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[R. S. Refugee]

U.S. history lesson: stop meddling

In the last 100 years, the U.S. has ousted the governments of at least 14 countries and forcibly intervened in dozens of others -- to what end?

By Stephen Kinzer

May 13, 2006

THE UNITED STATES is facing a major crisis in Iran, where the clerical regime, despite its denials, is evidently embarked on an effort to develop nuclear weapons. Because American leaders say they will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran, this has led to intense speculation that the Bush administration is preparing a military attack.

History suggests, however, that such an attack would have disastrous long-term consequences. Iranians know as well as anyone how terribly wrong such foreign interventions can go.

Iran was an incipient democracy in 1953, but Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh � chosen by an elected parliament and hugely popular among Iranians � angered the West by nationalizing his country's oil industry. President Eisenhower sent the CIA to depose him. The coup was successful, but it set the stage for future disaster.

The CIA placed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back on the Peacock Throne. His repressive rule led, 25 years later, to the Islamic Revolution. That revolution brought to power a clique of bitterly anti-Western mullahs who have spent the decades since working intensely, and sometimes violently, to undermine U.S. interests around the world.

If the Eisenhower administration had refrained from direct intervention against Iran in 1953, this religious regime probably would never have come to power. There would be no nuclear crisis. Iran might instead have become a thriving democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East.

Overthrowing a government is like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill � you have no idea exactly what will happen next. Iranians are not the only ones who know this. In slightly more than a century, the United States has overthrown the governments of at least 14 countries, beginning with the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, and forcibly intervened in dozens more. Long before Afghanistan and Iraq, there were the Philippines, Panama, South Vietnam and Chile, among others.

Most of these interventions not only have brought great pain to the target countries but also, in the long run, weakened American security.

Cuba, half a world away from Iran, is a fine example. In 1898, the United States sent troops there to help rebels overthrow Spanish colonial rule. Once victory was secured, the U.S. reneged on its promise to allow Cuba to become independent and turned it into a protectorate.

More than 60 years later, in his first speech as leader of the victorious Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro recalled that episode and made a promise. "This time," he vowed, "it will not be like 1898, when the Americans came in and made themselves masters of the country."

Those words suggest that perhaps if the U.S. had allowed Cuba to go its own way in 1898, the entire phenomenon of Castro communism might never have emerged.

The U.S. deposed a visionary leader of Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya, in 1909 and sent his unlucky country into a long spiral of repression and rebellion.

Forty-five years later, still believing that "regime change" can end well, the U.S. overthrew the left-leaning president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, and imposed a military regime. That regime's brutality set off a 30-year civil war in which hundreds of thousands died.

Today, Latin America and the Middle East are the regions of the world in the most open political rebellion against U.S. policies. It is no coincidence that these are the regions where the U.S. has intervened most often. Resentment over intervention festers. It passes from generation to generation. Ultimately it produces a backlash.

Countries that have been victimized by past interventions are especially determined to resist future ones. Iran is one of these. Over the last 200 years, the British, Russians and Americans have sought to dominate and exploit Iran. If the U.S. intervenes there now, it will face the pent-up anger many Iranians harbor against all outside powers.

Some in Washington evidently believe that it is worth trying to set off upheaval in Iran because any new regime there would be an improvement.

This is a dangerous gamble, as intervention would strengthen the most radical factions in Iran. Militants, including the bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would use it as an excuse to crack down on dissent. That could lead to a wave of repression, produce a regime more dangerously anti-American than the current one and set back the cause of Iranian democracy by another generation.

This looming crisis might be resolved by direct and unconditional negotiations between Washington and Tehran, but American leaders refuse to bargain with the mullahs. The trauma of the Islamic Revolution, and the hostage crisis that followed it, left a deep scar on the American political psyche � so deep that it prevents the U.S. from engaging Iran in ways that could have great benefits for American security.

Yet far from being doomed to conflict, these two proud nations are potential allies. Both want to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, assure the free flow of Middle East oil and crush radical Sunni movements like the Taliban and Al Qaeda. What prevents talks from materializing is the deep resentment both sides feel over past interventions.

Iran has intervened across the Middle East, sometimes using the extreme weapon of terror, to attack U.S. interests. For its part, the U.S. intervened to crush Iranian democracy in 1953, imposed the shah and supported his repressive rule for 25 years.

The cure for the effects of past intervention is not more intervention. Given the seriousness of the nuclear crisis with Iran, American leaders should put aside their self-defeating and increasingly dangerous refusal to negotiate. The alternative may be violent intervention in Iran. Americans have tried that before. The results would be no happier this time.


[i]STEPHEN KINZER, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of "All the Shah's Men," about the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran, and, most recently, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq."[/i]

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/latimes5_13_06.htm

[Kuros]

Keeping the Cold War cold, and winning it thereby?

[ddeubel]

Kinzer also wrote a very bang on editorial of the same vein. America on the decline because of its hubris...........America as a victim to its initial optimism and abundance........now gone old and not wisened....

Thanks for the post.

DD

[ddeubel]

Also a good article on the same subject in today's IHT.

Quote:

America the Titanic James Carroll The Boston Globe MONDAY, MAY 15, 2006 BOSTON The last living American survivor of the Titanic died last week. Lillian Gertrud Asplund was 5 when the luxury liner sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912. Her father and three brothers were lost. She, another brother, and her mother survived. At death, Asplund was 99. In reading her obituary, one could not escape the feeling that her entire life was shadowed by this tragedy. Is such a thing true more broadly? Does her passing mark the end of the Titanic story? What was that story anyway? Many ships have been ill-fated. Why did the fate of that particular one so grip the world's imagination? The Hollywood blockbuster of a few years ago brought the story to a new generation, but its pins were already deeply planted in human consciousness. Why? The Titanic, as the unsinkable vessel that sank on its maiden voyage, became an ultimate symbol of hubris, a cautionary tale warning that human inventiveness can always be trumped by nature. But the Titanic took on mythic significance only because of what soon followed in its wake. It was in hindsight that the catastrophe of the Great War took on the implicit character of the unforeseen obstacle into which Europe crashed. The unbridled optimism of the Enlightenment, a belief in the "unsinkability" of progress, drove full speed into the abyss of trench warfare. A generation of European males was lost, and for what? Kaiser? King? The Archduke of Sarajevo? A dynamic set by arms merchants? After the fact, what came to be called World War I could only be understood as an act of civilizational suicide. It was as if the man at the helm of the Titanic sailed into the thick of icebergs he had been warned were certainly there. The story of the ship became one of pure foreboding. The entry of the United States into the war was decisive, but it remained marginal to the agonies and the destructiveness. In America, it seemed possible to regard the Titanic tragedy as a morality tale meant for Europe, just as one could think of the Great War as the death rattle of the "Old World." That sense of relatively immune superiority was only confirmed by World War II. Though U.S. losses were greater than before, so was the benefit when the "New World" emerged uniquely whole, soon to become the engine of the global economy. Commanding from the bridge of "the West," American leaders went full speed ahead into a sea of icebergs, but now the true hazards had been created by the geniuses who had built the ship. The icebergs this time were thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union joined the United States in the manufacture of an ever growing danger. The stage for a second act of civilizational suicide was set. By sheer dumb luck, the USS America navigated the Cold War without hitting one of the nuclear icebergs, but the helmsmen credited their own skill while slaphappy passengers celebrated - again - a claim to unsinkability. We had "won" the Cold War and now we were the "indispensable nation." Not even awareness of the dangers posed by unmoored nuclear weapons - "loose nukes" - made America's geniuses see the hazard as applying to them. That alone is why, against reason and law, Washington can maintain its fleet of nuclear icebergs even now. Tragedy, nuclear or otherwise, is a fate awaiting other peoples, not Americans, who remain the last Enlightenment optimists. Oddly, the blow of 9/11 reinforced this exceptionalism. The anguish of that day was real, but it equaled neither what other nations suffered in the world wars, nor what the earth narrowly survived in the Cold War. Nor does it compare to what lies dead ahead if the captains of our ship hold course. Looming obstacles include an Islamic world enflamed by American belligerence, Russians feeling pushed into a new Cold War, China in an arms race, and a demonized Iran acting - no surprise - like a demon. All of these threats have their stimulus, if not their origins, in the old hubris of the New World. What America has done over the last six years makes plain that the lesson of the Titanic, even with its last American survivor gone, has yet to be learned in Washington. It is 1912 again. James Carroll's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe. BOSTON The last living American survivor of the Titanic died last week. Lillian Gertrud Asplund was 5 when the luxury liner sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912. Her father and three brothers were lost. She, another brother, and her mother survived. At death, Asplund was 99. In reading her obituary, one could not escape the feeling that her entire life was shadowed by this tragedy. Is such a thing true more broadly? Does her passing mark the end of the Titanic story? What was that story anyway? Many ships have been ill-fated. Why did the fate of that particular one so grip the world's imagination? The Hollywood blockbuster of a few years ago brought the story to a new generation, but its pins were already deeply planted in human consciousness. Why? The Titanic, as the unsinkable vessel that sank on its maiden voyage, became an ultimate symbol of hubris, a cautionary tale warning that human inventiveness can always be trumped by nature. But the Titanic took on mythic significance only because of what soon followed in its wake. It was in hindsight that the catastrophe of the Great War took on the implicit character of the unforeseen obstacle into which Europe crashed. The unbridled optimism of the Enlightenment, a belief in the "unsinkability" of progress, drove full speed into the abyss of trench warfare. A generation of European males was lost, and for what? Kaiser? King? The Archduke of Sarajevo? A dynamic set by arms merchants? After the fact, what came to be called World War I could only be understood as an act of civilizational suicide. It was as if the man at the helm of the Titanic sailed into the thick of icebergs he had been warned were certainly there. The story of the ship became one of pure foreboding. The entry of the United States into the war was decisive, but it remained marginal to the agonies and the destructiveness. In America, it seemed possible to regard the Titanic tragedy as a morality tale meant for Europe, just as one could think of the Great War as the death rattle of the "Old World." That sense of relatively immune superiority was only confirmed by World War II. Though U.S. losses were greater than before, so was the benefit when the "New World" emerged uniquely whole, soon to become the engine of the global economy. Commanding from the bridge of "the West," American leaders went full speed ahead into a sea of icebergs, but now the true hazards had been created by the geniuses who had built the ship. The icebergs this time were thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union joined the United States in the manufacture of an ever growing danger. The stage for a second act of civilizational suicide was set. By sheer dumb luck, the USS America navigated the Cold War without hitting one of the nuclear icebergs, but the helmsmen credited their own skill while slaphappy passengers celebrated - again - a claim to unsinkability. We had "won" the Cold War and now we were the "indispensable nation." Not even awareness of the dangers posed by unmoored nuclear weapons - "loose nukes" - made America's geniuses see the hazard as applying to them. That alone is why, against reason and law, Washington can maintain its fleet of nuclear icebergs even now. Tragedy, nuclear or otherwise, is a fate awaiting other peoples, not Americans, who remain the last Enlightenment optimists. Oddly, the blow of 9/11 reinforced this exceptionalism. The anguish of that day was real, but it equaled neither what other nations suffered in the world wars, nor what the earth narrowly survived in the Cold War. Nor does it compare to what lies dead ahead if the captains of our ship hold course. Looming obstacles include an Islamic world enflamed by American belligerence, Russians feeling pushed into a new Cold War, China in an arms race, and a demonized Iran acting - no surprise - like a demon. All of these threats have their stimulus, if not their origins, in the old hubris of the New World. What America has done over the last six years makes plain that the lesson of the Titanic, even with its last American survivor gone, has yet to be learned in Washington. It is 1912 again. James Carroll's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

in the rear view mirror it is easy to second guess.

If the US did not fight the cold war the Soviet Union might have destroyed the US.

[Gopher]

I've already addressed Kinzer's book, in much detail.

Clearly, R.S. is only interested in haranguing us and not listening.

[EFLtrainer]

Joo, please just stop posting. I mean, why are you here? Are you an English teacher? An EFL student in Korea?

Seriously, you repeat the same things over and over regardless of what is said.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[Gopher]

[deleted]

[ddeubel]

Gopher,

You may think that Kinzer is not intellectually rigorous, fine. But I wouldn't accuse him of inflamming anti-U.S. sentiment...............Substantially, his conclusions are more than correct, even if his sources and rhetoric are inflated.

I take issue with you quoting Gasiorowski as someone who opposes the arguement that the U.S. didn't have much to do with the 1953 coup. That just isn't the case and he says, after describing much of the evidence............

[Gopher]

[ddeubel]

I disagree that the Russians had a lot to do with the coup. They (as Gasiorowski also concurrs, along with agreeing the British had little to do with it . ) had little to do with the events. Wilber (a main actor in the coup) in his Secret History of the Coup, which he wrote for the CIA and was subsequently declassified, also gives scant notice to any British or Russian "role" .

[Gopher]

[Nowhere Man]

[rollo]

An interesting analylsis. But it does not factor the huge immigration into the U.S. in recent years. This immigration will more than likely trigger a flourescence in the U.S. both culturally and economically. Iraq is a mistake no doubt but it will not cause significant structural flaws in the U.s. economy. the influx of immigrants will act as a second baby boom and ignite the U.S. as never before. Bush will be gone in 900 days and a corrective course will be taken. This obituary is premature and Kinzer has an axe to grind and is not objective. But interesting!