Bound for Goo-Goo Land
excerpted from the book
Overthrow
America's Century of Regime Change
from Haiti to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, 2006, paper
p1
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not an isolated episode. It was
the culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew
fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological,
political, and economic reasons.
... No nation in modern history has done
this so often, in so many places so far from its own shores.
p3
... the United States rose to great power at the same time multinational
corporations were emerging as a decisive force in world affairs.
These corporations came to expect government to act on their behalf
abroad, even to the extreme of overthrowing uncooperative foreign
leaders. Successive presidents have agreed that this is a good
way to promote American interests.
The Imperial Era
Bound for Goo-Goo Land
p35
Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean and the last great bastion
of what had once been a vast Spanish empire in the Americas, was
in turmoil during the second half of the nineteenth century. Patriots
there fought a ten-year war of independence that ended with an
inconclusive truce in 1878, and rebelled again in 1879-80. Their
third offensive broke out in 1895. Its chief organizer was an
extravagantly gifted lawyer, diplomat, poet, and essayist, José
Marti, who from his New York exile managed to unite a host of
factions, both within Cuba and in émigré communities.
His success persuaded two celebrated commanders from the first
war, Máximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo, to come out of retirement
and take up arms again. After careful planning, the three of them
landed on the island in the spring of 1895 and launched a new
rebellion.
In the spring of 1897, William McKinley,
a Republican who was supported by Midwestern business interests,
succeeded the anti-imperialist Democrat Grover Cleveland as president
of the United States. Like most Americans, McKinley had long considered
Spanish rule to be a blight on Cuba. The prospect of the Cubans
governing themselves, however, alarmed him even more. He worried
that an independent Cuba would become too assertive and not do
Washington's bidding.
McKinley had reason to worry. Cuban rebel
leaders were promising that once in power, they would launch sweeping
social reforms, starting with land redistribution. That struck
fear into the hearts of American businessmen, who had more than
$50 million invested on the island, most of it in agriculture.
Early in 1898, McKinley decided it was time to send both sides
in the conflict a strong message. He ordered the battleship Maine
to leave its place in the Atlantic Fleet and head for Havana.
Officially the Maine was simply making
a "friendly visit," but no one in Cuba took that explanation
seriously. All realized that she was serving as a "gunboat
calling card," a symbol of America's determination to control
the course of events in the Caribbean. For three weeks she lay
quietly at anchor in Havana. Then, on the night of February 15,
1898, she was torn apart by a tremendous explosion. More than
250 American sailors perished. News of the disaster electrified
the United States. All assumed that Spain was responsible, and
when the navy issued a report blaming the disaster on "an
external explosion," their assumptions turned to certainty.
Many Americans already felt a passionate
hatred for Spanish colonialism and a romantic attachment to the
idea of "Cuba Libre." Their emotions had been fired
by a series of wildly sensational newspaper reports that together
constitute one of the most shameful episodes in the history of
the American press. William Randolph Hearst, the owner of the
New York Journal and a string of other newspapers across the country,
had been attracting readers for months with vivid denunciations
of Spanish colonialists.
... The moment Hearst heard about the
sinking of the Maine, he recognized it as a great opportunity.
For weeks after the explosion, he filled page after page with
mendacious "scoops," fabricated interviews with unnamed
government officials, and declarations that the battleship had
been "destroyed by treachery" and "split in two
by an enemy's secret infernal machine." The Journal's daily
circulation doubled in four weeks. Other newspapers joined the
frenzy, and their campaign brought Americans to near-hysteria.
With such intense emotion surging through
the United States, it was easy for McKinley to turn aside repeated
offers from the new Spanish prime minister, Práxedes Sagasta,
to resolve the Cuban conflict peacefully.
... negotiations would most likely have
led to an independent Cuba where neither the United States nor
any other country would have military bases. This was hardly the
outcome McKinley wanted, and it would have horrified expansionists
like Roosevelt, Lodge, and Mahan. Lodge went so far as to warn
McKinley that if he did not intervene, he would kill Republican
chances in that year's election.
... on April 11 [President McKinley] asked
Congress to authorize "forcible intervention" in Cuba.
p38
Members of Congress were reluctant to vote for McKinley's war
resolution as long as the Cuban people opposed it. They had refused
to annex Hawaii after it became clear that most Hawaiians were
against the idea. Now, five years later, Americans were showing
the same reluctance. Many were uncomfortable with the idea of
sending soldiers to aid a movement that did not want American
help. To secure congressional support for intervention in Cuba,
McKinley agreed to accept an extraordinary amendment offered by
Senator Henry Teller of Colorado. It began by declaring that "the
people of the island of Cuba are, and of right ought to be, free
and independent" and ended with a solemn pledge: "The
United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to
exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island
except for the pacification thereof, and assets its determination,
when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control
of the island to its people." The Senate approved it unanimously.
That promise, which came to be known as
the Teller Amendment, calmed the rebels' fears.
... On April 25, Congress declared that
a state of war existed between the United States and Spain. Members
of the House of Representatives celebrated their vote by breaking
into rousing choruses of "Dixie" and "The Battle
Hymn of the Republic" as they left the chamber. "A spirit
of wild jingoism seems to have taken possession of this usually
conservative body," McKinley's secretary wrote in his diary.
A nation that was still recovering from
the bitter divisions of the Civil War finally had a cause everyone
could embrace. President McKinley called for 125,000 military
volunteers, and more than twice that number poured into recruiting
stations. The New York Journal suggested that heroic athletes
like the baseball star Cap Anson and the boxing champion "Gentleman"
Jim Corbett be recruited to lead an elite unit. Not to be outdone,
the rival New York World published an article by Buffalo Bill
Cody headlined, "How I Could Drive the Spaniards from Cuba
with Thirty Thousand Braves!" Theodore Roosevelt announced
that he would quit his post as assistant secretary of the navy
to raise and lead a fighting unit.
"It was a war entered without misgivings
and in the noblest frame of mind," the military historian
Walter Millis wrote thirty years later. "Seldom can history
have recorded a plainer case of military aggression; yet seldom
has a war been started in so profound a conviction of its righteousness."
Events moved quickly in the weeks that
followed. Roosevelt ordered Commodore George Dewey to proceed
to Manila Bay, in the Philippines, and destroy the Spanish fleet
that had been deployed there.
... Six weeks later, American soldiers
landed near Santiago on Cuba's southeastern coast. They fought
three one-day battles, the most famous being the one in which
Roosevelt, dressed in a uniform he had ordered from Brooks Brothers,
led a charge up Kettle Hill, later called San Juan Hill. On July
3, American cruisers destroyed the few decrepit Spanish naval
vessels anchored at Santiago. Spanish forces soon ended their
resistance, and the Cuban and American commanders, Generals Calixto
Garcia and William Shafter, prepared to accept their formal surrender.
Before the ceremony, though, Shafter astonished Garcia by sending
him a message saying he could not participate in the ceremony
or even enter Santiago. That was the first hint that the United
States would not keep the promise Congress had made when it passed
the Teller Amendment.
... With victory won, the time had come
for the United States to begin its withdrawal and, in the words
of the Teller Amendment, "leave the government and control
of the island to its people." Instead it did the opposite.
In the United States, enthusiasm for Cuban
independence faded quickly. Whitelaw Reid, the publisher of the
New York Tribune and the journalist closest to President McKinley,
proclaimed the "absolute necessity of controlling Cuba for
our own defense," and rejected the Teller Amendment as "a
self-denying ordinance possible only in a moment of national hysteria."
Senator Beveridge said it was not binding because Congress had
approved it "in a moment of impulsive but mistaken generosity."
The New York Times asserted that Americans had a "higher
obligation" than strict fidelity to ill-advised promises,
and must become "permanent possessors of Cuba if the Cubans
prove to be altogether incapable of self-government."
These pillars of American democracy were
arguing quite explicitly that the United States was not obligated
to keep promises embodied in law if those promises were later
deemed to have been unwisely made. Over the next year, they and
others justified this remarkable argument through a series of
propositions. All were calculated to soothe the public conscience,
and all were largely or completely false.
... Few American correspondents had been
in Cuba to watch as rebels built their power over a period of
years, won broad popular support, and waged a highly successful
guerrilla war. To most of these journalists, the war began only
when American forces landed in the spring of 1898. None understood
that Cuban units had secured the beaches where American soldiers
landed near Santiago; even the American naval commander there,
Admiral William Sampson, said afterward that the absence of Spanish
troops on the beaches "remains a mystery." Other Cubans
served as scouts and intelligence agents for the Americans, although
they indignantly refused repeated demands that they work as porters
and laborers.
To most Americans, war consisted of set-piece
battles in which armies faced off. They loved reading about charges
like the one at San Juan Hill, in which few Cubans participated.
The long war of attrition that Cubans had waged unfolded far from
the view of American officers and correspondents. Most of them
did not realize that this campaign played a decisive role in the
victory of 1898.
p41
"None of us thought that [American intervention] would be
followed by a military occupation of the country by our allies,
who treat us as a people incapable of acting for ourselves, and
who have reduced us to obedience, to submission, and to a tutelage
imposed by force of circumstances," General Máximo
Gomez wrote. "This cannot be our fate after years of struggle."
Most Americans had little regard for Cubans,
so it was natural that they would reject such protests. Many went
even further. They were angry that Cubans had not fallen on their
knees to thank the United States for liberating them.
... Cuban patriots had for years promised
that after independence, they would stabilize their country by
promoting social justice. Americans wanted something quite different.
"The people ask me what we mean by stable government in Cuba,"
the new military governor, General Leonard Wood, wrote in a report
to Washington soon after he assumed office in 1900. "I tell
them that when money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest
and when capital is willing to invest in the land, a condition
of stability will have been reached." In a note to President
McKinley, he was even more succinct: "When people ask me
what I mean by stable government, I tell them, 'Money at six percent."
p42
... Secretary of War Elihu Root, who had been a leading corporate
attorney in New York, and Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut,
chairman of the Senate Committee on Relations with Cuba, wrote
the law that would shape Cuba's future. The Platt Amendment, as
it came to be known, is a crucial document in the history of American
foreign policy. It gave the United States a way to control Cuba
without running it directly, by maintaining a submissive local
regime. Washington would go on to apply this system in many parts
of the Caribbean and Central America, where to this day it is
known as plattismo.
Under the Platt Amendment, the United
States agreed to end its occupation of Cuba as soon as the Cubans
accepted a constitution with provisions giving the United States
the right to maintain military bases in Cuba; the right to veto
any treaty between Cuba and any other country; the right to supervise
the Cuban treasury; and "the right to intervene for the preservation
of Cuban independence or] the maintenance of a government adequate
for the protection of life, property and individual liberty."
In essence, the Platt Amendment gave Cubans permission to rule
themselves as long as they allowed the United States to veto any
decision they made.
p47
McKinley was a devout Christian living in an era of religious
revivalism. He would later tell a group of Methodist missionaries
that while he was wrestling with the Philippines question, he
fell to his knees in the White House on several evenings "and
prayed Almighty God for light and guidance."
"One night late, it came to me this
way," he said. "There was nothing left for us to do
but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos and uplift
them and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best
we could for them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died."
... "The episode marked a pivotal
point in the American experience," Stanley Karnow wrote
in his history of the Philippines. "For the first time, U.S.
soldiers fought overseas. And, for the first time, America was
to acquire territory beyond its shores-the former colony itself
becoming colonialist."
On May 1, 1898, three weeks after destroying
the Spanish fleet, Dewey welcomed the Filipino guerrilla leader
Emilio Aguinaldo aboard his flagship the Olympia.
p48
President McKinley, obeying what he took to be the word of God,
had decided that the United States should assume ownership not
simply of an enclave at Manila but of the entire Philippine archipelago.
He directed his negotiators in Paris to offer the Spanish $20
million for it. Spain was in no position to refuse, and on December
10, American and Spanish diplomats signed what became known as
the Treaty of Paris. It gave the United States possession of Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and the distant Philippine archipelago, which had
more than seven thousand islands and a population of seven million.
On December 21, McKinley issued an "executive
letter" proclaiming American sovereignty over the Philippines.
Rebels there were already proceeding along their own path. They
had elected a constituent assembly that produced a constitution,
and under its provisions the Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed
on January 23, 1899, with Aguinaldo as its first president. Twelve
days later, this new nation declared war against United States
forces on the islands. McKinley took no notice. To him the Filipinos
were what the historian Richard Welch called "a disorganized
and helpless people."
p49
President McKinley may well have believed that God wished the
United States to "uplift" and "Christianize"
the Filipino people. Speeches by senators during the treaty debate,
along with many articles in the press, however, offered a more
tangible rationale for taking the Philippines. businessmen had
become fascinated with the prospect of selling goods in China,
which, after losing a war with Japan in 1895, had become weak
and incapable of resisting intervention. They saw a magnificent
confluence of circumstances, as this vast land became available
for exploitation at the same time they were casting desperately
about for new markets.
p50
It began in February 1899, with a pitched battle for Manila. From
the beginning, there was little doubt about how it would end.
The insurgents had the advantage of numbers, but by every other
standard the Americans were clearly superior. Aguinaldo and his
troops were crippled by a lack of weaponry, enforced by an effective
American naval blockade. American soldiers landed in waves, by
the tens of thousands, eager to fight against an enemy of whose
motivations they were blissfully unaware. In letters home, they
told friends and relatives that they had come "to blow every
nigger to nigger heaven" and vowed to fight "until the
niggers are killed off like Indians."
Faced with these handicaps, the guerrillas
turned to tactics unlike any the Americans had ever seen. They
laid snares and booby traps, slit throats, set fires, administered
poisons, and mutilated prisoners. The Americans, some of whose
officers were veteran Indian fighters, responded in kind. When
two companies under the command of General Lloyd Wheaton were
ambushed southeast of Manila, Wheaton ordered every town and village
within twelve miles to be destroyed and their inhabitants killed.
During the first half of the Philippine
War, American commanders imposed censorship on foreign correspondents
to assure that news of episodes like this did not reach the home
audience. Only after censorship was lifted in 1901 were Americans
able to learn how the war was being waged. Newspapers began carrying
reports like one filed early in 1901 by a correspondent from the
Philadelphia Ledger.
Our present war is no bloodless, fake,
opera bouffe engagement. Our men have been relentless; have killed
to exterminate men, women, children, / prisoners and captives,
active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up,
an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better
than a dog, noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition
was the rubbish heap. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into
men to "make them talk," have taken prisoner people
who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour
later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even
insurrections, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by
one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example
to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses.
p53
Colonel Jacob Smith, American officer in the Philippines, 1901
"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more
you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me."
p53
During one long and amazingly ill-conceived march through the
Samar jungle, eleven marines perished from a combination of starvation
and exposure. Their captain, delirious and only intermittently
conscious, became convinced that their Filipino porters had contributed
to their deaths by withholding potatoes, salt, and other supplies.
He singled out eleven of them, one for each dead marine, and had
them shot.
Americans had used harsh tactics since
the beginning of the Philippine War, but the summary execution
of eleven Filipinos who were working for them, and who had committed
no apparent crime, was too much for commanders to ignore. They
ordered the offending officer court-martialed on charges of murder.
He was eventually acquitted, but the case set off an explosion
of outrage in the United States.
Until this episode, many Americans had
believed that their soldiers were different from others, operating
on a higher moral plane because their cause was good. After Balangiga,
however, a flood of revelations forced them out of their innocence.
Newspaper reporters sought out returned veterans and from their
accounts learned that American soldiers in the Philippines had
resorted to all manner of torture. The most notorious was the
"water cure," in which sections of bamboo were forced
down the throats of prisoners and then used to fill the prisoners'
stomachs with dirty water until they swelled in torment. Soldiers
would jump on the prisoner's stomach to force the water out, often
repeating the process until the victim either informed or died.
This technique was ... widely reported in the United States ...
"We have actually come to do the
thing we went to war to banish," the Baltimore American lamented.
The Indianapolis News concluded that the United States had adopted
"the methods of barbarism," and the New York Post declared
that American troops "have been pursuing a policy of wholesale
and deliberate murder." David Starr Jordan, the president
of Stanford University, declared that Filipinos had done no more
than rebel against "alien control" and that therefore
"it was our fault and ours alone that this war began."
The revered Harvard professor William James said that Americans
were guilty of "murdering another culture" and concluded
one of his speeches by declaring, "God damn the U.S. for
its vile conduct in the Philippines!" Mark Twain suggested
that the time had come to redesign the American flag with "the
white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by skull and
crossbones."
This spasm of recrimination continued
for several months, but soon a counter campaign began. Defenders
of American policy, who at first were too overwhelmed by the onslaught
of horrific revelations to respond, finally found their voice.
Extreme conditions, they insisted, had forced soldiers to act
as they did. The New York Times argued that "brave and loyal
officers" had reacted understandably to the "cruel,
treacherous, murderous" Filipinos. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat
said that American soldiers had done nothing in the Philippines
that they had not done during the Civil War and that "in
view of the provocation received and the peculiar nature of the
task to be performed, the transgressions have been extremely slight."
The Providence Journal urged its readers to accept "the wisdom
of fighting fire with fire."
A second theme that echoed through the
press was that any atrocities committed to the Philippines had
been aberrations. They were "deplorable," the St. Paul
Pioneer Press conceded, but had "no bearing on fundamental
questions of national policy." The New York Tribune said
only a few soldiers were guilty and "the penalty must fall
not upon the policy, but upon those men."
By the time this debate reached its crescendo,
in the early months of 1902, President McKinley had been assassinated
and replaced in office by Theodore Roosevelt. To Roosevelt fell
the task of defending the honor of the troops he loved, and he
embraced it even though he had never been enthusiastic about the
Philippine operation. He enlisted his close friend and ally Henry
Cabot Lodge to lead the defense. In a long and eloquent speech
on the Senate floor, Lodge conceded that there had been cases
"of water cure, of menaces of shooting unless information
was given up, of rough and cruel treatment applied to secure information."
But Americans who lived "in sheltered homes far from the
sound and trials of war," he warned, could not understand
the challenges of bringing law to a "semi-civilized people
with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics."
"Let us, oh, let us be just, at least
to our own," Lodge begged the Senate.
At Roosevelt's suggestion, Lodge arranged
for the Senate to hold hearings into charges of American misconduct
in the Philippines. It was a clever move. Lodge himself ran the
hearings, and he carefully limited their scope. There was much
testimony about operational tactics, but no exploration of the
broader policy that lay behind them. The committee did not even
issue a final report. One historian described its work as "less
a whitewash than an exercise in sleight-of-hand."
On July 4, 1902, soon after the investigating
committee ended its work, President Roosevelt declared the Philippines
pacified. He was justified in doing so. The important guerrilla
leaders had been killed or captured and resistance had all but
ceased. It had been a far more costly operation than anyone had
predicted at the outset. In three and a half torturous years of
war, 4,374 American soldiers were killed, more than ten times
the toll in Cuba. About sixteen thousand guerrillas and at least
twenty thousand civilians were also killed. Filipinos remember
those years as some of the bloodiest in their history. Americans
quickly forgot that the war ever happened.
Overthrow
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