AMY GOODMAN: Here on Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As special counsel Robert
Mueller continues his probe into Russian meddling
into the 2016 election, we take a look back
at Washington’s record of meddling in elections
across the globe.
By one count, the United States has interfered
in more than 80 foreign elections between
1946 and 2000.
And that doesn’t count U.S.-backed coups
and invasions.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey recently
joked about the U.S. record of meddling overseas,
during an interview with Laura Ingraham on
Fox News.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Have we ever tried to meddle
in other countries’ elections?
JAMES WOOLSEY: Oh, probably.
But it was for the good of the system, in
order to avoid the communists from taking
over.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Yeah.
JAMES WOOLSEY: For example, in Europe in ’47,
’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians,
we—CIA—
LAURA INGRAHAM: We don’t do that now, though?
We don’t mess around in other people’s
elections, Jim?
JAMES WOOLSEY: Well, mmm, yum, yum, yum, never
mind.
Only for a very good cause.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Can you do that—let’s
do a vine video and—as former CIA director.
I love it.
JAMES WOOLSEY: Only for very good cause—
LAURA INGRAHAM: OK.
JAMES WOOLSEY: —in the interests of democracy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The list of countries where
the U.S. has interfered is long.
In 1893, the U.S. helped overthrow the kingdom
of Hawaii.
Five years later, in 1898, the U.S. invaded
and occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico.
A year later, it was the Philippines.
Early 20th century interventions included
Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
all in the 1910s.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1953, the U.S. helped overthrow
the Iranian government.
A year later, in 1954, U.S.-backed coup in
Guatemala, overthrowing the democratically
elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz.
Then, in the '60s, the list grew to include,
once again, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia
and the Congo.
And that's just a partial list.
Even with the end of the Cold War, U.S. interference
overseas did not end.
Next week marks the 15th anniversary of the
U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple the government
of Saddam Hussein.
We now go to Stephen Kinzer, former New York
Times foreign correspondent, who writes about
world affairs for The Boston Globe.
He’s the author of a number of books, including
Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change
from Hawaii to Iraq, All the Shah’s Men:
An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East
Terror.
He’s written the book Bitter Fruit about
the coup in Guatemala.
And his latest book is The True Flag: Theodore
Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American
Empire.
Stephen Kinzer, we welcome you back to Democracy
Now! to talk, sadly, about the very same issue.
I’m not quite sure where to begin, whether
to go back to the beginning, but let’s start,
since it was 65 years ago, in Iran, in 1953,
in March of 1953.
The U.S. was in full swing making plans for
overthrowing the government of the democratically
elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
Can you talk about what the U.S. did in Iran
then?
So well known throughout Iran, but most people
in this country have no idea.
STEPHEN KINZER: Early in the 20th century,
the people of Iran began moving towards democracy.
It was a very difficult struggle.
It was back and forth.
But finally, after the Second World War, democracy
did emerge in Iran.
It was the one parenthesis, the one period
of real democracy that we’ve had in Iran
over the last hundred years.
So, the problem came when the Iranians chose
the wrong leader.
They did something that the United States
never likes: They chose a leader who wanted
to put the interests of his own country ahead
of the interests of the United States.
And that alarmed the West, and particularly
the United States.
Mosaddegh’s first move was to nationalize
Iranian oil.
We thought this would be a terrible example
for the rest of the world.
We didn’t want to start this process going
in other countries.
So, in order to set an example, the United
States decided we would work with the British
to overthrow the elected democratic government
of Iran.
We sent a senior CIA officer, who worked in
the basement of the American Embassy in Iran
organizing the coup.
The coup finally succeeded in the summer of
1953.
Mosaddegh was overthrown.
And, more important, the democratic system
in Iran was destroyed forever.
This was not just an attack on one person,
but an attack on democracy.
And the reason why we attacked that democracy
is the democracy produced the wrong person.
So, we like elections and democratic processes,
but they have to produce the candidates we
like; otherwise, our approval disappears.
AMY GOODMAN: And the person he sent—that
the U.S., the Dulles brothers, sent in to
Iran with the suitcases of money to begin
the process, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson?
STEPHEN KINZER: That’s right.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s something
genetic in the Roosevelt family that predisposes
them toward regime change.
It is a kind of a quirk of history that the
person who effectively projected the United
States into the regime change era at the beginning
of the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt, had
a grandson who went to Iran in the 1950s and
carried out a regime change operation there.
And there were similarities—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to go—
STEPHEN KINZER: —between the operations
that they carried out.
AMY GOODMAN: Before you go on, Stephen, I
wanted to go to a part of a trailer from an
upcoming documentary titled Coup 53 about
the 1953 British-American coup in Iran and
the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, directed
by the Iranian physicist-turned-award-winning-documentary-filmmaker
Taghi Amirani.
TAGHI AMIRANI: This man, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh,
he was our first democratically elected prime
minister.
SEN.
BERNIE SANDERS: Nobody knows who Mosaddegh
was.
Democratically elected prime minister of Iran.
TAGHI AMIRANI: In 1952, Time magazine named
him Man of the Year, because he had nationalized
Iranian oil and kicked the British out.
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] Mosaddegh came
along and threw them out.
They were gone.
Gone!
Gone!!
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] The Iranian people
had rejected the Shah’s rule with blood,
with blood, and bare hands in front of tanks.
INTERVIEWER: You had a million dollars in
cash to run the coup, right?
KERMIT ROOSEVELT: That’s right.
DAVID TALBOT: Kermit Roosevelt was prepared
to do whatever he had to do, when he was given
this mission by Allen Dulles to overthrow
the democratic government of Iran.
ALLEN DULLES: But may I say this?
At no time has the CIA engaged in any political
activity or any intelligence activity that
was not approved at the highest level.
AMY GOODMAN: That last voice, Allen Dulles,
head of the CIA from 1952 to 1961.
At the time, his brother—his brother, Secretary
of State Dulles, was secretary of state.
We’re talking about the overthrow of Iran
for the British oil company that would later
become British Petroleum.
Is that right, Stephen Kinzer?
STEPHEN KINZER: Yes.
That company is now called BP.
So, you’re seeing long-term effects of these
interventions, and what you’re seeing in
Iran today 100 percent ties back to what we
did in 1953.
We like to have this idea that these operations
are discreet, they’re not going to have
any long-term effects.
We’ll remove one government, place another
favorable government in power, and anything
will go fine.
Everybody will forget it, and it won’t have
any long-term effects.
But if you look around the world, you can
see that these kinds of operations to interfere
in other countries’ politics, what the CIA
calls “influence operations,” actually
not only often wind up devastating the target
country, but, in the end, undermine the security
of the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stephen Kinzer, I’d like
to move to another part of the world: Nicaragua.
Most people are familiar, obviously, with
the Reagan-era attempts to overthrow the Sandinista
government or the period during the Roosevelt
era of the attempts to get rid of Sandino
as a force in Nicaragua.
But, further back, José Santos Zelaya, at
the beginning of the 20 century, could you
talk about the efforts of the U.S. government
to overthrow Zelaya?
STEPHEN KINZER: Zelaya was a fascinating figure,
certainly the most formidable leader Nicaragua
ever had.
He was a slashing reformer.
He was a liberal, a progressive.
He built ports and roads, tried to build up
a middle class in Nicaragua.
He brought the first automobile into Nicaragua,
the first streetlights.
He organized the first baseball league.
He was a true modernizer.
But he had one characteristic the United States
really didn’t like.
And that is, he wanted Nicaragua to have an
independent foreign policy.
When he needed to raise money for a planned
railroad across Nicaragua, rather than seek
loans from the Morgan bank in the United States
as we wanted him to do, he floated the loan
offers in London and in Paris.
The United States tried to get those governments
to forbid the offering of those loan agreements,
but they refused.
Sure enough, the money was raised.
And America became very alarmed.
Nicaragua was trying to diversify its international
relations.
It didn’t want to be just under the power
of the United States.
And that was a fatal decision by Zelaya.
Once he decided that he wanted to pull Nicaragua
out from under the thumb of the United States,
he became a target.
And we did overthrow him in 1909.
That was the beginning of a century of American
interference in Nicaragua.
I think you can argue that there’s no country
in the world where the cycle of American intervention—imposition
of a dictator, rebellion, repression, and
a return of American power to impose another
leader—is so clear, over such a long period
of time, the way it is in Nicaragua.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Stephen Kinzer,
former New York Times foreign correspondent,
now writes the world affairs column for The
Boston Globe.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about
another invasion that is rarely talked about
these days: the invasion of the Dominican
Republic in 1965 by Lyndon Johnson and the
efforts of the United States, again, to control
the affairs of the Dominican Republic over
many, many years, because, obviously, there
were two invasions of the Dominican Republic.
There was one at the early part of the century
that led to the rise of Trujillo, and then
there was one after the fall of Trujillo to
attempt regime change against President Juan
Bosch, who had been elected into office.
STEPHEN KINZER: You have placed it very well,
because if we remember this operation at all,
we remember the American Marines landing on
the beaches in the Dominican Republic.
But the cause of that intervention was the
foolish mistake of the Dominican people of
electing a leader who was unpalatable to the
United States.
Juan Bosch was a figure a little bit like
Zelaya had been half a century earlier in
Nicaragua.
He didn’t want the Dominican Republic to
be under the thumb of the United States.
He wanted it to be an independent country.
And this was something the U.S. couldn’t
tolerate.
All these movements in the Caribbean Basin
have been—have had, as a fundamental part
of their political program, measures to limit
the power of foreign corporations in their
countries, and often measures to limit the
amount of land that foreigners can own in
their country.
These are the kinds of measures that are hateful
to the American corporations that have gotten
so rich from taking the resources of the Caribbean
Basin, and leaders who promote those policies
always find themselves in Washington’s crosshairs.
This is not just ancient history.
We had an episode in Honduras in 2009 where
a president who was very much in this line,
trying to pull Honduras away from subservience
to the United States, was overthrown in a
coup by the military, dragged out of his house
in the middle of the night in his pajamas,
sent into exile.
The U.S. was so happy, members of Congress
even went to Honduras to congratulate the
leader of the coup.
And then, just last year, a new election was
held to ratify the results of the coup.
The election was so fraudulent that for the
first time in the history of the Organization
of American States, the OAS called for a new
election.
And the leader of the OAS, Almagro, had to
do it, because he had been denouncing attacks
on democracy in Venezuela and figured he couldn’t
just stand by while something even worse was
done in Honduras.
Unfortunately, the United States doesn’t
have that kind of shame, and we cheered that
election.
We refused the call for a new election.
And Honduras today is under the rule of a
regime that is the product of a coup, supported
by the United States, against an elected government.
So, this is not something that we used to
do in ancient history.
This is something that’s happening right
now.
And that’s why those of us familiar with
this history roll our eyes a little bit when
we hear these outraged allegations that Russia
has been doing something so dastardly as to
try to influence our politics.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Kinzer, can you take
us on a brief, kind of thumbnail journey from
the overthrow of Hawaii, the Spanish-American
War, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines—all
before the turn of the 20th century?
STEPHEN KINZER: This was a fascinating period,
and it really was the moment when the United
States went from being what you could call
a continental empire—that is, inside North
America—to being an overseas empire, a crucial
moment of decision for the United States.
That was not inevitable, but that was the
choice we made.
So, in 1893, at the behest of sugar growers
in Hawaii, the United States promoted the
overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
The idea was that Hawaii would then immediately
become part of the United States.
That didn’t happen, because there was a
change of presidency in Washington, and the
new president, Grover Cleveland, hated that
intervention and didn’t want to take Hawaii
in.
Then, five years later, in 1898, when Grover
Cleveland was gone, the Spanish-American War
broke out.
The United States became interested in the
Pacific, because we destroyed the Spanish
fleet in the Philippines.
Then we decided we should take the Philippines
for ourselves.
We became interested in the China market.
This was a real, fantastic Fata Morgana out
there for American business.
The American press was full of stories about
how many nails we could sell in China, if
we could get the Chinese to use nails; how
much cotton we could sell there; how much
beef we could sell there, if we could get
the Chinese to eat beef.
So, we decided we needed stepping stones to
China.
And that was the moment when we decided, “Let’s
take Hawaii as we’ve taken the Philippines.”
So, that happened at the same time the United
States was consolidating its rule over Cuba
and Puerto Rico.
In Cuba, we staged a presidential election,
after we consolidated our power there in 1898.
We found a candidate that we liked.
We found him in upstate New York.
He spoke good English, which is always essential
for the people that we promote.
We brought him back to Cuba.
As soon as it became clear that the campaign
was rigged, the other candidate dropped out.
He became president of Cuba.
Sure enough, six years later, the United States
had to send troops back to Cuba to suppress
protests against him.
They occupied Cuba for three more years.
Then they left.
They had to come back again about six or seven
years later, in 1917, because again the Cuban
people had had the temerity to elect a leader
who was unpalatable to the United States.
So, this was a great model for an idea, a
concept, that has reverberated through the
whole period since then, which is: Have your
elections, but you must elect someone we like;
otherwise, we’re going to go to Plan B.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break,
and then we’re going to come back with Stephen
Kinzer and talk about James Woolsey’s latest
comment.
When asked on Fox if the U.S. is still interfering
with people’s elections, he chuckles and
says, “Only for a good cause.”
Yes, we’re talking with Stephen Kinzer,
former New York Times foreign correspondent,
now writing a world affairs column for The
Boston Globe, has written many books, one
on the coup, U.S. overthrow of Guatemalan
democratically elected government, called
Bitter Fruit, one called Overthrow: America’s
Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,
one specifically on Iran, All the Shah’s
Men, and his latest book, The True Flag: Theodore
Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American
Empire.
This is Democracy Now!
Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Nicaragua” by Bruce Cockburn,
here on Democracy Now!.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Our guest is Stephen Kinzer, former New York
Times foreign correspondent, now writes for
The Boston Globe.
He’s author of a number of books, his latest,
The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain,
and the Birth of American Empire.
Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to ask you,
in terms of the Spanish-American War and,
of course, of the bitter guerrilla war that
developed in the Philippines in the 1899,
1900, the birth of the Anti-Imperialist League
in the United States—it was a widespread
movement of Americans opposed to this overseas
empire.
Could you talk about some of the figures and
the impact of the Anti-Imperialist League?
Because we don’t see that kind of organization
these days, even though the U.S. empire continues
to grow and make itself felt around the world.
STEPHEN KINZER: The story of the Anti-Imperialist
League is a central part of my new book, The
True Flag.
And I like my books always to be voyages of
discovery.
I’m always looking for some really big story
that shaped the world but that we don’t
know about.
And this really is one.
Here’s a story that has almost completely
dropped out of our history books.
But the Anti-Imperialist League was a major
force in American life in the period around
1898, 1900.
It was based in Boston, later moved to Washington,
had chapters all over the United States.
Some of the leading figures in the United
States were members.
The leaders of the Anti-Imperialist League
included billionaires like Andrew Carnegie
and social activists like Jane Addams and
Samuel Gompers, Booker T. Washington.
Grover Cleveland was a member.
It was really a remarkable group.
It staged hundreds of rallies, published thousands
of leaflets, intensely lobbied in Washington,
and actually had quite an impact.
This was a debate that seized the attention
of the entire American people: Should we begin
taking territories outside North America?
Or should we now stop, now that we’ve consolidated
our North American empire?
Everybody in the United States realized this
was a huge decision.
It dominated newspaper coverage.
When the treaty by which the United States
took the Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico
was brought before the Senate, there was a
34-day debate.
That’s the center of my book.
In this debate, you will see every argument,
on both sides, that has ever been used, for
the last 120 years.
Every argument about why intervention is a
good idea or a bad idea starts there.
And the Anti-Imperialist League played a great
role in that debate.
And interestingly enough, that treaty, that
set us off on the path of global empire, was
passed in the Senate by a margin of one vote
more than the required two-thirds majority.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, the—
STEPHEN KINZER: And when it was challenged
in the Supreme Court, it was five to four.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, the most eloquent
spokesman—the most elegant spokesman for
the Anti-Imperialist League was none other
than Mark Twain, no?
STEPHEN KINZER: This is another discovery
I made while I was writing my book.
I grew up with what I now realize was a partial,
a kind of false, image of Mark Twain.
I always thought of him as Mr. Nice Guy.
He’s a sweetheart.
He’s everybody’s favorite old uncle, who
has nice curly white hair and rocks on his
porch and tells nice, funny stories that everybody
laughs at.
This is not correct!
This is not the real Mark Twain.
Mark Twain was an eviscerating anti-imperialist.
He was militant.
He was intent.
He used to write that Americans fighting in
foreign wars were carrying a polluted musket
under a bandit’s flag.
And he even wanted to change the flag of the
United States, to change the stars to skull-and-crossbones
symbols.
So, I now realize that we have sort of sanctified
and bleached Mark Twain for public consumption.
Many of the quotes I use from Twain in my
book do not appear in many biographies or
anthologies.
That part of Twain has been dropped out of
his legacy, and I’m trying to recovery it,
because he speaks to us today.
AMY GOODMAN: Makes me wonder if his books
will start to be taken out of libraries around
the country.
