04/24/06
A new book by Stephen Kinzer, entitled Overthrow: America's Century of
Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, analyzes 14 countries that the U.S.
intervened in. These include: Hawaii,
Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Chile, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, South
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Panama. It is a shameful
history. Just to take one example, here
is how Kinzer describes the revolution in Hawaii:
“Many Americans I don't think realize that Hawaii was an independent country before it was brought into the United States. In brief, this is the story. In the early part of the 19th century, several hundred American missionaries, most of them from New England, sailed off to what were then called the Sandwich Islands to devote their lives to, as they would have put it, raising up the heathen savages and teaching them the blessings of Christian civilization.
It wasn't long before many of these missionaries and their sons began to realize that there was a lot of money to be made in Hawaii. The natives had been growing sugar for a long time, but they had never refined it and had never exported it. By dispossessing the natives of most of their land, a group that came from what was then called this missionary planter elite sort of left the path of God, went onto the path of Mammon and established a series of giant sugar plantations in Hawaii, and they became very rich from exporting sugar into the United States.
In the early 1890s, the U.S. passed a tariff that made it impossible for the Hawaiian sugar growers to sell their sugar in the U.S. So they were in a panic. They were about to lose their fortunes. And they asked themselves what they could do to somehow continue to sell their sugar in the U.S.
They came up with a perfect answer: We’ll get into the U.S. How will we do this? Well, the leader of the Hawaiian revolutionaries, if you want to call them that, who were mostly of American origin, actually went to Washington. He met with the Secretary of the Navy. He presented his case directly to the President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison. And he received assurances that the U.S. would support a rebellion against the Hawaiian monarchy.
So he went back to Hawaii and became part of a triumvirate, which essentially carried out the Hawaiian revolution. He was one part of the triumvirate. The second part was the American ambassador, who was himself an annexationist and had been instructed by the State Department to do whatever he could to aid this revolution. And the third figure was the commander of the U.S. naval vessel, which was conveniently anchored right off the shores of Honolulu.
This revolution was carried out with amazing ease. The leader of the Hawaiian revolutionaries, this missionary planter elite, simply announced at a meeting one day, “We have overthrown the government of Hawaii, and we are now the new government.” And before the queen was able to respond, the U.S. ambassador had 250 Marines called to shore from the ship that was conveniently off the coast of Honolulu and announced that since there had been some instability and there seemed to be a change of government, the Marines were going to land to protect the new regime and the lives and property of all Hawaiians. So that meant that there was nothing the queen could do. The regime was immediately recognized by the United States, and with that simple process, the monarchy of Hawaii came to an end, and then ultimately Hawaii joined the U.S. “ (see http://mwcnews.net/content/view/6268/26/ )
That was Hawaii. And the US
conducted revolutions elsewhere as well.
Sadly, there is reason to believe this history of involvement in
revolution is about to repeat itself in Iran in the coming years.
[Neo-conservative] Ledeen noted "the president publicly
promised the Iranian people the United States would support them if they acted
to win their own freedom, and the Iranians are now calling on Bush to make good
on that promise" (see http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43355
).
http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/071905Schuh/071905schuh.html
quotes President Bush as saying , in a speech to 25,000 soldiers in Fort Hood,
Texas; "The establishment of a free Iraq is a watershed event in the
global democratic revolution. That success is sending a message from Beirut to
Tehran." This same article records
the various programs the US government is funding to promote regime change in
Iran.
According to http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2006_04_16_regimechangeiran_archive.html
, “Turkish
sources said the Defense Department has discussed U.S. military access to
several bases in Turkey. They said they included air and naval bases that
spanned an area from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. "The request was for temporary
access and connected to the crisis with Iran," a Turkish source said. On April 17, the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet
reported that the United States has sought to establish a presence in three
naval bases in Turkey. The newspaper said the United States demanded access
to bases located along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, Middle East
Newsline reported…”
As http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9073
points out: “…Last June, former UN weapons
inspector Scott Ritter warned that the U.S. is building up military
capabilities in Azerbaijan, on Iran's northern border, and sponsoring rebel
bombings inside Iran. The obstacles to a full-scale invasion of Iran would at
first glance appear to be formidable. As Ivan Eland has observed,
"invading Iran would likely make the bloody quagmire in Iraq look like a
picnic. Iran has nearly four times the territory and three times the population
of Iraq. Also, Iran's terrain is much more mountainous than Iraq's and even
more ideal for guerrilla warfare."
Yet if ethnic tensions in Khuzestan province can be effectively exploited
by the U.S. and Britain, they may feel that a more limited destabilization or
invasion will put Iran's main oil province under Western control. In other
words, the prospects of an invasion may loom larger, simply because Bush thinks
it can be a "mission accomplished" with less effort than an all-out
conquest of Iran…”
There can be no true Reformation in America until there is confession and repentance from this long history of revolution.
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