Self-deception and history: author examines the U.S. record of conquest

OVERTHROW: AMERICA'S CENTURY OF REGIME CHANGE FROM HAWAII TO IRAO By Stephen Kinzer Times Books, 384 pages, $27.50

When The New York Times carried a story Aug. 28 about Ali Muhammad Besharati of Iran, a former interior minister and deputy foreign minister following the Iranian revolution of 1979, he had many things he wanted to say to the West.

During the interview, he held out his fingers and said the nails had been ripped out in torture chambers by the secret police who worked decades ago for the shah, America's good friend.

"I was a medical student," he told reporter Michael Slackman. "But they put me in prison because I opposed American dominance in Iran." Mr. Besharati now works at the Strategic Studies Center in Iran, a research organization influential in that country's policy making.

It is clear from the article that Mr. Besharati--and he certainly isn't alone in this thinking--would have trouble conceding the high ground to the United States when President Bush starts consigning countries to the axis of evil.

The story is a fitting if unintended illustration of many of the points one might take away from Stephen Kinzer's book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. A principal point is that much of the United States' modern history of conquest would belie that most "persistent strain in the American character ... the belief that the United States is a nation uniquely endowed with virtue." Mr. Kinzer, an award-winning foreign correspondent, has reported from more than 50 countries and has served as New York Times bureau chief in Turkey, Germany and Nicaragua. As he has done in detailed reporting in such previous books as Bitter Fruit, a meticulously detailed history of the 1954 CIA overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, and All the Shah's Men, a history of the 1953 overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran, Mr. Kinzer strips away the fantasy and delivers the American character, unadorned and with only the facts of history as props, to the harsh glare of the center-stage spotlight.

It is a dose of reality that only rarely sneaks through in this country for, as Mr. Kinzer points out, "Americans consider themselves to be, in Herman Melville's words, 'a peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our times.'" He adds: "They are hardly the first people to believe themselves favored by Providence, but they are the only ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their political and economic system to others, they are doing God's work."

Mr. Kinzer begins his history of American conquest in 1893 in Hawai and ends with the current war in Iraq. What becomes apparent is that the war in Iraq, while more technologically sophisticated in some ways than wars before it, is part of a pattern going back more than 100 years in which the United States sees itself as entitled to rearrange governments to suit its interests. Once the ostensible cause was to keep the world safe from communism; today it is to keep the world safe from terrorists. Often, as Mr. Kinzer points out, the real reasons are economic interests and guaranteeing U.S. access to others' resources. In many cases, invasions and coups were undertaken with little understanding of or concern for cultural differences and long-term consequences. That makes for abundant sad irony in our relationships with other countries. In our current dispute with Iran, we are told Iran hates us because we possess liberty and democracy. However, before we instigated his overthrow in 1953, Iran's president, Mohammed Mossadegh, "believed passionately in two causes--nationalism and democracy."

Nationalism got Mr. Mossadegh in trouble with Britain, which saw its grip on Iranian oil slipping because of him. Britain needed only to tell President Dwight D. Eisenhower's new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, that Mr. Mossadegh was going communist, a charge that historians have determined to be false. (At the time, in an eerie precursor to current events, the intelligence from the field had it right; Washington simply wanted a different story and created one to fit.) Mr. Dulles was convinced of the need for a coup, which was carried out by the CIA. One presumes that the irony of today the United States demanding democracy in a place where we destroyed it is not nearly as lost on Iranians as it might be on Americans.

The same year Mr. Mossadegh was overthrown, the United States hatched another plot, this time in Guatemala against duly elected president Jacobo Arbenz. In the case of Guatemala, President Arbenz was, like Mr. Mossadegh, a nationalist who wanted to regain control of natural resources that had been appropriated by United Fruit. "During the first half of the 20th century," writes Mr. Kinzer, "United Fruit made great profits in Guatemala because it was able to operate without interference from the Guatemalan government. It simply claimed good farmland, arranged for legal title through one-sided deals with dictators, and then operated plantations on its own terms, free of such annoyances as taxes or labor regulations."