May 13, 2006
"For
how can people, when they understand their system, fail to see in it
the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?"(1)
Former
New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer’s latest book, "Overthrow:
America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" makes the case
that regime change has been a regular feature of US foreign policy for
decades, and is not a recent innovation cooked up one afternoon by
neo-cons over barbecued ribs and Budweiser at the Bush ranch.
"Regime
change," Kinzer’s book tells us, "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."
While this is a welcome debunking of the
myth that regime change comes from a Bush-cabal-inspired hijacking of a
mythical noble US foreign policy, Kinzer founders in his analysis of
why US governments regularly seek to depose foreign regimes, and in the
process, manages to reinforce liberal myths about the nature of US
society and the possibilities of change within it.
There’s
nothing particularly shocking about Kinzer’s argument. Examine US
history with an eye to doing more than simply singing the usual
hosannas to American ingenuity, selflessness and sacrifice, and read
the daily newspapers carefully, and you can’t help but trip over US
regime change policy.
What was the Democrat-backed war on
Yugoslavia, but an instance of regime-change? Granted, regime change in
Serbia was widely regarded in NATO countries as being motivated by
humanitarian concerns, but it did succeed in toppling a government that
stood in the way of US, British and German economic goals. Take a look
at who owns the place now, and who owned it before NATO bombs,
sanctions and foreign intervention in elections drove Milosevic out.
(Strangely, this seems to have escaped Kinzer’s notice, whose book has
no reference to Yugoslavia, Serbia or Milosevic.)
Belarus offers
another example, a current one, though not as high profile as regime
change efforts directed at the "axis of evil" countries.
Belarus
has a largely state-owned economy that offers little room to Western
corporations to rake in large profits. US, British and EU efforts to
replace a president who hangs onto a Soviet-era economy with their own
candidate -- he promises to hold a fire sale of state-owned assets just
as soon as the project is complete -- doesn’t look so much like regime
change as much as backing the country’s "democratic" opposition.
Still, regime change it is.
The
president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, is denounced as a dictator, claims are
made that he stole the last election, and the seeds of a color
revolution are carefully nurtured. Lukashenko’s efforts to nip
Washington’s regime change program in the bud are denounced as further
evidence of his authoritarianism, and further justification of the
regime change policy.
Is Lukashenko widely reviled at home, and
does he hang onto power by repression and electoral fraud, as the
agents of regime change charge?
On the contrary, there’s good
reason to believe Lukashenko is widely liked, and that his lopsided
electoral victories are legitimate.
Lukashenko’s record in
government would secure sterling approval ratings for most politicians.
He has "presided over a continual increase in real wages for several
years, culminating in a 24 percent rise over the past 12 months." (2)
"He has also cut (Belarus’s value added tax), brought down inflation,
halved the number of people in poverty in the past seven years," and
created "the fairest distribution of income of any country in the
region." (3)
In September of last year, the Los Angeles Times
reported "even [Lukashenko’s] fiercest opponents don’t question the
accuracy of independent polls that rate him the most popular politician
in this country." (4)
As to the charge he committed electoral
grand theft, consider this: Just weeks before the election, the New
York Times, whose sympathies to Lukashenko are about as warm as an anal
retentive’s to an enema, reported that "the results of a poll, paid for
by the [US Congress-funded International Republican Institute]…showed
the ratings of (the US-backed opposition leader) Milinkevich and other
opposition leaders in the single digits." (5)
And an InterMedia
poll released in the lead up to the election (6), as well as a
Gallup/Baltic Surveys poll, predicted an overwhelming Lukashenko win.
(7)
If you want a vote-stealing dictator, you’re going to have
look elsewhere, say the invitation list of world leaders showing up for
audiences with George Bush and his foreign policy Czar, Condoleeza Rice.
Not
long after US officials issued their final apologies to the reporters
they had showered with saliva by spitting out the D-word whenever the
offending Belarusian’s name was brought up in connection with the
allegedly stolen election, three honest to goodness, dyed in the wool,
vote stealers were showered, not with spit, but with praise, by the
same officials who’d have you believe Lukashenko is the second coming
of Hitler.
First, Condoleeza Rice met with Equatorial Guinea’s president Teodoro Obiang Nguema, and called him "a good friend." (8)
Next, George Bush issued an invitation to Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev for a cozy chat at the White House.
And
finally, Dick Cheney showed up in Kazakhstan to meet with the country’s
president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, expressing his admiration for "the
political developments" that have taken place in Kazakhstan "over the
past 15 years." (9)
What’s wrong with these guys?
They are truly what Lukashenko is said to be, but isn’t.
Ngeuma
"runs a regime regularly condemned by the State Department for human
rights violations, including torture, beatings, abuse and deaths of
prisoners and suspects." (10)
According to the Coors family
founded Heritage Foundation, he "was re-elected in 2002 with 97 percent
of the vote amid charges of massive voter fraud and intimidation." (11)
Aliyev "has never held a clear election and has used riot police to crush anti-government demonstrations." (12)
And
Nazarbayev "won a third six-year term in December, 2005, with 91
percent of the vote in an election that international observers said
was flawed." (13) So, why the bon mot for these guys and brickbats for Lukashenko?
Two
reasons: (1) Oil. (2) Nguema, Aliyev and Nazarbayev are US bendovers,
which is to say, they give US corporations what they want.
The
US is Equatorial Guinea’s top trading partner. (Russia, by comparison,
is Belarus’ – a no-no if you plan not to run afoul of Washington, for
US foreign policy would prefer that the US, not Russia, occupy that
role.) Oil and gas exports account for nearly 90 percent of the
country’s GDP. This means US transnationals export the country’s oil
and gas at a profit, and US transnationals sell goods into Equatorial
Guinea at a profit. It’s good for US transnationals – not so good for
Equatorial Guinea, unless you think a raw materials export economy
dominated by foreign firms is a good thing. If so, you’ve blundered
into the wrong blog.
Azerbaijan is a principal player in a
pipeline route to be used by US transnationals to pump oil and gas from
the Caspian to Europe, in competition with Russian suppliers.
And
Kazakhstan produces 1.2 million barrels of oil a day and is expected to
pump three million per day by 2015. Exxon Mobil and ChevronTexaco are
developing fields in the country.
This, and other instances of
US hypocrisy, provoked Russian president Vladimir Putin to ask, "Where
is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it
comes to the need to pursue their own interests? Here, it seems,
everything is allowed, there are no restrictions whatsoever." (14)
The
New York Times points out that the US is "cozying up to states like
Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan that have spotty human rights records and
limited democracy" to "weaken Russia’s control over oil and natural gas
while keeping China from stepping into the breach." (15)
This is
said to be an "echo of the 19th-century Great Game scramble for
colonial possessions in Central Asia." (16) It would be more accurate
to say it’s a scramble for oil profits. How does this relate to Kinzer’s book?
Infringe upon the profit-making activities of US corporations and you get a good dose of regime change.
But
there’s an important flip-side Kinzer doesn’t address. Facilitate the
profit-making of US corporations, and you can be just as authoritarian,
anti-democratic, and dictatorial as you like. Indeed, repression and
dictatorship may be necessary to keep indigenous forces in line that
bristle at being exploited for the benefit of a tiny class of bankers,
hereditary capitalist families, and high-level executives back in the
US.
Kinzer is clear on the link between US corporate interests and Washington’s regime change policies. Sort of.
The
US sets out to overthrow foreign governments when "they bother an
American company or harass an American company," he says. (17)
Makes
sense, if you consider who’s running foreign policy. It’s not Bill, the
mailroom guy, or your Aunt Flo. It’s not even that old political
science professor you had in college who taught international
relations. Nor is it Americans collectively, expressing their
preferences at the polls or through their elected representatives.
Who
makes foreign policy is the corporate community, whose members and
operatives dominate the Presidency, the State Department, and the
Pentagon. Everyone else is pretty much irrelevant, like fans at a
hockey game. If they cheer the home team, so much the better; if not,
it doesn’t change the way the game is played.
The two Bush
presidents, scions of old money, are graduates on Andover and Yale,
tony, upper class schools whose graduates almost invariably go into
finance, business and corporate law. Both owned oil companies, and Bush
Jr., the Texas Rangers. (18)
Foreign policy supremo Condoleezza
Rice was a director of Chevron and TransAmerica, (and has an oil tanker
named after her). Her predecessor at the State Department, Colin
Powell, was a director of AOL and GulfStream Aerospace (a company that
just might have an interest in US military interventions abroad.)
Powell
was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization
funded by corporations and wealthy families, which brings together
small groups of corporate executives, government and military officials
and scholars to write hundreds of papers for, (that is, to recommend
policies to) the State Department. Twenty percent of the Council’s
members are officers or directors of major corporations.
Vice-President
Cheney, who drew up Washington’s secret energy policy and expressed his
admiration for the post-Soviet political developments in petroleum rich
Kazakhstan, spent eight years as president of oil drilling services
firm Halliburton, and was a director of Proctor and Gamble, EDS, and
Union Pacific. He was also a director of the Council on Foreign
Relations.
Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of
pharmaceutical giant G.D. Searle (where I spent summers shoveling
Metamucil into bottles) and before that of General Instruments.
Rumsfeld sat on the boards of Kellog, Sears, The Tribune Publishing
Company, and GulfStream Aerospace.
If you think this is just a Republican thing, think again.
Warren
Christopher, Clinton’s first Secretary of State, was a corporate
lawyer, a director of Lockheed Martin (another company with an interest
in expanded military alliances and interventions), Southern California
Edison and First Interstate Bankcorp, and vice-chair of the Council on
Foreign Relations.
Clinton’s two CIA directors were also
well-connected. James Woolsey, a corporate lawyer, was a director of
defense contractor Marietta, and Jack Kelly was a director of CitiCorp,
Perkins-Elmer and CMS Energy.
And many of the principal members
of Clinton’s administration were drawn from the corporate community’s
Council on Foreign Relations. Four council members held top positions
in the State Department.
One study that looked at all the US
cabinet and diplomatic appointees from the 30’s to 80’s found that 60
percent sat on the boards of America’s largest corporations.
US
presidents are no less well-connected. Most come from wealthy families
or got rich as corporate lawyers representing the interests of their
corporate clients before they became president.
The
Roosevelts, Taft, Kennedy and the Bush’s were from Social Register
families. Hoover, Carter, Reagan and Johnson were millionaires before
becoming president. Nixon was a corporate lawyer who raked in huge
earnings representing corporate clients.
It should come as no
surprise then that US policy inclines toward furthering the interests
of the US corporate community and that US foreign policy inclines
toward enlarging the interests of US corporate interests overseas.
Except that’s not entirely Kinzer’s view.
While
he acknowledges that limitations on a US corporation’s profit-making
interests are usually the spark that sets off the fire of regime
change, he argues that is not the protection of profits that is the
driving force.
It’s stupidity.
The problem, as Kinzer
explains it, is that US officials make the mistake of assuming "that
any regime that would bother an American company or harass an American
company must be anti-American, repressive, dictatorial, and probably a
tool of some foreign power or interests that wants to undermine the
United States." (19)
So what matters is not restrictions on the
actual or potential profits of US corporations, but the political
character of regimes that limit US corporate interests. These regimes
must be repressive, dictatorial and anti-American – at least that’s the
inference Kinzer believes US officials have been making, as a knee jerk
reaction, for the past hundred years.
In other words, US foreign
policy prominently features regime change because, in Kinzer’s view, US
foreign policy officials are dumb asses.
Indeed, an important
part of Kinzer’s argument is that regimes that bother or harass
American companies are not repressive, dictatorial and anti-American,
but become so as a result of US regime change programs put together by
dumb assess at the State Department.
Had these regimes been
left alone to develop their countries’ economies in peace,
nationalizing the assets of US corporations and pursuing trade and
investment policies that favor indigenous development at the expense of
US corporate interests, they would, he argues, have become developed
capitalist democracies, just like us, not nasty, brutish regimes like
Cuba and Iran, which, Kinzer says, Washington has legitimate beefs with
(like what?)
Here’s Kinzer’s argument in point form:
•
Countries like Iran and Cuba, the objects of botched or overturned US
attempts at regime change, are repressive, dictatorial and
anti-American.
• The political character of these regimes is a
consequence of US regime change efforts, and is only a cause insofar as
US foreign policy officials have regularly blundered in misinterpreting
economic nationalism as a threat to the United States and its political
values.
• Regime change, then, is well-meaning (US foreign
policy officials are motivated by their aversion to repression and
dictatorship) but mistaken (regimes or movements which seek to abridge
or terminate US corporate interests in their country, are not
necessarily repressive, dictatorial and anti-American.)
• US
foreign policy should allow other countries to pursue their own
economic development in their own way, even if this means US corporate
interests are threatened, abridged or undermined. There are two huge problems with this argument.
If
US foreign policy officials are truly motivated by their aversion to
repression and dictatorship, we might expect that the regimes the US
has installed in place of those they’ve overthrown would have the
opposite character: not repressive and not dictatorial.
But
Kinzer need only look at the overthrow of the nationalizing Mossadegh
in Iran, an event he’s documented in a previous book (All the Shah’s
Men: An Amercian Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror), and the
brutally repressive and dictatorial Shah who Washington installed in
his place, to see this isn’t so. The suppression by invading US
forces of the People’s Committees in Korea at the close of the Second
World War, and their eventual replacement by the US-selected dictator
Syngman Rhee, is in the same vein.
Indeed, US foreign policy is
littered with a seemingly endless string of repressive and dictatorial
regimes it has backed, from Batista in Cuba to Suharto in Indonesia to
Pinochet in Chile and even to the poorly known Nguema, Aliyev and
Nazarbayev today. All have been distinguished by the alacrity with
which they’ve accommodated the interests of the US corporate community.
If US foreign policy officials were truly motivated by a hatred
of dictatorship and repression, why do they back so many repressive
dictatorships? And why is it that the regimes that are regularly
overthrown happen to be those that bother and harass US corporate
interests, while those that are installed in their place welcome and
look after US corporate interests?
Kinzer overlooks the class
nature of US society, the fact that policy is dominated by the
corporate community, and the reality that the corporate community is
driven by profits (and since, if policy is dominated by the corporate
community, and the corporate community is driven by profit-making,
policy must be driven by profit-making, too.)
The harassment
of the profits of US corporations by foreign regimes isn’t a miscue
that leads US foreign policy makers to make erroneous assumptions about
the political character of regimes – it’s a direct threat to the
achievement of the very goals to which US foreign policy is yoked.
US
corporations scour the globe for profit-making opportunities. They need
the apparatus of the US state -- the executive branch, the State
Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community – to open
doors abroad, to keep them open, and to protect their investments.
The
corporate community gets its way in Washington more often than not for
two reasons: First, it’s richly represented in the foreign policy
making apparatus of the state. And second, while failure to keep doors
open overseas might not necessarily lead to all sorts of economic
troubles at home, in the form of rising unemployment and growing
poverty and leaner profits, it certainly makes these dangers all the
more likely, and governments that elect to live within the limits of
capitalism, are constrained to pursue policies to avoid these dangers.
These policies favor the creation of a pro-business, pro-investment
climate, both at home and abroad.
In other words, if you’re
going to accept the vigorous pursuit of profits as a necessity of
prosperity, allowing other countries to pursue their own economic
development in their own way, even if this means US corporate interests
are threatened, abridged or undermined, is not in the cards.
But
if you believed Kinzer, or any of a number of other liberal and social
democratic commentators, all that’s necessary to reform US foreign
policy is to persuade foreign policy makers of the error of their
thinking. To change the world, Kinzer seems to say, you must change the
ideas of the powerful (rather than sending those in power, and their
class interests, packing.)
Okay, suppose US foreign policy comes
from ideas and that the opposite (that ideas rationalize US foreign
policy, which serves the economic interests of the corporate community)
isn’t true.
What then? Do you march to Washington and say,
"Economically nationalist, socialist and communist governments must be
left alone to develop their own economies, even if it means abridging
the interests of US corporations. That’s the way to a peaceful,
democratic foreign policy"?
If you did, no one would listen to
you. Paying a price in foregone or damaged profits to create affluent,
capitalist democracies elsewhere in the world can hardly be appealing
to the corporate community or to the foreign policy establishment it
dominates, even less so considering that all the newly developed
capitalist democracies this sacrifice would create would become
competitors for access to markets and investment opportunities.
Foreign
policy officials will dismiss Kinzer’s ideas as naïve – with
justification. But on top of being naïve, his ideas act to reinforce
certain liberal foreign policy myths. The first is that the rhetoric of
US foreign policy isn’t rhetoric at all, but has some basis in reality.
Kinzer operates at the level of this rhetoric, accepting the public
relations bumf of US officials at face value. In Kinzer’s view, if what
US officials say is nonsense, it’s because they’re mistaken, and
genuinely believe what they say.
At other times he accepts
nonsense as truth. For example, he accepts the absurd argument that
Cuba and Iran are threats to the United States. That he argues the
threats could have been averted had Mossadegh been left alone and
Castro been given space (as if these were ever possibilities a
corporate dominated foreign policy apparatus would accept) seems to
have a progressive flavor, but in doing so he nevertheless legitimizes
the claim that Iran and Cuba are salient security concerns.
Lenin
wrote of the anti-imperialism of Americans who denounced the
Spanish-American War as criminal and a betrayal of the country’s
values, but who refused to "recognize the indissoluble bonds between
imperialism and the very foundations of capitalism", as nothing but a
pious wish. (20)
While Kinzer’s Overthrow does a service in
rectifying the historical myopia that leads Americans to believe the
last gobsmacking outrage of their government is an anomaly, he doesn’t
ask why regime change is a regular feature of US foreign policy – or
rather does, but comes up with an explanation that falls well short of
the mark and panders to several liberal myths about the nature of US
society and the possibilities of change within it.
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto," 1848.
2. Times Online, March 10, 2006.
3. Ibid.
4. Los Angeles Times, September 25. 2006.
5. New York Times, February 26, 2006.
6. Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2006.
7. Times Online, March 10, 2006.
8. Washington Post, April 17, 2006.
9. New York Times, May 6, 2006.
10. Washington Post, April 17, 2006.
11. Heritage Foundation, Index of Economic Freedom, 2006.
12. New York Times, April 23, 2006.
13. New York Times, May 6, 2006.
14. Washington Post, May 11, 2006.
15. New York Times, May 6, 2006.
16. Ibid.
17. Transcript of Amy Goodman interview of Stephen Kinzer for Democracy Now, April 21, 2006. www.democracynow.org.
18.
This, and all subsequent references to the backgrounds of presidents
and cabinet members is from G. William Domhoff, "Who Rules America?
Power & Politics," Fourth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2002.
19. Goodman interview with Kinzer.
20. V. I. Lenin, "Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism," International Publishers, New York. 1939.
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