Korean Job Discussion Forums

[some waygug-in]

http://www.buzzflash.com/reviews/06/04/rev06051.html

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Hardcover)
by Stephen Kinzer

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS



Awhile back, we offered the book "All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle Eastern Terror," by Stephen Kinzer. (We interviewed Kinzer about the book.)

It was a compelling, detailed account of how the U.S. overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953. Kinzer's book on the Iran coup was meticulously researched. In the end, whatever cover story the State Department was using to claim it was necessary to squash democracy in order to fight Communism, the real impetus behind the U.S. suppression of democratic rule was that the charismatic elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, wanted to restore the British oil concession to Iranian control.

Eisenhower, then president, had to be convinced that the coup was necessary to keep the Soviets at bay. The former WW II Allied Commander in Chief wondered aloud at a National Security Council Meeting "why it wasn't possible to get some of these people in the downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us."

These were prophetic words. The Shah was installed as a puppet government leader by the U.S. after Mossadegh was disposed of -- and the rest is the sad history of U.S. failure after failure in foreign policy.

Kinzer, who is one of the truly professional New York Times reporters, has returned to the topic of the United States overthrowing governments in his new bestseller appropriately titled, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq."

Although Iraq may stand out for its singular incompetence, deception, bungling and corruption, it does -- Kinzer's book sadly reminds us -- join a long list of U.S. attacks on democratically elected (and U.S. supported rogue leaders who rebelled) governments that didn't toe the American foreign policy/economic interest line. Regime change isn't some sort of Bushevik innovation, although pre-emptive regime change is. The fact is America has always asserted its "right" to remove governments not to its liking when it was able to do so.

[Gopher]

When Ambassador Nathanial Davis testified before the Senate Committe on Foreign Relations concerning Chile, he recalls coming up against extremely hostile, cynical, unyeilding, and very U.S.-centric assumptions concerning U.S. involvement in world affairs. He explains why the hearing was so combative:

[EFLtrainer]

[Gopher]

Here is a short list of professional examinations of Cold War-era U.S. foreign policy and world affairs, for Some Waygug-in and anyone else who is interested in leaving indictment-style or partisan diatribes and narratives behind and engaging in a more mature and professional debate...

Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War -- is in either its ninth or tenth edition now, I am not sure which. See his huge bibliographic essay for additional suggestions.

Thomas McCormick, America's Half Century, 2d ed., (Johns Hopkins, 1995)

Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant, rev. ed. (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1986).

Blasier, The Giant's Rival: The USSR and Latin America (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1987).

Ilya Prizel, Latin America Through Soviet Eyes (Cambridge, 1990).

United States Senate, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, D.C., 1975).

Paul E. Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1977).

Nathaniel Davis, The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende (Cornell, 1985).

Allison and Zelikow, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2d ed., (Longman, 1999).

Thomas Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution, rev. ed. (Praeger, 2000).

Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton, 1991).

Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Univ. of North Carolina, 2002).

Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, eds., Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse University Press, 2004).

[some waygug-in]

Thank you for such an in-depth response.

[EFLtrainer]

[EFLtrainer]

[Gopher]

Beg your pardon, BLT Trainer, but what is your purpose here, on this thread?

Some Waygug-in asked for opinions on a book. I have some competence in this area, so I offered an opinion, as detailed an opinion as I was capable of.

But, again, what is your purpose on this thread, and why are you rambling about me and the President so?

Do you have anything at all to say about Kinzer's work? Have you ever even read Kinzer's work?

[EFLtrainer]

[Gopher]

Answer the question: Have you read any of Kinzer's work?

[Gopher]

BLT Trainer: have you read anything of Kinzer's? Do you have any thoughts on Kinzer's sources and his analysis of the problems he identifies and addresses? If not, why so much time and energy on this thread if you have nothing at all of substance to contribute to it, one way or another?

Are you going to answer these questions? Can you answer these questions? Or is rambling about the President and attacking my views your only talent here?

[Gopher]

BLT Trainer: have you read anything by Kinzer?

If not, why did you launch into your usual diatribe on this thread?

Were you drunk while posting again? Why exactly did you come onto this thread and ramble about W. Bush when it was a thread about Kinzer's work?

Is there a method to your madness?

By the way, when you said this above...

[bucheon bum]

So that's how you shut the man up.

[some waygug-in]

Wikipedia has this to say about Stephen Kinzer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Stephen Kinzer is an American author and newspaper reporter. He came to prominence during the 1980s when he covered Central America for the New York Times, one of the most prestigious papers in the U.S. In 1990, he was promoted to bureau chief of the Berlin bureau and covered the growth of Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from Soviet rule. He has also written several non-fiction books about Turkey, Central America, Iran, and the United States's involvement in government ousters during the 20th century.

Kinzer was used as an example of media bias by left wing writers Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent. The authors show that Kinzer fails to quote a single person in Nicaragua who is pro-Sandinista and contrast this with polls reporting a 9% support for all the opposition parties taken together. The authors conclude that such a persistent bias can only be explained by the propaganda model. ("[They're] only 9 percent of the population [but] they have 100 percent of Stephen Kinzer," Chomsky quips.)



So if Kinzer is .........an example of media bias.........but you say he's too left wing? I'm confused.

[Gopher]

I cannot speak on Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, a leftist favorite, as I have not read it. Have you? (Please tell me your information is more than that which you have gathered from a two-minute Google search and then opening the link to this Wikipedia article, which you appear to have swallowed at face value.)

You say you are confused, and I have to take you at face value. I will not assume that this represents sarcasm, even though that seems to be the way of this board of late.

I will continue answering you in good faith, then.

Kinzer's All the Shah's Men is rightly criticized for advancing a U.S.-centric interpretation, and for forwarding the argument that many have made in the aftermath of 9/11 -- that is, that the U.S. deserved to be attacked because its foreign policy was insensitive and malicious -- no wonder they attacked us.

Kinzer is also criticized for failing to account for much history that came between 1953 and 1979, and between 1953 and 2001, for that matter, as if it was merely a two-dimensional story between the U.S. and Iran.

I stand by the historiographical review I posted onto this thread above. You will recall that I pointed out that many scholars, including many foreign scholars, have complained that much of the writing on U.S. diplomatic history and foreign relations suffers a U.S.-centric bias, that many authors/critics are only inclined to seek and find faults in U.S. foreign policy, and that these authors/critics are quite bitter in their criticism -- and that, my main point, Kinzer contributes to this tradition.

I do not believe I called Kinzer "leftist" -- even if he is, even if he is not quite left enough for Chomsky. I did point out that BLT Trainer claimed Gasiorowski and Byrne represented "the center" while in fact they work at a research institute (the National Security Arvhice at George Washington Univ.) that is left-of-center and indeed, at times, on the radical wing, and in any case, on the cutting-edge of getting some new information declassified. I found this claim significant because it was yet another indicator to me that this poster's views are further left than the left wing.

I also stand by my reference of Gasiorowski and Byrne as a sort of control on Kinzer's All the Shah's Men, by the way, which was my original point (before the thread was hijacked).

I strongly suggest that you read them both, compare and contrast them, particularly their willingness to explore and then open up the complexity of this historical event. Only then will you be well-prepared to read Kinzer's Overthrow, which is yet another denouncement of U.S. foreign policy and not a scholarly reconstruction or even a professional and balanced journalistic investigation like Peter Wyden's Bay of Pigs or Evan Thomas's The Very Best Men.

In any case, to better make my point, let us take a brief look at Kinzer's most famous work, a collaboration with his colleague Stephen Schlesinger called Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.

This is one of the five most-cited works treating Operation PBSUCCESS. (See also Cullather's Secret History; Gleijeses's Shattered Hope; Immerman's CIA in Guatemala; and Schneider's Communism in Guatemala.)

Schlesinger and Kinzer are recognized and hailed for pioneering the document declassification procedure that forced CIA to preserve its case files on PBSUCCESS, which led to subsequent work. Indeed, Harvard just republished Bitter Fruit.

Yet this account is severly limited, as even its title suggests. It concerns itself only with the U.S. side and only with U.S. actors in an event which is multifaceted and complex. It does not come close to treating Guatemalan politics and its problems and peculiarities as well as Gleijeses does, for example. Furthermore, Schlesinger and Kinzer argue that U.S. involvement in this 1954 coup directly caused the civil war that engulfed the country and claimed well over one hundred thousand dead.

That is all there is to know, according to them: the U.S. caused this coup to occur, and that in turn caused these people to die. Shame on the U.S. The U.S. should not do these things. But for U.S. interference and meddling, there might have been peace and tranquility in Guatemala.

Others build on this, and say, wait a moment. The U.S. was clearly involved in this, perhaps disproporationately so, and therefore shares the responsibility in having helped to bring these things about. Recently, Cullather has helped us to better understand exactly how the U.S. contributed to this 1954 coup.

But we have also expanded on local conditions and actors and explored how they themselves, and not anyone else, decisively contributed to these things as well. In the Guatemalan case, we've opened up Guatemalan politics and its problems, particularly the Church and the elites' nondemocratic authoritarianism, their unwillingness to cede anything with respect to Guatemala's middle and lower classes, as well as the Guatemalan military's brutal anticommunist and monstrous por la patria ideology, and we have begun to understand how these things combined with the Hispanics' and ladinos' traditional intolerance and racism towards Guatemala's Indian peoples and cultures, combined yet again with U.S., Soviet, and Cuban geopolitics to forge the outcome that so disappoints us.

And people like Kinzer simply throw this complexity away, disregarding it entirely, in favor of sticking to the simplistic story that the U.S. did it and therefore shame on the U.S. for doing it.

That is my objection to Kinzer's work: it tends to be simplistic and unduly U.S.-centric.

It seems that you may simply want to promote a book that you have not read because the synopsis you discovered happens to coincide with your politics.

I guess that is your prerogative.

But you began a thread asking for our opinions on this book (and, implicitly, its author). If you are unwilling to listen to the advice of those of us who know something about this writer and his work -- and I realize that most people wed their ideologies infinitely more faithfully than they wed their spouses, so I am asking something virtually impossible -- then I do not believe I can help you.

So if Kinzer is what floats your boat (and for BLT Trainer, it seems to be Zepezauer), then, by all means, read Kinzer. I can also refer you to anything else by ThirdWorldTraveller.com, Odonian Press, Britain's Verso Press, and an Australian press which I believe is called Ocean Press or Oceanview Press or something like that -- they publish all of the Che Guevara "down with the Yankee!" stuff.

But do not tell yourself that you know anything at all about U.S. diplomatic history or foreign affairs when you have mastered -- and perhaps I misuse "mastered" here -- nothing more than the antiAmerican diatribes, indictments, and leftist cases for the prosecution.

I would also strongly suggest that you do not start any more threads seeking opinions on books and authors you have not read, when you simply prefer to resist good advice and adhere to your own (largely ignorant) predetermined worldviews and assertions.