printIn a new book, Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer chronicles America’s interventions in foreign countries. Writes Brian Urquhart for The New York Review of Books:
Kinzer describes three periods of American intervention: first the “Imperial Era” between 1893 and 1910 (in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and Honduras); second, the “Covert Action period” between 1953 and 1973 (in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile); and third, the “Invasions” since 1983 (in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq). The original announced aim was to help anti-colonial patriots to achieve success, as in Cuba and the Philippines; and then, to the patriots’ surprise, the US would establish an authoritarian protectorate.
Especially startling are “The parallels between McKinley’s invasion of the Philippines and Bush’s invasion of Iraq.” As Kinzer see it:
Both presidents sought economic as well as political advantage for the United States. Both were also motivated by a deep belief that the United States has a sacred mission to spread its form of government to faraway countries. Neither doubted that the people who lived in those countries would welcome Americans as liberators. Neither anticipated that he would have to fight a long counterinsurgency war to subdue nationalist rebels. Early in the twenty-first century, ten decades after the United States invaded the Philippines and a few years after it invaded Iraq, those two countries were among the most volatile and unstable in all of Asia.