Here's an excellent review of a recent book by a USian liberal democrat called Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. The review, by Canadian leftist Stephen Gowans, shows the kind of absurdities liberals get themselves into because they lack a class analysis of USian foreign policy.

Excerpts:

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Former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer’s latest book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq makes the case that regime change has been a regular feature of US foreign policy for decades, and is not a recent innovation cooked up one afternoon by neo-cons over barbecued ribs and Budweiser at the Bush ranch.

“Regime change,” Kinzer’s book tells us, “did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush but has been an integral part of American foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the entire twentieth century and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to topple governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals.”

While this is a welcome debunking of the myth that regime change comes from a Bush-cabal-inspired hijacking of a mythical noble US foreign policy, Kinzer founders in his analysis of why US governments regularly seek to depose foreign regimes, and in the process, manages to reinforce liberal myths about the nature of US society and the possibilities of change within it.
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The problem, as Kinzer explains it, is that US officials make the mistake of assuming “that any regime that would bother an American company or harass an American company must be anti-American, repressive, dictatorial, and probably a tool of some foreign power or interests that wants to undermine the United States.”

So what matters is not restrictions on the actual or potential profits of US corporations, but the political character of regimes that limit US corporate interests. These regimes must be repressive, dictatorial and anti-American – at least that’s the inference Kinzer believes US officials have been making, as a knee jerk reaction, for the past hundred years.

In other words, US foreign policy prominently features regime change because, in Kinzer’s view, US foreign policy officials are dumb asses.
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But if you believed Kinzer, or any of a number of other liberal and social democratic commentators, all that’s necessary to reform US foreign policy is to persuade foreign policy makers of the error of their thinking. To change the world, Kinzer seems to say, you must change the ideas of the powerful (rather than sending those in power, and their class interests, packing.)

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Papal Bull:You can beat a drum internationally, but you have to be far more subtle at home, eh?

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