, I'm sorry. 1983.
STEPHEN KINZER: This really is a remarkable episode, as you pointed out. So, it happened in 1983, soon after Reagan had come into office. Grenada is a tiny island in the Caribbean. Its entire population could fit into the Rose Bowl in California. That’s how small it is. But the United States was looking for a victory. Reagan came into office with this idea that the U.S. had to shake off what he called the Vietnam syndrome, the syndrome that we were, as he called it, a pitiful, helpless giant. He wanted to show that the United States was still able to crush enemies. But as was always the case during the Cold War, we were never able to strike against our real enemies. Nobody ever proposed bombing Moscow or invading China. So, we had to go after countries that weren’t really our enemies but were smaller and easier to push around. And there hardly was a country smaller and easier to push around than poor little Grenada.
Grenada had inserted itself into the Cold War. The Grenadan leadership had been friendly to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to Fidel Castro in Cuba. And somehow the United States developed this idea that this little island could somehow be a threat to the United States. So, partly for that reason, but I think largely for reasons of politics, for reasons of appearance, the United States, under Reagan, decided we’re looking for a place to attack. There was turmoil inside Grenada, suddenly. There was a rebellion within the ruling group, and one of the groups turned on the other. The prime minister was assassinated. And in that turmoil, Reagan saw a chance, that we would go in and say we were trying to rescue the people of Grenada, save American citizens who were there, and show that America could still stand strong in the world. So we invaded. Obviously, the invasion was predetermined in its outcome.
But what I find particularly egregious about this is what happened afterwards. So, this is a tiny, little country. The United States could have made it into the jewel of the Caribbean. It’s such a small place. We could have made it into a paradise, for nothing, for the cost of a toilet seat on a B-52 bomber. So, we didn’t do that. We just turned away and left. And this is so true with all of our other interventions. You might say we intervened in some places to overthrow leaders or regimes that were unfair to their people, but we never tried to impose other ones that were good. We turned our back immediately. And we allow the tyrants that we impose, in places like Iran and Guatemala, to do whatever they want, once we’ve placed them in power. So, Grenada has stumbled along. It’s not in a terrible condition. But we missed a great opportunity. And that’s because once we’ve overthrown a government, we feel we’re finished. We’ve put in someone we like. We can turn away and look for the next country.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to turn to Honduras. We talked about it in Part 1 of this conversation, but I wanted to turn to a conversation that we had with Mel Zelaya, Mel Zelaya who was ousted in 2009. In December, we spoke with the former Honduran president. He was ousted in a U.S.-backed coup. And I asked President Zelaya whether he’s suggesting that the U.S.—you know, they had just experienced their own election. Hernández, the incumbent president, had clearly not won right after the election. In fact, when they announced who was ahead, it was the competing presidential candidate. Then they shut down all information about the elections. Before we knew it, they announced Hernández was the victor, over Nasralla. And that is playing out to this day, with thousands of people protesting in the streets. Mel Zelaya had formed an alliance with Nasralla, and I asked him, “Are you still—do you still see the U.S. running the show in Honduras?”
MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated] I have no doubt about it, Amy. And you know why? Because I was president of the country, and they tried to run everything. And their opposition is what took me out of power. The coup d’état against me was planned in Miami at the Southern Command. So I know, here, they run the churches—not all of them, not all of the pastors or all of the priests, but the main heads. They finance the main churches, evangelical churches, as well—not all of them, but most of them. They run the large owners of the media corporations. They feed them a line, day after day. And the military obey them, because they were trained by them at the School of the Americas. It now has another name, but the graduates are throughout Latin America. The private business—well, if you’re going to be a businessperson and make money in Honduras, you need to export to the United States, and so you have to have a good relationship, you have to have a visa. So, anything the United States says is the law for the private sector here. If they say, “Go into the abyssum,” they will. That’s how the history of this country has been. They run the transnationals, private sector, the churches, the major media—not just here, around the world. The major media conglomerates answer to the U.S. line.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is the ousted Honduran President Mel Zelaya, speaking just a few months ago. Since then, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has visited Honduras and the president now, Hernández, has visited Guatemala, right after which Guatemala announced that two days after the U.S. moves its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Guatemala will move its embassy to Jerusalem. Stephen Kinzer, your comments?
STEPHEN KINZER: Well, I thought President Zelaya’s statements were actually pretty accurate. I wish I could protest against him, but I think he’s laid out the situation pretty clearly. Honduras, sometimes thought of as the ultimate banana republic, and we’ve certainly treated it that way. You know, we mentioned earlier the overthrow of President Zelaya in Nicaragua in 1909. After that happened, there was one other liberal leader left in Central America, and that was a guy named Dávila in Honduras. So we went in and overthrew him the next year, 1910. Since then, the United States has been the overwhelming power in Honduras.
What I find especially interesting, and it didn’t—President Zelaya didn’t get into this in his interview, is the excuse that we used to support the overthrow of Zelaya back in 2009. He was going to call a referendum in which he would ask whether the constitution could be changed to allow presidential re-election. We didn’t like that, so we set this coup in motion. Now, what just happened? The president of Honduras, who just got elected, is elected for a second term. He didn’t try to change the law. He did. He violated it. The constitution says there’s no re-election allowed. The president of Honduras has just been re-elected. And the United States has blessed this as a triumph of democracy. So you can understand why Hondurans are out in the street upset and how this feeds into a long century of American intervention in that poor country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Stephen Kinzer, what about Chile, which we’ve dealt with numerous times here on the program, the American role in governing in Chile?
STEPHEN KINZER: I want to just point out one episode in the very sad and well-known story of what happened in Chile. We all know that the CIA was deeply involved in the coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973. But that was not the first time the U.S. focused on Allende. We had also tried to prevent his election during the—in 1970, when he was first elected president.
One of the ways we wanted to be sure that he wouldn’t be elected president is we wanted to get the commander of the Chilean Army to lead an uprising or to tell Congress they could not confirm Allende’s election. He refused to do that. He had the attitude the military does not involve itself in politics. As a result, we saw him as an obstacle.
And we did something that I think is really a low point—or maybe a high point, depending on your point of view—in the history of American intervention: We sent weapons, we sent ammunition, in a diplomatic pouch from the United States to our embassy in Santiago. And that night, at 2:00 in the morning, the defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy, on a dark street, handed these weapons over to anti-Allende ex-military people. And the next morning, they assassinated the commander of the Chilean Army.
What was his sin? His sin was to defend the principle that is absolutely fundamental to any democracy, including American democracy. And that is, the military does not involve itself in politics. Because he stuck to that principle and wanted civilians to decide who the civilian leader of the country would be, we participated in his assassination. This really was the extreme of American efforts to shape countries where we feared governments would soon emerge that would not support our interests.
AMY GOODMAN: Last question: Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, where we are in Iraq and Afghanistan today as a result of U.S. involvement in these countries?
STEPHEN KINZER: Both of these are—Iraq and Afghanistan are great exemplars of a cliché that writers sometimes hear. We say every story is either happy or sad, depending on where you end it. So, if we could have invaded Afghanistan, got rid of the Taliban, and then everything would be quiet, that would have been perfect. But life doesn’t work that way. History keeps on happening. Things have effects on other things.
So, here we are now 16 years into our war in Afghanistan. The military, our military, is completely out of ideas. They have tried everything. There is no way for victory in Afghanistan. We don’t even know what victory would look like. And our own military and political leaders admit this. Nonetheless, we’re still staying there. Pretty soon, there will be kids eligible—Americans eligible to go fight in Afghanistan who were not even born when this war began. So, we are there only because we don’t want to be the ones to stand up and admit that we failed, we couldn’t succeed in imposing our project. The same thing is happening in Iraq.
Here, I see an even bigger problem. The United States is still focusing on the Middle East as if our vital interests, our survival depends on it. Now, we intervened in the Middle East in the earlier eras for two reasons: keep the Soviet Union out and defend our vital oil supply links. There’s no more Soviet Union, and we don’t get vital oil from the Persian Gulf anymore. It’s time for us to withdraw from the Middle East. We no longer have vital interests there. What is the difference between a little more Syrian influence or less Syrian influence in eastern Turkey, whether parts of Iraq are more Kurdish or less Kurdish? This is not in the vital interest of the United States. It’s time for us to withdraw from that part of the world, let it resolve its own problems. We should have learned by now from Iraq and our other Middle East adventures that these adventures never produce any positive results, either for the people in the region or for us.
The Middle East was a vital interest for the United States for a while. For a long time, it hasn’t been. But our foreign policies don’t change as the world changes. We have policies that are set for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. And this is one of the great problems of our foreign policy. We get into a rut. We get in somewhere. We never get out. And it goes back to something I wrote about in my True Flag book. It was Henry Cabot Lodge who said, “Wherever the U.S. flag once flies, I hate to see it taken down.” What it means is, any country that we ever invade, that we ever interfere in, is a place where we have to stay forever. And as long as we continue to be in that mindset, we’re going to be dragged into these adventures in which we spend our blood and treasure in countries far away, for purposes that even our own leaders realize will never be accomplished.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the issue that Mel Zelaya raised about the media and its alliance with the United States? In your book True Flag, you write that the country’s best-known political and intellectual leaders took sides. Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and William Randolph Hearst pushed for imperial expansion. Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Andrew Carnegie preached restraint. What did William Hearst have to do with this?
STEPHEN KINZER: William Randolph Hearst was a brilliant newspaper publisher who arrived in New York taking over a newspaper from his father that had a circulation of about 80,000. He built it up, in the space of less than a year, to 800,000. How did he do that? He came up with an idea, which is still very valid in journalism today. If you want people to buy a newspaper, the best thing is to have a running story—that is, a story that’s happening day after day after day, not just a one-time event, that makes people want to buy newspapers. War is the best-running story of all. And Hearst realized that if he could get the United States involved in some war, any war, anywhere, he could sell lots of newspapers by coming up with stories about heroism, treason, battles, all the archetypes of war. So he looked around the world. There was Cuba right there. There had been upheaval going on in Cuba for decades. And he took it on as a project to whip up fury in the United States against Spanish colonialism in Cuba, in a way that would produce our intervention. And it worked.
Hearst realized something that’s still true today about Americans. We are very compassionate people. Americans hate the idea that anybody is suffering anywhere. And when we see a newspaper article that shows you about some poor girl who’s been brutalized in a country because she wanted to go to school, we think, “We have to go invade that country.” So, playing on the compassion of the American people is something that our leaders, and particularly the press, are very practiced at doing. Just try to focus on the victims of tyranny in some foreign country, play up their suffering, and then you can produce in the American mind this odd link: If people are suffering in another country, the United States has to get involved, as if somehow we are going to be able to reduce that suffering. So, my bottom line would be, I don’t mind intervening in these humanitarian crises, if you think there’s a real chance that in the long run we can reduce human rights violations. But that’s almost never the case, as has been proven repeatedly in recent years.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Kinzer, we want to thank you for being with us, former New York Times foreign correspondent, now a columnist for The Boston Globe, author of a number of books, among them Bitter Fruit, the story of the U.S. overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954; All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq; and, most recently, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.
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