The Canadian Army Journal

Thankfully, although hard-hitting in its conclusions, many of which are not without
challenge and controversy, Kinzer’s book is not an ideological diatribe. He does not
automatically equate US experience with Old World imperialism, nor does he assume
that intervention automatically yielded worse societies or governments than would have
otherwise been the case absent gunboat or dollar diplomacy (and he engages in a few
scenarios of fascinating historic alternatives). At a time when history as a discipline is
too often narrowed to the micro level in focus and detail or couched in esoteric language
only accessible to academics, it has too often become the task of journalists to take on
the sweep of history, and to spin a good yarn in the process, and Kinzer fits well into this
mould.
Overthrow is in reality three books in one. The first section, subtitled “The Imperial
Era,” begins with the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani’s rule in Hawaii and its eventual
annexation as a US state through to US efforts in the Philippines, Central America and
the Caribbean. These adventures, Kinzer argues, were inspired by naval theorist Alfred
Thayer Mahan, who argued that states become great via the access to trade and
markets that sea power guaranteed, and Mahan’s approach was championed by the
powerful Washington elite. The second section, “Covert Action,” details the post World
War II efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency in operationalizing four coups that had
lasting consequences for each of the states involved: the 1953 removal of Mohammad
Mossadegh in Iran; Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán’s flight from power in Guatemala in 1954;
the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973; and initial efforts at regime change
in Vietnam in 1963 prior to large-scale US troop commitments. Clouded in judgement
by the extreme anti-Communism of John Foster Dulles and his contemporaries, Kinzer
bemoans the point that no one questioned the overriding premise on which all such
operations were based, that the states in question were indeed in imminent danger of
falling into Soviet hands. In retrospect, we know that the domino theory worked largely
in reverse: in toppling authoritarian communism in 1989 in Eastern Europe rather than
in ensuring the global success of the red menace. The third section, “Invasions,”
discusses post Cold War interventions in Grenada and Panama, as well as post 9/11
operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this last section, Kinzer is at his most damning,
particularly as he recounts intelligence failures and American unilateralism leading up to
the war in Iraq. Although he is more balanced in his assessment of Afghanistan,
acknowledging the moral obligation of the US to help rebuild the state given its previous
support for the mujahedin throughout the 1980s and the urgent necessity in keeping the
area free from becoming either a terrorist safe haven or a leading producer of heroin, he
remains critical of the means employed, particularly with respect to the turning of public
and political attention from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Much of Kinzer’s book is a detailed catalogue of the old adage-you reap what you
sow. Had democratic opposition movements in Latin America, for example, not been
rejected as challenging US interests but as largely reflections of local and nationalist
concerns that they were, the more radical alternatives such as Fidel Castro in Cuba or
the Sandanistas under Daniel Ortega would not have been successful or generated as
much charisma and cachet in the process. Given situations where real or imagined
violence was the only alternative seen by the US in its regime change operations, even
greater violence was unfortunately seen as the only available means of challenging US
power. In the end, Kinzer concludes that successful regime change has largely yielded
catastrophic results, which in the long run have weakened rather than strengthened
American security as a whole (p. 317). Democracy, although often wielded as a
rhetorical instrument, was little promoted in the past and indeed more often than not
democratically elected governments were overthrown and replaced with tyrants.
Moreover, now that the Bush government has appeared to take democracy promotion
seriously, it has done so in an uneven and contradictory manner.
Canadian Army Journal Vol. 11.1 Spring 2008 145