War & Commerce

[John Carvill]

>From the September issue of BoldType (The Empire issue):

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

 
Published: April 2006   
Pages: 400   
Publisher: Times Books   


   
Synopsis

The United States has forced "regime change" 14 times in its history,
beginning with Hawaii and most recently in Iraq. This New York Times
reporter's chronicle of US foreign policy leaves the reader enraged,
engaged, and impassioned.


Review

That we live in an unexceptional epoch is both a disheartening and
reassuring revelation. Things are bad, but they've been bad before. The
invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn't an unprecedented power grab, an
anomalous American stab at an empire; American imperialism, as Stephen
Kinzer shows in Overthrow, has a history as old as the US itself.

Kinzer, a former New York Times bureau chief in Germany, Turkey, and
Nicaragua, traces America's history of regime change from Hawaii to
Iraq. All told, America has played a decisive role in deposing another
world leader 14 times. The countries on the list will be recognizable to
anyone with even a passing interest in discord, poverty, oppression, or
war: Nicaragua, Iran, Vietnam, Honduras, the Philippines, Grenada, Cuba.

What is most galling, perhaps, is the role corporations have played in
determining the future of nations and the misery of their citizens. As
Kinzer writes: "The United States rose to great power at the same time
multinational corporations were emerging as a decisive force in world
affairs." So it was that, in 1893, Hawaii's Queen Lili'uokalani was
overthrown to sweeten the lot of Castle and Cooke, an American sugar
producer; Cuba's infant independence replaced with a regime pledging
fealty to American investors; the great hope of Nicaragua, the
noble-minded Zelaya, routed in favor of the Panama Canal; and the
democratic government of Honduras almost single-handedly overthrown by
Sam Zemurray, a New Orleans banana seller.

Sam "the Banana Man" is just one in a colorful cast of ruthless men,
noble leaders, thugs, demagogues, and mercenaries who populate the book.
And as infuriating as the history is, Overthrow makes for a good read:
empires are built on spectacle as much as on blood, on the image of
American gunboats looming off the coast of Cuba or on a president's
triumphant stroll down the deck of a military carrier.






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