Baddest Bad Boy on the Block

Here's a revew I recently posted to Amazon for Stephen Kinzer's book OVERTHROW: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq."

It's a terrific book and once that I highly recommend. Here's my review:

The Terrible Gift of American Freedom, July 30, 2006

Particularly timely give the current catastrophe in Lebanon, indeed throughout the Middle East, Stephen Kinzer in "OVERTHROW: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq," catalogs with the journalist's eye for the telling detail and the historian's attention to larger patterns of change and continuity, the mostly money-grubbing, plutocratically-driven regime changes undertaken by the U.S. government over the past 100 years.

To read OVERTHROW is to come to understand how very little American citizens have to do with their government's foreign policy decisions. To read this eye-opening book is to see how the U.S. goverment, when it does need to fabricate a reason for regime change crafts a cynical appeal always to Americans' belief in the exceptional goodness of themselves and their system. In reality, American citizen's are enlisted in these undertakings in only two ways: as cannon-fodder or cheerleader.

In fact, in almost all 14 cases of "regime change" that Kinzer covers, the U.S. government's actions are nearly always driven by corporate interests: bananas in Honduras and Guatemala, sugar cane in Hawaii, copper and telecommunications in Chile, oil in Iran and Iraq.

For instance, the perfect scenario for regime change in the 50s was to conjure up the specter of world Communism as the reason for deposing foreign governments who had the nerve to consider policies that interfered with American corporate interests such as the nationalization of Iran's oil resources. The perfect rationale now, of course, is global terrorism, a movement the U.S. helped create as the blowback from invasions and assassinations earlier in this century, and for which it continues to recruit with its ham-handed, simple-minded policies.

Highly recommended both for its brisk pace and its broad and balanced view of the U.S.'s mostly short-sighted and most disastrous career of regime change. Good companion reads are "HOUSE OF WAR: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power" by James Carroll, and "EMPIRE'S WORKSHOP: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism" by Greg Grandin.