America and the rest of the world -- how we overthrow their governments, how they hate us

1. U.S. history lesson: stop meddling
In the last 100 years, the U.S. has ousted the governments of at least 14 countries and forcibly intervened in dozens of others -- to what end?
By Stephen Kinzer

THE UNITED STATES is facing a major crisis in Iran, where the clerical regime, despite its denials, is evidently embarked on an effort to develop nuclear weapons. Because American leaders say they will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran, this has led to intense speculation that the Bush administration is preparing a military attack.

History suggests, however, that such an attack would have disastrous long-term consequences. Iranians know as well as anyone how terribly wrong such foreign interventions can go.

Iran was an incipient democracy in 1953, but Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh — chosen by an elected parliament and hugely popular among Iranians — angered the West by nationalizing his country's oil industry. President Eisenhower sent the CIA to depose him. The coup was successful, but it set the stage for future disaster.

The CIA placed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back on the Peacock Throne. His repressive rule led, 25 years later, to the Islamic Revolution. That revolution brought to power a clique of bitterly anti-Western mullahs who have spent the decades since working intensely, and sometimes violently, to undermine U.S. interests around the world.

If the Eisenhower administration had refrained from direct intervention against Iran in 1953, this religious regime probably would never have come to power. There would be no nuclear crisis. Iran might instead have become a thriving democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East.

Overthrowing a government is like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill — you have no idea exactly what will happen next. Iranians are not the only ones who know this. In slightly more than a century, the United States has overthrown the governments of at least 14 countries, beginning with the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, and forcibly intervened in dozens more. Long before Afghanistan and Iraq, there were the Philippines, Panama, South Vietnam and Chile, among others.

Most of these interventions not only have brought great pain to the target countries but also, in the long run, weakened American security.

Cuba, half a world away from Iran, is a fine example. In 1898, the United States sent troops there to help rebels overthrow Spanish colonial rule. Once victory was secured, the U.S. reneged on its promise to allow Cuba to become independent and turned it into a protectorate.

More than 60 years later, in his first speech as leader of the victorious Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro recalled that episode and made a promise. "This time," he vowed, "it will not be like 1898, when the Americans came in and made themselves masters of the country."

Those words suggest that perhaps if the U.S. had allowed Cuba to go its own way in 1898, the entire phenomenon of Castro communism might never have emerged.

The U.S. deposed a visionary leader of Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya, in 1909 and sent his unlucky country into a long spiral of repression and rebellion.

Forty-five years later, still believing that "regime change" can end well, the U.S. overthrew the left-leaning president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, and imposed a military regime. That regime's brutality set off a 30-year civil war in which hundreds of thousands died.

Today, Latin America and the Middle East are the regions of the world in the most open political rebellion against U.S. policies. It is no coincidence that these are the regions where the U.S. has intervened most often. Resentment over intervention festers. It passes from generation to generation. Ultimately it produces a backlash.

Countries that have been victimized by past interventions are especially determined to resist future ones. Iran is one of these. Over the last 200 years, the British, Russians and Americans have sought to dominate and exploit Iran. If the U.S. intervenes there now, it will face the pent-up anger many Iranians harbor against all outside powers.

Some in Washington evidently believe that it is worth trying to set off upheaval in Iran because any new regime there would be an improvement.

This is a dangerous gamble, as intervention would strengthen the most radical factions in Iran. Militants, including the bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would use it as an excuse to crack down on dissent. That could lead to a wave of repression, produce a regime more dangerously anti-American than the current one and set back the cause of Iranian democracy by another generation.

This looming crisis might be resolved by direct and unconditional negotiations between Washington and Tehran, but American leaders refuse to bargain with the mullahs. The trauma of the Islamic Revolution, and the hostage crisis that followed it, left a deep scar on the American political psyche — so deep that it prevents the U.S. from engaging Iran in ways that could have great benefits for American security.

Yet far from being doomed to conflict, these two proud nations are potential allies. Both want to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, assure the free flow of Middle East oil and crush radical Sunni movements like the Taliban and Al Qaeda. What prevents talks from materializing is the deep resentment both sides feel over past interventions.

Iran has intervened across the Middle East, sometimes using the extreme weapon of terror, to attack U.S. interests. For its part, the U.S. intervened to crush Iranian democracy in 1953, imposed the shah and supported his repressive rule for 25 years.

The cure for the effects of past intervention is not more intervention. Given the seriousness of the nuclear crisis with Iran, American leaders should put aside their self-defeating and increasingly dangerous refusal to negotiate. The alternative may be violent intervention in Iran. Americans have tried that before. The results would be no happier this time.


(STEPHEN KINZER, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of "All the Shah's Men," about the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran, and, most recently, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.”)


2. The Perils of Soft Power -- by JOSEF JOFFE

In recent years, a number of American thinkers, led by Joseph S. Nye Jr. of Harvard, have argued that the United States should rely more on what he calls its "soft power" — the contagious appeal of its ideas, its culture and its way of life — and so rely less on the "hard power" of its stealth bombers and aircraft carriers. There is one problem with this argument: soft power does not necessarily increase the world's love for America. It is still power, and it can still make enemies.

America's soft power isn't just pop and schlock; its cultural clout is both high and low. It is grunge and Google, Madonna and MoMA, Hollywood and Harvard. If two-thirds of the movie marquees carry an American title in Europe (even in France), dominance is even greater when it comes to translated books. The figure for Germany in 2003 was 419 versus 3,732; that is, for every German book translated into English, nine English-language books were translated into German. It used to be the other way around. A hundred years ago, Humboldt University in Berlin was the model for the rest of the world. Tokyo, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and the University of Chicago were founded in conscious imitation of the German university and its novel fusion of teaching and research. Today Europe's universities have lost their luster, and as they talk reform, they talk American. Indeed, America is one huge global "demonstration effect," as the sociologists call it. The Soviet Union's cultural presence in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw vanished into thin air the moment the last Russian soldier departed. American culture, however, needs no gun to travel.

There may be little or no relationship between America's ubiquity and its actual influence. Hundreds of millions of people around the world wear, listen, eat, drink, watch and dance American, but they do not identify these accouterments of their daily lives with America. A Yankees cap is the epitome of things American, but it hardly signifies knowledge of, let alone affection for, the team from New York or America as such.

The same is true for American films, foods or songs. Of the 250 top-grossing movies around the world, only four are foreign-made: "The Full Monty" (U.K.), "Life Is Beautiful" (Italy) and "Spirited Away" and "Howl's Moving Castle" (Japan); the rest are American, including a number of co-productions. But these American products shape images, not sympathies, and there is little, if any, relationship between artifact and affection.

If the relationship is not neutral, it is one of repulsion rather than attraction — the dark side of the "soft power" coin. The European student movement of the late 1960's took its cue from the Berkeley free-speech movement of 1964, the inspiration for all post-1964 Western student revolts. But it quickly turned anti-American; America was reviled while it was copied.

Now shift forward to the Cannes Film Festival of 2004, where hundreds of protesters denounced America's intervention in Iraq until the police dispersed them. The makers of the movie "Shrek 2" had placed large bags of green Shrek ears along the Croisette, the main drag along the beach. As the demonstrators scattered, many of them put on free Shrek ears. "They were attracted," noted an observer in this magazine, "by the ears' goofiness and sheer recognizability." And so the enormous pull of American imagery went hand in hand with the country's, or at least its government's, condemnation.

Between Vietnam and Iraq, America's cultural presence has expanded into ubiquity, and so has the resentment of America's soft power. In some cases, like the French one, these feelings harden into governmental policy. And so the French have passed the Toubon law, which prohibits on pain of penalty the use of English words — make that D.J. into a disque-tourneur. In 1993, the French coaxed the European Union into adding a "cultural exception" clause to its commercial treaties exempting cultural products, high or low, from normal free-trade rules. Other European nations impose informal quotas on American TV fare.

Nor is America's high culture more easily accepted than its pop — at least not by the cultural elites. A fine example is how the art critics of two distinguished German newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung (leftish) and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (centrist), dealt with an exhibit of 200 pieces from the Museum of Modern Art in Berlin in 2004. More than a million visitors stood in line, many for up to nine hours, to view the objets from across the Atlantic. Yet the fervor of the hoi polloi mattered little to their betters, whose comments ran the gamut from contempt to conspiracy.

The opening shots were fired by the Süddeutsche Zeitung of Munich. Without having seen the collection, its critic aimed his volley straight against imperial America. Regurgitating a standard piece of European ressentiment, the author insinuated that what America has in the way of culture is not haute, and what is haute is not American. (Or as Adolf Hitler is said to have declared, "A single Beethoven symphony contains more culture than all that America has ever created.")

After World War II, the critic contended, America had wrested "artistic hegemony" from Europe in two sleazy ways. One culprit was "a new abstract school of painting" — Abstract Expressionism — "that had hyped itself into high heaven." The other was American mammon: "Everything still available in old Europe was bought up." And this "stolen idea of modern art will now be presented in Berlin." Thus were pilferage and grand theft added to the oldest of indictments: America's cultural inferiority.

The critic of Frankfurter Allgemeine went one worse. If his colleague claimed that America's art was either hyped or heisted, the man from Frankfurt thundered that MoMA's Berlin show was a mendacious ploy, indeed, an imperialist conspiracy. It was done by "concealment" and "censorship" in a game full of "marked cards," and its aim was not only to blank out Europe's greats but also to suppress their magnificent contribution to American art in the second half of the 20th century. This was an instance of the selective perception that suffuses anti-Americanism or any other "anti-ism," for the exhibit contained an impressive number of European works: Matisse ,Picasso , Manet, Rousseau, Brancusi and Mondrian, plus assorted Expressionists and Surrealists.

That did not count. What about contemporary Germans like Beuys, Baselitz and Kiefer? the critic huffed. But even here, MoMA had done its duty, capping the progression with Gerhard Richter's "18 October 1977" cycle, which depicts dead members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang. That MoMA would display these German works enraged the feuilletoniste from Frankfurt even more. That particular choice, he fumed, was the final proof of American perfidy. The terrorist motif was insidiously selected to finger Europe as a "creepy" place, as a messenger of "bad news."

There is a moral in this tale of two critics: the curse of soft power. In the affairs of nations, too much hard power ends up breeding not submission but resistance. Likewise, great soft power does not bend hearts; it twists minds in resentment and rage. And the target of Europe's cultural guardians is not just America, the Great Seductress. It is also all those "little people," a million in all, many of whom showed up in the wee hours to snag an admissions ticket to MoMA's Berlin exhibit. By yielding to America-the-beguiling, they committed cultural treason — and worse: they ignored the stern verdict of their own priesthood. So America's soft power is not only seductive but also subversive.

Hard power can by defanged by coalitions and alliances. But how do you balance against soft power? No confederation of European universities can dethrone Harvard and Stanford. Neither can all the subsidies fielded by European governments crack the hegemony of Hollywood. To breach the bastions of American soft power, the Europeans will first have to imitate, then improve on, the American model. Imitation and leapfrogging is the oldest game in the history of nations.

But competition has barely begun to drive the cultural contest. Europe, mourning the loss of its centuries-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and "cultural exception" clauses) or seeks solace in the disparagement of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic or stolen. If we could consult Dr. Freud, he would take a deep drag on his cigar and pontificate about inferiority feelings being compensated by hauteur and denigration.

(Josef Joffe is publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit. This essay is adapted from his book "Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America," to be published in June by Norton.)


3. The NED, NGOs and the Imperial Uses of Philanthropy
Why They Hate Our Kind Hearts, Too
By JOAN ROELOFS

In recent years, nations have challenged the activities and very existence of non-governmental organizations. Russia, Zimbabwe, and Eritrea have enacted new measures requiring registration; "Open Society Institute" affiliates have been shut down in Eastern Europe; and Venezuela has charged the Súmate NGO leaders with treason. In Iraq and Afghanistan, staff of Western charitable NGOs (CARE and Doctors Without Borders) have been assassinated.

What are these organizations, and who or what is behind them?

They are heirs of the missionaries, who did many good deeds, bringing sewing machines to Bulgaria, ideas of women's liberation to Chinese footbinders, and life-saving medicines to the less industrialized world. Yet the missionaries also served as scouts for corporations and colonizers, tying knots with the most ambitious local people, especially those adept at bilingualism.

Missionaries are still operating today, but the field has become more intensely populated and diverse. Today's NGOs are elephantine, serpentine, and Byzantine. They may be international organizations, their local affiliates, or seemingly spontaneous grassroots groups.

Most funding and direction come from the wealthy nations. Often the donors form a conglomerate creating mutual responsibility and considerable ambiguity. CIVICUS, a partnership to promote "civil society" worldwide, is funded by, among others, American Express Foundation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Canadian International Development Agency, Ford Foundation, Harvard University, Oxfam, and United Nations Development Programme.

If the source is confusing, the message is usually clear: "democratization" strives for civil rights and elections, but it also must include an open door to foreign capital, labor contracts, resource extraction, and military training. These networks also define "civil society" to include rock concerts and street mobs, but not government-provided maternal health clinics, child care, or senior services.

Affluent nations' government agencies are important NGO funders. The most notorious is the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED; ostensibly a non_governmental foundation), created by Congress in 1983 to do openly what had been CIA cold war covert activities. When these operations were revealed in 1967, there was shock, not so much because the US was covertly funding foreign political and labor groups, but because organizations such as the National Education Association, American Newspaper Guild, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the National Student Association were secretly used as pass-throughs, and all but the top officers were unwitting. Actual and phony foundations also distributed CIA funds.

NED changed this--but not very much. It distributes grants both directly and through other organizations, now overtly. Its "core grantees" are the Center for International Private Enterprise (of the US Chamber of Commerce), the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (of the AFL-CIO), and, affiliated with the parties, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International Republican Institute. Some private foundations chip in, for example, Smith Richardson and Mellon-Scaife. The Mott Foundation gave the NDI $150,000 in 1998 "to increase public confidence in democratization and the transition to a market economy in Ukraine." Foundations also directly co-fund NED's ultimate grantees. Thus, the Lilly Endowment supports the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, headed by Hernando de Soto, which offers free-market remedies for poverty.

Other capitalist democracies now have government foundations similar to NED, and they work collaboratively, e.g., the Canadian Rights and Democracy and the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy. Additional US agencies have joined NED and the CIA in this work, notably, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and United States Information Agency (USIA), which support and create foreign NGOs and media.

Germany, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, and Sweden fund their political parties' foundations. The European members of the Socialist International's fund, the European Forum for Democracy and Solidarity, distributes "democratization" aid.

The European Union has worldwide grant programs for sustainable development and democratization. NATO grant programs support environmental organizations, among others. United Nations agencies such as UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNDP, and FAO have long operated this way, and the World Bank funds, sponsors, guides, and coordinates grassroots poor people's organizations.

NGOs in prosperous nations have extensive grant programs overseas. These include not only the obviously international ones, e.g., Rotary, American Friends Service Committee, and Oxfam; but also labor organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation. Corporate foundations are active throughout the world, and sometimes have separate funds directed by employees, for example, the Boeing Employees Fund, which supports charities in Japan and England.

Why would these philanthropic efforts offend anyone? Why do they hate our kind hearts?

In the first place, these public-private philanthropies have worked together to fund and direct overthrow movements. We had a "Subversive Activities Control Board" here, but export was encouraged. The grantees' activities included destabilization, the creation of mobs preventing elected governments from ruling, chaos, and violence. Among those funded were the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity in Poland, Union of Democratic Forces in Bulgaria, Otpor in Serbia, and, more recently, similar groups in the succession states of the USSR. Sometimes mobs (especially of young people) have been moved around from one country to another to give the impression of vast popular opposition. The NED, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Soros philanthropies have been particularly active in these operations. Human Rights Watch (formerly Helsinki Watch) has nurtured opposition groups. Reformers seeking social democracy or democratic socialism were excluded; such systems might oppress the "vulture capitalists."

It is hard to know how much native support existed for the Western-funded revolutions, as media and information (especially if we can't read Mongolian, Bulgarian, or Uzbeki) are produced by the same conglomerates. Of course, all revolutions are made by minorities, often with assistance of foreign allies. However, by today's standards as embodied in the UN Charter, subverting with the intention of overthrowing foreign governments is a grave violation of international law. Many were shocked by the NED activities complementing other instruments of intervention that helped to destroy the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Yet the 1990 election was judged by the NGO observers to be a free one; neither threats of physical annihilation nor millions of foreign dollars violated the purity of that process. "Cold-war liberal" policymakers have advocated covert actions as a peaceful alternative to invasion, but it isn't as if military action has faded away; they work together.

Such attempts are ongoing. The Venezuelan indictment is just one indication of a larger NED-NGO operation. Plans for annihilating the Cuban revolution, via "independent libraries," "Red Feminista Cubana," and other created organizations, are clearly spelled out on the NED web site .

NGOs are also used to disrupt revolutionary or even reformist movements that might interfere with neo-liberal goals, hampering the ability of corporations to go anywhere and do anything. Thus, as James Petras has reported, radical social groups and their leaders are co-opted into NGOs dedicated to worthy, ameliorative projects that are no threat to Western interests. Instead of broad movements challenging systemic causes of oppression, activists are recruited into discrete, well-funded "identity" politics and single-issue organizations, and poverty is just another minority status.

In India and South Africa, the very poor have been organized into Slum Dwellers and Shack Dwellers Associations, which meet with the World Bank people to discuss what is to be done. Protesters against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were channeled into groups that were invited and funded to attend the meetings preparing this treaty. Those concerned with the devastation of oil, lumber, and mineral extraction throughout the world can utilize the "participatory mechanisms" of the Earth Council, one of whose board members is Klaus Schwab, director of the World Economic Forum. Conferences for the protesters "parallel" to the globalization elite's are supported by that same elite. These do create fruitful interaction among dissidents; yet they may also function as a diversionary tactic. We won't know unless these possibilities are investigated.

Amelioration is important to keep those societies newly "marketized" on a steady course despite crushing poverty. In Mongolia (as elsewhere), "shock therapy," decimating both employment and social services, has resulted in street children, child prostitution, and increasing maternal mortality, none of which occurred in its "undeveloped" or communist phases. However, the rock concerts and street mobs have attained freedom. Enter PACT (originally, Private Agencies Collaborating Together; funders now include the Ford Foundation, US AID, Mercy Corps International, the Nature Conservancy, the World Bank, Citigroup, Chevron, Levi Strauss, and Microsoft), which provides some substitutes for the former socialist institutions, while desperation drives Mongolia's leaders to welcome foreign garment industries and copper and gold extraction.

For many nations far from the North Atlantic, NATO seems to promise economic security. This inclination has been abetted by the creation, through NATO's grant programs, of NGOs to foster the NATO spirit, and in Bulgaria, a charitable NGO to provide employment for their former military officers, who wouldn't fit in. NATO also supplies research funds for universities in Eastern Europe, which now have little government funding, and is attempting to expand its charities throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

Prominent insiders, who sit high in the democracy-promotion turrets of the foundation-NGO international world, have problems with the system, although they may ignore or applaud the overthrow operations. What concerns them is the feudal relationship existing between the wealthy Western institutional patrons and the clients in poorer lands, and the NGOs lack of a genuine local constituency. Thomas Carothers, of the Carnegie Endowment, has written: "Transnational civil society is . . . very much part of the same projection of Western political and economic power that civil society activists decry in other venues."

Others are concerned about the "brain drain" drawing the scarce educated people away from government service or authentic grassroots organizations, neither of which can offer comparable pay or perks. They protest the imposition of a foreign culture that denigrates indigenous knowledge, and paradoxically, programs such as microcredit in South Asia that reinforce the more oppressive patriarchical aspects of traditional cultures.

NGO staff members have been accused of being spies. Whether or not this is the case, the system allows access to remote native cultures, where the lay of the land and sociograms of local influentials can be charted for any purpose. This type of missionary penetration, attained through Bible translation in the Amazon River basin, has been recounted in Thy Will Be Done , by Colby and Dennett.

NGOs are now extensively occupied in the relief of disasters, whether natural or man-made, and the US military (with its "coalition") is deeply involved in both the comforting and the afflicting. To receive US funds, humanitarian organizations must support US foreign policy. Consequently, some, such as Oxfam UK, have withdrawn their workers from Iraq. Those remaining are often regarded as collaborators, which is not surprising, as many international NGOs have been handmaids to subversion, overthrow, and occupation. Some have even supported "humanitarian" bombing, especially in the case of Yugoslavia.

It is hard to assess accurately NGOs' complicity because there are few incentives for critical studies by journalists or academics, and anti-capitalist activists are often knotted up in some way. Information about NGOs mostly comes from the same funding sources, such as "Transitions on Line" of the Soros enterprises, or OneWorld.net, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and others. A networking resource, Ngo.net, is administered by Freedom House and funded by the USAID.

The peak of international NGOs, the World Social Forum, meets at the same time as the World Economic Forum, only far away. The WSF's general funding is rarely scrutinized by the participants, whose travel expenses come from similar sources. An exception is a report by the Research Unit on Political Economy-India, which explains why foundation funding was refused for the 2004 WSF in Mumbai, and discusses critically the activities of the Ford Foundation in India.

It is news when any NGO nibbles at the hand that feeds it, as did a Pakistani theater group last November. Invited to a women's theater festival in India, they were sent home because the organizers deemed their contribution too anti-US for a Ford Foundation-sponsored event.

As all generalizations have exceptions, let it be noted that some NGOs are impeccable, and even peccable ones often have humanitarian staff and directors. A recent attempt by dissidents seeking international donors to "democracy promotion" in the US, the International Endowment for Democracy , could give an effective jolt. Yet it may be that democracy, justice, or equality are not readily attainable by such means. For several centuries NGOs have been providing "disaster aid" for societies being "marketized." What can we learn from this history?

(Joan Roelofs is a professor emerita of political science in Keene, NH. More information on this subject may be found in her Foundations and Public Policy: the Mask of Pluralism. Other books are Greening Cities: Building Just and Sustainable Communities, and a just-published translation of Victor Considerant's Principes du socialisme: Manifeste de la démocratie au XIX siècle. Email: joan.roelofs@verizon.net)