Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

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Overview

""Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush but has been an integral part of American foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the entire twentieth century and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to topple governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the latest, though perhaps not the last, example of these high-stakes operations." "In Overthrow, ...
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Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

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Overview

""Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush but has been an integral part of American foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the entire twentieth century and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to topple governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the latest, though perhaps not the last, example of these high-stakes operations." "In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. He recounts how America's long regime-change century began in Hawaii and gained momentum during the Spanish-American War, when Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines fell to American military and political power. Soon afterward, the United States started flexing its muscles in Central America, orchestrating coups that brought down the presidents of Nicaragua and Honduras." "Kinzer then shows how the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union led American leaders to view all political disputes through the lens of superpower competition. During this period, they arranged covert actions that led to the murder of a South Vietnamese president and the fall of democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. In recent years, invasions have once again become the preferred instrument of regime change, as operations in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq attest." The United States usually succeeds when it sets out to depose a foreign leader, but Kinzer assesses these operations in the cold light of history and concludes that many of them have actually undermined American security. Overthrow is a cautionary tale that serves as an urgent warning as the United States seeks to define its role in the modern world.
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Editorial Reviews

Anatol Lieven
Kinzer has written a detailed, passionate and convincing book, several chapters of which have the pace and grip of a good thriller. It should be essential reading for any Americans who wish to understand both their country's historical record in international affairs, and why that record has provoked anger and distrust in much of the world. Most important, it helps explain why, outside of Eastern Europe, American pronouncements about spreading democracy and freedom, as repeatedly employed by the Bush administration, are met with widespread incredulity.
— The New York Times
Julia E. Sweig
I have a sad suspicion that, with Iraq's seemingly endless toll, Overthrow will likewise become required reading.
— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
The recent ouster of Saddam Hussein may have turned "regime change" into a contemporary buzzword, but it's been a tactic of American foreign policy for more than 110 years. Beginning with the ouster of Hawaii's monarchy in 1893, Kinzer runs through the foreign governments the U.S. has had a hand in toppling, some of which he has written about at length before (in All the Shah's Men, etc.). Recent invasions of countries such as Grenada and Panama may be more familiar to readers than earlier interventions in Iran and Nicaragua, but Kinzer, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, brings a rich narrative immediacy to all of his stories. Although some of his assertions overreach themselves-as when he proposes that better conduct by the American government in the Spanish-American War might have prevented the rise of Castro a half-century later-he makes a persuasive case that U.S. intervention destabilizes world politics and often leaves countries worse off than they were before. Kinzer's argument isn't new, but it's delivered in unusually moderate tones, which may earn him an audience larger than the usual crew of die-hard leftists. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
Over the last century, the United States has intervened in over a dozen countries to overthrow their governments -- more often than any other great power in modern history. In this fascinating history, Kinzer explores the reasons for such operations and what they accomplished. The pattern of regime-change operations has followed the arc of U.S. global engagement in the twentieth century. In the early cases -- Hawaii, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras -- U.S. presidents acted openly and in imperial fashion to protect corporate interests and spheres of influence; in the Cold War cases -- Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile -- more subtle techniques and clandestine actions prevailed. The most recent interventions -- in Afghanistan and Iraq -- reveal new and staggeringly more complicated circumstances and calculations. Across the cases, which are recounted in lively and colorful detail, Kinzer argues that the motives for regime change have ranged from the prosaic and the pecuniary to the principled and the strategic. But in each case, action was undertaken when foreign governments refused to protect U.S. interests as defined at the moment. What Kinzer does not clarify is why interventions occurred in some countries and not others. Still, he offers a useful portrait of the presidents who have influenced the exercise of U.S. power and the interesting judgment that interventions have often succeeded in their immediate goals but failed to advance U.S. interests in the long term.
Library Journal
New York Times foreign correspondent Kinzer has collected 14 cases in which the United States overthrew another government, starting with the 1893 annexation of Hawaii. By doing so, he creates an image of U.S. policymakers as arrogant, ignorant, and driven entirely by self-interest. His analysis of overthrow operations in Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Grenada, Iran, Vietnam, Chile, and Afghanistan suggests that the invasion of Iraq was not an isolated case but an extension of settled American policy. Kinzer considerably vitiates his thesis, however, by ignoring the two world wars entirely, even though the wartime aim of the Allies in Europe, for instance, was explicitly regime change. He overreaches in arguing that 9/11 stemmed directly from the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, an assertion he originally made in All the Shah's Men. The chapter on Iraq attacks the Bush administration, comparing its mistakes to those of presidents from William McKinley on. Although not a balanced portrayal, this book is recommended as an addition to collections on foreign affairs. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/05.]-Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Mossadegh, Diem, Arbenz, Allende, Liliuokalani, Kissinger: In this cheerless catalogue of villains and victims, New York Times correspondent Kinzer (All the Shah's Men, 2003, etc.) convincingly portrays U.S. foreign policy as a branch of organized crime. In 1901, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre ordered his men to turn the Philippines into "a howling wilderness," kill everyone over ten years of age and take no prisoners. Anticipating My Lai and Abu Ghraib by many decades, his troops responded by committing all manner of atrocities, including inventing a devious form of torture that led the Indianapolis News to opine that the U.S. had adopted "the methods of barbarism." Just a few years before, America had first stretched its imperial wings by seizing Hawaii from its rightful owners at the behest of a handful of sugar barons. Their spiritual heirs would call for the ouster of democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende, and Kissinger and Nixon would happily oblige, funding and arming a coup that, eerily enough, began on Sept. 11, 1973. Kinzer recounts these and several other exercises in regime change conducted more or less openly (save for those of the Nixon administration, sneaky in everything). The project is a timely one, given the ongoing exercises in Iraq and Afghanistan, which seem tailor-made for the moral of the story-that, with the exception of Reagan's Grenada invasion of 1983, those operations have, "in the end, weakened rather than strengthened American security," having had the cumulative effect of serving as a rallying point for anti-Americanism worldwide, increasing political divisions at home, amplifying the foreign entanglements that the FoundingFathers so feared and proving that "the United States was a hypocritical nation, as cynical as any other."A sobering and saddening book.
From the Publisher
"Citizens concerned about foreign affairs must read this book. Stephen Kinzer's crisp and thoughtful Overthrow undermines the myth of national innocence. Quite the contrary: history shows the United States as an interventionist busybody directed at regime change. We deposed fourteen foreign governments in hardly more than a century, some for good reasons, more for bad reasons, with most dubious long-term consequences."

—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

"Stephen Kinzer has a grim message for those critics of the Iraqi war who believe George W. Bush to be America's most misguided, uninformed, and reckless president. Bush has had plenty of company in the past century—presidents who believe that America, as Kinzer tells us, has the right to wage war wherever it deems war necessary."

—Seymour M. Hersh

"Stephen Kinzer's book is a jewel. After reading Overthrow, no American — not even President Bush — should any longer wonder 'why they hate us.' Overthrow is a narrative of all the times we've overthrown a foreign government in order to put in power puppets that are obedient to us. It is a tale of imperialism American-style, usually in the service of corporate interests, and as Kinzer points out, 'No nation in modern history has done this so often, in so many places so far from its own shores.' "

—Chalmers Johnson

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780805082401
  • Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 2/6/2007
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 416
  • Sales rank: 103,976
  • Product dimensions: 5.44 (w) x 8.29 (h) x 0.74 (d)

Meet the Author


Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning New York Times correspondent who has reported from more than fifty countries on five continents. During the 1980s he covered revolution and social upheaval in Central America. In 1990 he was named chief of the Times bureau in Berlin and spent the next six years covering the emergence of post-Communist Europe. Later, Kinzer became the first Times bureau chief in Istanbul. He is coauthor of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala and the author of Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua; Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds; and Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Michael Prichard has played several thousand characters during his career. While he has been seen performing over one hundred of them in theater and film, Michael is primarily heard, having recorded well over five hundred full-length books. During his career as a one-man repertory company, he has recorded many series with running characters-including the complete Travis McGee adventures by John D. MacDonald and the complete Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout-as well as series by such masters as Mark Twain, John Cheever, and John Updike. His numerous awards and accolades include an Audie Award for Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman and several AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for At All Costs by Sam Moses and In Nixon's Web by L. Patrick Gray III. Named a Top Ten Golden Voice by SmartMoney magazine, he holds an M.F.A. in theater from the University of Southern California. Michael appears regularly on the professional stage, including as a member of Ray Bradbury's Pandemonium Theatre Company, performing such great roles as Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451, which became the second-longest-running production in the Los Angeles area. Bradbury himself dubbed Michael "the finest Beatty in history."
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Read an Excerpt

Overthrow

America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
By Kinzer, Stephen

Times Books

Copyright © 2006 Kinzer, Stephen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0805078614
American leaders might be forgiven for intervening in countries about which they were so ignorant. What is harder to justify is their refusal to listen to their own intelligence agents. Chiefs of the CIA stations in Tehran, Guatemala City, Saigon, and Santiago explicitly warned against staging these coups. Officials in Washington paid no heed. They rejected or ignored all intelligence reports that contradicted what they instinctively believed.
Americans who think about and make foreign policy grasp the nature of alliances, big-power rivalries, and wars of conquest. The passionate desire of people in poor countries to assert control over their natural resources, which pushed them into conflict with the United States during the Cold War, lay completely outside the experience of most American leaders. Henry Kissinger spoke for them, eloquently as always, after Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdes accused him of knowing nothing about the Southern Hemisphere.
"No, and I don't care," Kissinger replied. "Nothing important can come from the south. History has never been produced in the south. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens inthe south is of no importance."
This attitude made it easy for American statesmen to misunderstand why nationalist movements arose in the developing world.



Continues...
Excerpted from Overthrow by Kinzer, Stephen Copyright © 2006 by Kinzer, Stephen. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Customer Reviews

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 3, 2006

    Useful study of the effects of foreign interventions

    This excellent book, by Stephen Kinzer, an experienced American foreign correspondent, surveys the US state¿s record of forcible interventions abroad to change governments. It started when in 1893 it overthrew Hawaii¿s queen. In 1898 it took Cuba from Spain, denying Cuba its independence. From 1899 to 1902, it fought a vicious colonial war in the Philippines in which 4,374 US troops, 16,000 guerrillas and 20,000 civilians were killed. In 1909 it overthrew Nicaragua¿s government and in 1911 Honduras¿. After the Second World War, the US state carried out military coups across the world, aided by British governments, Labour and Conservative. The Attlee government (`old Labour¿, remember) opposed Vietnam¿s national liberation movement and helped the French to reimpose their colonial rule. The US state, supported by the Churchill government, backed their man Diem¿s refusal to hold the promised elections. In Iran, where Anglo-Iranian made more profit in 1950 alone than it had allowed Iran in royalties since 1900, an elected government sought to control and develop Iran¿s resources for the benefit of its people. Incensed at this presumption, the US and British states organised a coup in 1953. The US state overthrew Guatemala¿s elected government in 1954, installing a junta which killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans in the next thirty years. Similarly, in response to the Chilean people¿s election of Salvador Allende in 1970, the US state acted as its Ambassador there threatened, ¿We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chilean people to utmost deprivation and poverty.¿ Thatcher¿s friend General Pinochet seized power in a bloody coup, butchering 25,000 people and torturing 27,255. US presidents ordered all these coups they were not `rogue operations¿ carried out by the CIA on its own initiative. All replaced incipient democracy with brutal dictatorships. All increased repression and reduced freedom. In the 1980s, the US state sent billions of dollars to aid the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, letting Pakistan¿s intelligence service decide who got the money ¿ the most anti-Western, anti-secular, anti-nationalist fundamentalists. Then the US state, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden together put the Taliban in power. After 9/11, Bush attacked Iraq (which had never attacked or even threatened Americans) rather than focus on stopping Al Qaeda. Bush senior¿s National Security adviser, General Brent Scowcroft, warned that attacking Iraq would be a priceless gift to Islamic terrorists - Blair says this is enemy propaganda. These wars against Iraq and Afghanistan are traditional colonial wars for power and resources, not a rerun of the Second World War, as Blair and Bush would have us believe. The US state opposes all nationalisms and so opposes all other nations. Destroying other nations¿ sovereignty is bad for everyone. As Kinzer concludes, ¿In almost every case, overthrowing the government of a foreign country has, in the end, led both that country and the United States to grief ¿ far more pain than liberation.¿

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted January 11, 2012

    Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer

    The Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer is an amazing book that enlightened me to the dark side of America. I found it amazing that the American Public has been so blind, and so tricked by our own government. "In the name of Freedom, freedom is destroyed" Bickel. One of my favorite quotes that match this book. This book closely examines the actions the American government and business executive have taken to undermine governments for beneficial reason. I thought the book was written to show that actions speak louder than words because the American government have been lying to the public ever since the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. The decisions that the American government have taken are very clever. An example is Operation Iraq Freedom because the operation in Iraq and Iran was mainly for oil. We disguised our involvement into a foreign country by declaring to free the people in Iraq from the Taliban. We have involved ourselves in undermining and "invading" countries since 1893. We have sercetly overthrown or changed over twenty countries. I believe that the actions that America, a power hunger nation, is taking will slowly lead to its decline because most of the world hates America, and if America keeps involving itself in foreign matters, it might lead to war.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 12, 2010

    Thought Provoking!

    This book is a perfect conversation starter because it is very relevant to today's world and what the U.S. has had a hand in creating. I had to read this for a class but I thoroughly enjoyed it because it was well-researched, well-written and overall an enthralling read.

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