Mr. Stephen Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has written a book called "Overthrow" in which he surveys 14 cases where United States toppled foreign governments in the 110 years between the 1893 coup in Hawaii and the occupation of Iraq. But Kinzer says the results are always damaging to the countries involved, and to American security as well.
Although the book does not add to historical knowledge of the individual cases, it may be the first to bring them together in a comparison over time. This makes the narrative more interesting than a single case study, but also more depressing. In one instance after another, Americans are shown tossing out legitimate governments and installing corrupt ones. They in turn cause more problems for foreign policy than did the ousted leaders.
The main explanation for these recurrent misadventures is greed. The prime villains are United Fruit, ITT, Aramco, Halliburton and other corporations and plutocrats operating through like-minded officials. Kinzer proceeds from the classic theory first advanced by the British economist J. A. Hobson, and most prominently in Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism," that overproduction causes a scramble for new markets and "a policy of forcing foreign nations to buy American products." This may be convincing for the early cases, but Kinzer underestimates the relative force of geopolitical concerns during the cold war.
The easy answer is that everything mattered, but without clarifying which causes are necessary or sufficient, the story does not tell us which levers we should look to first to change the pattern.
Washington can be tagged with a decisive role in the Chile coup. That too only by blurring together the events of 1970 and 1973. In 1970 President Richard M. Nixon did encourage a coup to prevent Allende from taking office after the Chilean election, but the scheme failed. Although plotters accidentally killed the army commander, the coup never got off the ground. In the next three years Washington undertook covert action programs that funnelled money to anti-Allende newspapers, parties and private groups. The definitive investigation under Senator Frank Church, however, found no evidence that the United States instigated or aided the military coup.
The horrors of the Pinochet regime, the movie "Missing," the record of previous covert actions and Nixon's happiness with Allende's ouster generated the folklore that Washington had done to Allende just what it did to Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala.
And what about Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and the list goes on. The cost, in terms of money, reputation and personnel of these adventures or mis-adventures? The people who gain are those in the military-industrial complex in Washington. Also, those puppets in the countries where they have been ravaged.
Stop Wars and Regime Change! Act justly, love mercy and please walk humbly with your God.
Source: https://www.reddit.com
Reference:
A century of intervention, regarded with a cold eye, Richard K Betts, May 2, 2006,
(https://www.nytimes.com)
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