A history of regime change

I heard a great interview on the NPR show Fresh Air with Stephen Kinzer, author of the book Overthrow : America's Century Of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq. Kinzer notes that the US policy of regime change to advance the economic interests of American corporations did not begin with the recent aggression against Iraq.

It started back in the early 1893, when a US-backed coup overthrow the monarchy of the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii. The queen was replaced by a regime backed by US sugar interests who wanted Hawaii integrated into the United States so as to avoid having to face American tariffs on their exports. Hawaii was annexed in 1898.

1898 was the same year as the conflict considered by most to America's first true imperial excursion: the Spanish-American War. Though argue that such tendencies date further back to the various conflicts with Mexico and even as far back as the Barbary Wars of the late 1790s. (Thus the beginning of the Marine hymn, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.")

Knizer notes that in the last 110 years, the US has used force to impose 14 separate 'regime changes' in various parts of the world. Almost all for primarily economic reasons, even if ideological and pseudo-moral pretexts were offered as a smokescreen. And most of them turned out badly, both for the country in question and for America's prestige and security.

Not surprisingly, he points out that these interventions are remembered much more vividly in the affected countries than in this country. (Do you think 5 percent of Americans could tell you who Mossadegh was?) This lack of institutional memory is why different US administrations continue to make the same errors repeatedly even though previous regime changes have a miserable history.

He also brings up a point I've mentioned before. So often, especially during the Cold War, paranoid American officials were consistently unable to (or refused to) distinguish between nationalism and communism.

The US government has consistently been unable to countenance democratic governments who act in their countries' interests instead of ours. (The whole definition of 'national interests' is another topic). Thus, the French are 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' and now the Iraqis have become 'ingrates.'

One of the most infamous examples involved the most mythologized of African fathers of independence: Congo's Patrice Lumumba. He opposed foreign domination, be it by the Belgians, Americans, French or Soviets. But because he wouldn't kowtow to American or western wishes, he was labelled a communist. The CIA engineered a coup to overthrow him and he was murdered under mysterious circumstances.

There was one little problem: Lumumba was not a communist. It's not just me or his mythologizers who say this. In her excellent book In The Footsteps Of Mr Kurtz, journalist Michela Wrong interviewed the CIA station chief in the Congolese capital (then called Leopoldville). Even the CIA station chief admitted that Lumumba was not a communist. His nationalist rhetoric had just unleashed forces beyond his control.

Then there was the case of another African independence leader: Ghana's Kwame N'Krumah. N'Krumah, too, was a nationalist not a communist. He originally appealed to the US and Britain for help in developing his poor country. They hesitated and hemmed and hawwed. So, he asked the Soviet Union and they eagerly filled the void. Thus, N'Krumah quickly became labelled a 'communist.' N'Krumah was British educated and of a temperment predisposed to staying within the western sphere of influence. But as a nationalist, he wanted to improve his country. The US and Britain wouldn't help him do that; the Soviets did. The choice was simple for him. He was overthrown in a 1966 coup which many believe had the CIA's fingerprints on (in fairness, by then, he'd become an isolated cult-of-personality dictator ruling by arbitrary decree).

Some ostriches delude themselves into believing that anti-Americanism must rise out of nothing and that hostility toward the US government never has any basis in historical or current fact. Any grievances against US foreign policy are always illegitimate and must have been formulated by agitators and troublemakers. In some cases, that's true; in most cases, it's not. This should be a concern to all Americans because it is not poverty, but resentment that fuels terrorism.

It's thus no coindence that whenever the US meddles in a region of the world, anti-Americanism erupts. Such sentiment has always been hot in Latin America since that's where the US has meddled most. It was hottest in the 1970s and 80s as US interference has reached its zenith. The sentiment has exploded in the Middle East in the last few years, coinciding with the aggression against Iraq. By contrast, West Africa has been largely immune from US chest-beating and America is generally well-regarded there.

Whether the CIA was actually involved and to what degree in the overthrows of Lumumba and N'Krumah is a matter of much historical debate. That CIA complicity in these two coups is almost universally accepted amongst Africans is a testament to the corrosive impact of a belligerent foreign policy on America's international prestige. Even when the US government may not be guilty of meddling and interference, it is widely assumed that it is.