Stephen Kinzer on the consequences of Operation Ajax

The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East.  Operation Ajax [CIA code for the August 1953 coup] taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies.  That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship. 

~ Stephen Kinzer

1953 Iranian coup

 

Stephen Kinzer on John Foster Dulles

If ever a man was born to international privilege, it was John Foster Dulles.  His family traced its ancestry to Charlemagne.  As a boy he thrived under the special encouragement of his grandfather and namesake, the lawyer-diplomat John Watson Foster, who had been a treaty negotiator, minister to Russia and Spain, and secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison...

Dulles was hired as a clerk at the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, with a monthly salary of $50.  Unlike other clerks, he was able to live well, since his grandfather allowed him to draw on the $20,000 that had been set aside as the young man's inheritance.  He needed that help only for a short time.  Propelled by his sharp legal mind and network of connections, Dulles rose through the firm more quickly than anyone ever had.  By 1927, sixteen years after being hired, he was its sole managing partner and one of the highest-paid lawyers in the world...

By the time he reached his mid-thirties, Dulles was on easy terms with some of the world's richest and most powerful men... 

The list of Dulles's clients at Sullivan & Cromwell is nothing less than a guide to the biggest multinational corporations of early-twentieth century America...  Dulles arranged loans to governments across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East; sued the Soviet Union on behalf of American insurance companies; organized a worldwide takeover campaign for the American Bank Note Company, which had printed the fateful Nicaraguan stamp showing a volcano in fictitious eruption; and negotiated concessions in Mexico and Panama for the American & Foreign Power Company.  His clients built ports in Brazil, dug mines in Peru, and drilled for oil in Columbia...

Dulles was especially interested in Germany, which he visited regularly during the 1920s and 1930s.  According to the most exhaustive book about Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm "thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime," and Dulles spent much of 1934 "publicly supporting Hitler," leaving his partners "shocked that he could so easily disregard law and international treaties to justify Nazi repression."  When asked during this period how he dealt with German clients who were Jewish, he replied that he simply decided "to keep away from them."  Finally, facing a revolt by his partners, he agreed in 1935 to close the firm's Berlin office, later backdating the decision to a year earlier.

Soon after World War II ended, Dulles found in Communism the evil he had been so slow to find in Nazism.  His epiphany came when he read Stalin's Problems of Leninism, which he found gripping.  Several times he compared it to Hitler's Mein Kampf as a blueprint for world domination...

Law and politics were not Dulles's only passions.  Throughout his life, he was also moved by deep Christian faith.  It was an integral part of his character, and from it grew the intensity of his anti-Communist zeal.  He cannot be understood apart from it...

Dulles believed the heritage of the United States, which he described as "in its essentials a religious heritage," placed Americans under a special obligation.  He felt what he called "a deep sense of mission," a conviction that "those who found a good way of life had a duty to help others to find the same way."  Like his father, he was a born preacher; like his grandfather, a missionary.  When the 1950s dawned, he was looking for a way to channel his "Christian insight and Christian inspiration" into the fight against "the evil methods and designs of Soviet Communism."

The best way to do that, Dulles quite reasonably concluded, was to become secretary of state.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow, pp. 112-115

Stephen Kinzer on the racist roots of American imperialism

The first wave of American "regime change" operations, which lasted from 1893 to 1911, was propelled largely by the search for resources, markets, and commercial opportunities.  Not all of the early imperialists, however, were the tools of big business.  Roosevelt, Lodge, and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan were moved by what they considered to be the transcendent imperatives of history.  Expanding, they believed, was simply what great nations did.  In their minds, promoting commerce and defending national security fused into what one historian has called "an aggressive national egoism and a romantic attachment to national power."  They considered themselves nothing less than instruments of destiny and Providence.

The missionary instinct was already deeply ingrained in the American psyche.  From the time John Winthrop proclaimed his dream of building a "city upon the hill" to which the world would look for inspiration, Americans have considered themselves a special people.  At the end of the nineteenth century, many came to believe they had a duty to civilize needy savages and rescue exploited masses from oppression.  Rudyard Kipling encouraged their missionary spirit with a famous poem published in McClure's Magazine as the debate over annexing the Philippines began.

Take up the White Man's burden

Send forth the best ye breed,

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild,

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child

Americans have a profoundly compassionate side.  Many not only appreciate the freedom and prosperity with which they have been blessed but fervently wish to share their good fortune with others.  Time and again, they have proved willing to support foreign interventions that are presented as missions to rescue less fortunate people.

When President McKinley said he was going to war in Cuba to stop "oppression at our very doors," Americans cheered.  They did so again a decade later, when the Taft administration declared that it was deposing the government of Nicaragua in order to impose "republican institutions" and promote "real patriotism."  Since then, every time the United States has set out to overthrow a foreign government, its leaders have insisted that they are acting not to expand American power but to help people who are suffering.

This paternalism was often mixed with racism.  Many Americans considered Latin Americans and Pacific islanders to be "colored" natives in need of guidance from whites.  In a nation whose black population was systematically repressed, and where racial prejudice was widespread, this view helped many people accept the need for the United States to dominate foreign countries.

Speeches justifying American expansionism on the grounds of the white race's presumed superiority were staples of political discourse in the 1890s.  Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana described expansion as part of a natural process, "the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man."  Representative Charles Cochrane of Mississippi spoke of "the onward march of the indomitable race that founded this Republic" and predicted "the conquest of the world by the Aryan races."  When he finished his speech, the House burst into applause.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, pp. 83-84

Stephen Kinzer on the sinking of the Maine and pro-war propaganda

Many Americans already felt a passionate hatred for Spanish colonialism and a romantic attachment to the idea of "Cuba Libre."  Their emotions had been fired by a series of wildly sensational newspaper reports that together consitute one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press.  William Randolph Hearst, the owner of the New York Journal and a string of other newspapers across the country, had been attracting readers for months with vivid denunciations of Spanish colonialists...

[...]

The moment Hearst heard about the sinking of the Maine, he recognized it as a great opportunity.  For weeks after the explosion, he filled page after page with mendacious "scoops," fabricated interviews with unnamed government officials, and declarations that the battleship had been "destroyed by treachery" and "split in two by an enemy's secret infernal machine."  The Journal's daily circulation doubled in four weeks.  Other newspapers joined the frenzy, and their campaign brought Americans to near-hysteria.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, pp. 36-37

(Editor's note: The role of yellow journalism in whipping Americans into a pro-war frenzy may be overstated.)

Stephen Kinzer on the rise of Fidel Castro

Castro was a pure product of American policy toward Cuba.  If the United States had not crushed Cuba's drive to independence in the early twentieth century, if it had not supported a series of repressive dictators there, and if it had not stood by while the 1952 election was canceled, a figure like Castro would almost certainly not have emerged.  His regime is the quintessential result of a "regime change" operation gone wrong, one that comes back to haunt the country that sponsored it.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, p. 91

Stephen Kinzer on the U.S. shift to world power in 1898

Historic shifts in world politics often happen slowly and are hardly even noticeable until years later.  That was not the case with the emergence of the United States as a world power.  It happened quite suddenly in the spring and summer of 1898.

Until then, most Americans had seemed satisfied with a nation whose reach extended only across their own continent...

In 1898 the United States definitively embraced what Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called "the large policy."  Historians have given it various names: expansionism, imperialism, neocolonialism.  Whatever it is called, it represents the will of Americans to extend their global reach.

[...]

Henry Cabot Lodge was among several members of Congress who urged the annexation of Canada.  [Teddy] Roosevelt mused about attacking Spain, and picked out Cádiz and Barcelona as possible targets.  Portuguese leaders feared that American troops might seize the Azores.

[...]

Outsiders watched the emergence of this new America with a combination of awe and fear.  Among the most astonished were European newspaper correspondents who were posted in the United States during 1898.  One wrote in the London Times that he had witnessed nothing less than "a break in the history of the world."  Another, in the Manchester Guardian, reported that nearly every American had come to embrace the expansionist idea, while the few critics "are simply laughed at for their pains."

Some of these journalists were unsettled by what they saw...  Le Temps said the United States, formerly "as democratic as any society can be," had become "a state already closer to the other states of the old world, that arms itself like them and aggrandizes itself like them."  The Frankfurter Zeitung warned Americans against "the disastrous consequences of their exuberance" but realized that they would not listen.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (2006), pp. 80-81