Summary Of Overthrown By Stephen Kinzer

In the book:" Overthrown" by Stephen Kinzer lays out a little over 100 years of modern American history. He offers warrant for his propositions, and throughout the book starting with sugar plantations in Hawaii, meticulously goes through both supposed scenarios and historical narratives to make his conclusive point: America is good at overthrowing countries and quite bad at knowing what to do afterwards. He puts many of the vague and unwarranted discussions that most likely take place across the United States in perspective, and in doing so will most likely be unpopular in many circles.

The book is at its best when is put together individual stories of little known characters who played decisive roles in the history of US interventions. Kinzer

Most covert actions undertaken in the four decades after World War II were part of larger policies designed to contain the Soviet Union and other communist countries. With the end of the Cold War, the role of covert actions is being reassessed. For many years covert actions were usually undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) without congressional approval or notification, but since the mid-1970s the executive branch has been required to provide increasingly detailed information to congressional intelligence committees on planned and ongoing covert actions. U.S. foreign policy decision makers in the mid-1960s committed a supreme act of misjudgment by intervening directly in the Vietnam War. Under the influences of secretary of state John Foster Dulles and national security adviser Henry Kissinger and the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon and, American leaders hysterically overestimated the threat of Soviet influence around the world and misinterpreted developing countries' nationalistic impulses to own and control their own resources as evidence of Soviet control and Communist tendencies. Finally, expansionists felt that we had an obligation and responsibility to help others less

and George W. Bush, the accounts of Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq show when past American interventions started to come back to haunt them, especially in Afghanistan. Kinzer's book puts the Bush-Iraq fiasco into historical perspective. There are nations out there with natural resources, which America both requires and desires. Any pretext is sufficient to infiltrate such nations and, in the name of democratic reform, appropriate the goods and resources we need to keep capitalism growing at home. It's a simple solution, determined by a philosophy that needs to be wrapped in political rhetoric that conceals the fact that it is contrary to the social and philosophic precepts on which America itself was founded. It abandons traditional American principles such as individual freedom, dissent, equality, etc.. in order to service our economic needs which promote prosperity by appropriating goods from weaker countries that cannot resist American might. The rubrics of Freedom and Democracy are essential factors in withdrawing democracy and freedom from those nations that resist our appropriation of their natural resources. That has certainly been the case since the end of the l9th century, and to attack what has become "the American way" or try to reverse it is perceived as being