Four Important Books on U.S. Foreign Policy—What, Why, and Where?
by Bill Becker

"And as for the modern press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is constitutionally ‘free’— the realist merely asks at whose disposal it is." Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

ALL THE SHAH’S MEN, by New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer. In three parts.
ROGUE NATION, by former U.S. State Department official Clyde Prestowitz.
HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL, by Noam Chomsky.
THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE, by Chalmers Johnson, Far East expert and former consultant to the CIA.


My apologies for the disparate lengths of these home-grown reviews. After reading Rogue Nation and All the Shah's Men, I was literally driven to produce the very long discussions below. I recently finished Hegemony or Survival and Sorrows of Empire, and simply did not have the energy to write more, or even better, than I did. I hope that the briefer treatment of these two books does not disincline the visitor from reading them. For those Americans with an honest desire to understand the hostility felt by millions of global citizens toward the U.S. government —not toward them personally—each of the four books is of major value. Sorrows is perhaps the most unique of this genre to date—it is the first I know of to offer the bold suggestion that for the first time in our history, we are on the verge of losing the republic itself.

Hegemony or Survival and Sorrows of Empire are published by Metropolitan, an imprint of Henry Holt Co.   These two books are a part of a new project at Holt: The American Empire Project.   The AEP website hosts a forum for the discussion of U.S. foreign policy, and links to interviews with Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson.

Comments and corrections are welcome. I reserve the right to post comments anonymously, with my replies.

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ALL THE SHAH’S MEN   AN AMERICAN COUP AND THE ROOTS OF MIDDLE EAST TERROR, by Stephen Kinzer.    (Wiley, 2003)
Part I.  (With thanks to Bonnie.)

Stephen Kinzer is arguably the top foreign correspondent for the New York Times, with extensive experience reporting from Central America and Europe during those regions’ recent eras of turmoil. His new book, ALL THE SHAH’S MEN  is a chilling narrative of the successful overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August, 1953.

The people of Iran had for centuries been repressed by corrupt rulers and foreign powers – in this period, the British. Mossadegh was a genuinely incorruptible politician – passionately nationalist, and a secular, pious, and progressive Muslim. He wanted nothing more for Iran than a decent life and future for the Iranian people. In 1952 he committed the unforgivable sin of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which, in the finest imperialist tradition, had become filthy rich while maintaining the vast majority of Iran’s population in abject poverty. The British government held a 51% share of Anglo-Iranian. Mossadegh was phenomenally popular with virtually all Iranians except the de-nationalized elites who had benefitted from their arrangements with the British: die-hard monarchists, military right-wingers, and much of the up-scale business class. Only a heartless wretch can read with equanimity Kinzer’s contrast between the sumptuous living standards of Anglo-Iranian’s British managers and the squalid conditions the company provided for its workers. In fact, Anglo-Iranian was in direct violation of promises made to Reza Shah, the immediate monarch’s father, to provide decent working and living conditions for its Iranian laborers. The de-nationalized sectors would be instrumental in the plot to depose Mossadegh, even though many of them had to be bribed to overcome their fear of reprisal in case the coup failed. Mossadegh was such a decent man, however, that it is unlikely that any plotters would have received much more than a slap on the wrist.

America's first covert action against a soverign government was code-named Operation Ajax by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. (The British retained their original code name: Operation Boot.) Mohammad Reza Shah had replaced his father, Reza Shah, as monarch when the British forced the latter from the throne in 1941. In the subsequent opening of political space, Mohammad Mossadegh attained formidable political powers, and effectively nullified the influence of the younger, child-like monarch. During the CIA-organized violence against Mossadegh, the Shah had fled the country; the successful coup returned him to the Peacock Throne in triumph. But whereas the Shah had literally been a puppet of the British for over a decade, with a new-found independence born of the effective end of British influence in Iran he soon gathered total power in his own hands and established one of the most brutally repressive regimes the world has known. Washington loved him. (See Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shah of Shahs, Vintage, 1986.)

Kinzer’s meticulously researched work is virtually bullet-proof. The only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that the post-war anti-communism that gripped America, and which provided the excuse to remove Mossadegh form power, was at best a true psychopathology, and at worst, genuinely evil. That psychopathology went on to beget many other CIA-sponsored covert actions against progressive Third World governments, which over time inspired the virulent, global anti-American sentiment that so puzzles millions of well-meaning but historically naive Americans today. Kinzer is entirely correct, and not alone, in his observation that "it is not farfetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

(For example, Monty Woodhouse, the British agent who snuck into Washington in January 1952 to persuade the Dulles brothers to support a coup against Mossadegh, observed in his 1982 memoirs: "It is easy to see Operation Boot as the first step towards the Iranian catastrophe of 1979. What we did not foresee was that the Shah would gather strength and use it so tyrannically, nor that the US government and the Foreign Office wold fail so abjectly to keep him on a reasonable course. At the time we were simply relieved that a threat to British interests had been removed." By then, of course, it was too late. As one of Iran’s top religious leaders, the Ayatollah Ali Khameinei said, "we are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the CIA can snuff out." Considering that the Shah’s father, whom the British had both installed and deposed, was himself a vicious tyrant, Woodhouse reveals nothing less than colossal stupidity; on his part, and on the part of the British government. We are reminded of the not-so-famous quip by [I believe] George Bernard Shaw: "power does not corrupt; fools corrupt power when they attain to it.")

"All the world’s a stage," said the Bard, and with the overthrow of Mossadegh, the U.S. government set on that stage the first act of a long-running tragic farce. From the coup against Guatemala’s popular and progressive president Arbenz the next year, in 1954, through Vietnam, through president Reagan’s criminal attack on Nicaragua, millions of people have died, either through direct military action, or through massively disrupted economies. And for what? For nothing more than to feed the appetite of the U.S. business community.

President Bush and his advisors are directing the current act of this farce. Rather than engage in honest soul-searching toward understanding the sources of global American sentiment, and genuine effort toward making America respected and honored once again, the Bush administration instead has effectively adopted the mentality of our British forbears: military might, globally deployed, brutally employed if necessary, will subdue our enemies and ensure our security. Thus has the Bush administration made it virtually impossible for the American people to engage in a collective examination of the national soul — to genuinely understand that other nations have legitimate aspirations that do not fit the American plan for them, and that many of them have legitimate grievances against the U.S. Thus are we, as a nation, kept in an state of junvenility, continually marching to the drums of war, while we are lulled into moral complacency by memories of our quintessential fantasy hero and his blazing six-shooters: John Wayne.

ALL THE SHAH’S MEN is a stellar treatment of modern Iranian history. Kinzer fills in many of the blanks in our knowledge of the profoundly destructive role America has played in Iran.

Part II
(With more thanks to Bonnie.)

In this important book, Kinzer provides information that should give even the most fervent anti-communist reason to doubt that the U.S. action in Iran was either intelligent or necessary. (Kinzer also provides a useful, and arguably sympathetic, discussion of Shiism , the version of Islam predominant in Iran. When the Arabs conquered Persia, they forced Islam on the population, but this Islam was modified by the precepts of Persia’s original, much older religion, Zoroastrianism. Kinzer notes the Zoroastrian emphasis on social justice and just rule, which is a major element of Shiism.

First, we learn that after failing to intimidate Mossadegh into returning the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company under effectively the same rules that led to its nationalization in the first place, Britian's newly re-elected, super-imperialist Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried mightily to persuade the Truman administration to join Britain in a covert action to remove him from power. Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, rejected Churchill’s underhanded request out of hand. Truman and Acheson held British imperialism in contempt, and while recognizing that Mossadegh was a frustratingly difficult national leader to deal with, they also approved of his progressive reforms and his democratic aspirations for Iran. Contrary to the British, they also took seriously the fact that Mossadegh had been democratically elected and enjoyed the genuine support of the vast majority of Iranian citizens. In essence, they wanted to see Mossadegh succeed.

Second, we learn that the British did not once invoke a "communist threat" to the entire Middle East and beyond if Anglo-Iranian was not returned to them. In fact, the British and the Russian monarchy had in 1907 formally partitioned Iran between them, with the Russians taking the north sector. During WWII, the U.S., the British, and the Soviet Union worked together in Iran for crucially important strategic purposes. In 1944, the pro-Soviet wing of Iran’s first true political party, Tudeh, gained control of the party, and in 1946 even succeeded in winning a majority in Iran’s parliament. Tudeh implemented significant progressive reforms: limitations on child labor, a 48-hour workweek, guaranteed maternity leaves, and a minimum wage. Tudeh’s growing political strength led Stalin to attempt a takeover of Northern Iran in early 1946. He envisioned a "People’s Republic of Azerbaijan" run by Tudeh. Azerbaijanis resisted, and the Iranian Prime Minister at the time, Ahmad Qavam, persuaded Stalin to withdraw his troops as required by the agreement reached before the end of the war. "Jubilant Azerbaijanis celebrated by summarily executing all the Tudeh leaders they could find," writes Kinzer.

Tudeh also suffered in Iran proper. In 1949, a attempt was made to assassinate Mohammad Reza Shah. In spite of the evidence that the would-be assassin was a religious fanatic, the Shah blamed Tudeh, and took repressive measures against it. Thenceforth, Tudeh was only one of several players on the Iranian political field.

This history hardly speaks of a Soviet Union that presented a dire threat to Iranian sovereignty, or even to British commercial interests. The British knew this, and President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson, both savvy and far more scrupulous, knew it. In fact, Kinzer makes it clear that Truman and Acheson believed that the most effective way to forestall a communist Iran was to bring more democracy, more education, more freedom, and higher living standards to the Iranian people. They thought Mossadegh was the man for the job. Thus the British had no choice but to keep their mouths shut regarding a non-existent "communist threat." (More on Kinzer’s treatment of the "communist threat" in Part III of this review.)

Truman chose not to run for re-election, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, running as a Republican on a strong anti-communist platform, won the Presidency in 1952. Even before the inauguration, the British, knowing of the rabid anti-communist sentiments of Secretary of State-designate John Foster Dulles, purposefully played the "communist threat" card. Dulles and his younger brother Alan, who had been appointed to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, easily manipulated Eisenhower into approving a coup against Mossadegh. (Poor Ike: going into his Presidency, he held the same view of Mossadegh as did Truman and Acheson. "I’d like to give the guy ten million bucks," he told British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden before the Dulles brothers worked their magic on him. Our current President, George W. Bush, is clearly as manipulable as Eisenhower was, but in Bush a humanity comparable to Eisenhower’s is much less in evidence.)

Following are a few pertinent tidbits from All The Shah’s Men. Kinzer is indented, others are in single quotes. My clarifications are in brackets.

In 1951 Iranian Prime Minister and British lackey Ali Razmara tried, unsuccessfully, to hold the line against nationalization of Anglo-Iranian.

In August 1952 Truman finally caved in to Churchill’s pressure and asked Mossadegh to return Anglo Iranian to the British and submit to the opinion of the World Court, into which the British had dragged the nationalization controversy. Truman offered a bribe, in the form of a $10 million aid package and the end of the British embargo of Iranian oil, which was literally strangling Iran. Mossadegh rejected the offer in a scornful address to the Iranian parliament.

After the initial coup attempt appeared to fail, the CIA agent in charge, Kermit Roosevelt, regrouped and decided on his own to make another attempt. Just as his second effort appeared on the brink of success, Roosevelt received a cable from Washington, ordering him to 'flee immediately.'

After the coup succeeded:

Those who opposed the coup were right after all:

Finally, Kinzer’s own statement:

In 1984, I heard former CIA agent John Stockwell speak at a meeting of activists opposing President Reagan’s war against the people of Nicaragua. Stockwell had been the CIA station chief in charge of the not-so-covert action against Angola, conceived by President Nixon and his Secretary of State – or National Security Advisor, I don’t recall which – Henry Kissinger. Stockwell later wrote a book about the Angola operation, In Search Of Enemies

In his talk, Stockwell said that CIA recruits were taught how to get a handle on the enemy-designate’s core persona and values by imagining him or her as a 5-year-old child. Kinzer’s description of Kermit Roosevelt and the Cold War CIA agents makes clear that this method is also useful in understanding many of America’s so-called defenders of freedom.

As Roosevelt surreptitiously entered Iran:

Children at play: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. To those who opt for violence as the first response to serious international issues, the advice of peace activist Alice Walker will forever be unintelligible:

Part III

All The Shah’s Men was obviously a labor of love for Kinzer. Early in the book he reveals his respect for the famously eccentric Mossadegh, and for the Iranian people: "In intellect and education he towered above almost all of them [his countrymen], a drawback for a politician in some countries but not in Iran, where those who do not live the life of the mind have always admired those who do." (Alert readers will naturally wonder what countries Kinzer had in mind.)

In 2002, Kinzer went to Iran "looking for traces of Mohammad Mossadegh." On August 19, 49 years to the day Mossadegh was overthrown, he is alone at the compound where the incorruptible Iranian democrat spent the last eleven years of his life, under house arrest. Leaning against a back wall of the compound, Kinzer finds "the tall double doors of a sturdy iron gate." It is the only artifact remaining of Mossadegh’s home in Tehran. "What history this gate has seen!" Kinzer writes. "The house before which this gate stood was wrecked and burned on the night of August 19, 1953, and later the debris was bulldozed to make way for an apartment building. All that remains is the gate. This gives it great historical importance, ... an almost spiritual aura. I placed my hand on it and held it there for a long time." [I was quite moved by Kinzer’s words myself. B.B.]

All The Shah’s Men is a very painful read, but it is of enormous value just because it presents in one compelling narrative a monumental event in U.S. foreign policy, and because it comes at a time when Americans are critically in need of understanding such events. I recommend it without reservation.

Nevertheless, All The Shah’s Men cannot be entirely satisfying to those of us who had already become familiar with much of the information Kinzer presents. For reasons we will probably never know — and to the detriment of his account — Kinzer withholds useful information.

As noted earlier, John Foster Dulles and his younger brother Allen joined the Eisenhower administration as Secretary of State and Director of the CIA, respectively. In fact, Kinzer gives an inadequate account of their history. Kinzer correctly reports that the brothers were born into wealth. Later, before being tapped by Eisenhower for government work, he tells us that they were both lawyers for the "legendary firm of Sullivan & Cromwell." Kinzer notes that "the Dulles brothers developed a special interest in Iran," and that "Foster always mentioned Iran when he spoke about countries he believed might soon fall to communism." What Kinzer fails to reveal is that Sullivan & Cromwell represented two of the world’s largest companies, Exxon and Mobil (each controlled by the Rockefeller family), and that each company had large contracts for oil with Anglo-Iranian, the super-greedy, and blatantly exploitative British oil company nationalized by Mossadegh. No wonder the Dulles Brothers were so concerned about Mossadegh.

The cynical reader will say "So? Nothing new here. Everyone knows that self-interest is what drives businessmen. That’s just politics as usual." Just so. Nevertheless, it is certain that many of Kinzer’s readers will be well-meaning, uncynical Americans who might naively attribute the Dulles brothers’ anti-communism to a sincere desire that the Iranian people be truly free. Contrasted with Truman’s, Acheson’s, and even Eisenhower’s original view that patience, and even assistance to Mossadegh was the best way to prevent a communist take-over in Iran (which, as we will see, under Mossadegh was not in the cards in any case) the Dulles brothers’ choice of violent covert action against him comes across as pathological. There is no valid reason for leaving this information out of any account of the coup. (The lamest excuse would be that there wasn’t room for it.)

Kinzer compounds this narrative lacuna by failing to make proper journalistic use of his long-departed New York Times predecessor, Kennett Love. Love was the Iran correspondent for the Times at the time of the coup, and Kinzer’s highly selective, even mysterious, references to him make for an interesting story in itself.

Mossadegh’s tolerance of Tudeh, the Iranian communist party, played right into the hands of the rabidly anti-communist Dulles brothers. Kennett Love, on the other hand, was equally clear that Mossadegh was firmly anti-communist, and that he had severely suppressed Tudeh when the occasion called for it. But the reader will not learn about this from Kinzer.

To learn more, and more that is interesting, of Kennett Love’s experience in Iran, we must go to a different book, written by Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny seventeen years before the "fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York": Endless Enemies -- The Making of an Unfriendly World. (Congdon & Weed, New York, 1984.)

In the chapter Upsetting the Balance: Iran and Afghanistan, Kwitny tells us that in 1960, Kennett Love wrote a forty-one page report on the coup. We learn that the report was not published, but was instead handed over to then Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, the same man who directed the coup from Washington seven years earlier. Ultimately, Love’s paper disappeared, with all of Dulles’s papers, into the bowels of the Princeton University archives. At the time Kwitny wrote, the Dulles papers were administered by a panel headed by a former CIA legal counsel. They were made available only to selected researchers, on condition that "any articles to be based even indirectly on material from the papers" be submitted to advance review (read: prior censorship). Kwitny says that the Wall Street Journal was refused access to the papers several times, just because it would not agree to advance review.

But, the truth will out, as the saying goes. Kwitny received a copy of Love’s paper from an independent source, and thus did not feel bound to submit Endless Enemies to prior censorship, In fact, Kwitny and Congdon & Weed were pretty gutsy.

Kwitny did not give the title of the Love document in his possession, but Kinzer’s bibliography refers to it follows:

As we will see below Kinzer is familiar with Love’s paper.

On May 28, 1953, Mossadegh asked President Eisenhower for help in breaking the British-led boycott of Iranian oil, which was strangling Iran. Instead of helping Mossadegh, Eisenhower waits until June 29 to suggest that he cave in to the British. In the following sections from Endless Enemies — indented, Love is in double quotes, with Kwitny’s clarifications in square brackets. Italics are Kwitny’s, for emphasis; they do not appear in Love’s original paper. My intervening text is full-left-justified.:

After a nicely objective presentation of the self-serving theories of Mossadegh’s foreign and domestic enemies, Love suggests, au contraire:

Further on, Love reinforces the impression that Mossadegh was a nationalist first and foremost:

Later, Love describes the behavior of Tudeh, the communist bogey-man that Washington evoked to justify the coup. Mr. Carroll is the CIA agent in charge of recruiting street thugs to create the chaos that would be blamed on the communists:

So far, then, we have a report by the New York Times’s man in Iran that Mossadegh opposed communism as much as he opposed British hegemony, and that the communist party in Iran might well have been a paper tiger. While certain of Love’s conjectures may well have been the product of seven years’ hindsight, the events on the ground in 1953 Iran were known to him, and these conclusions might easily have been drawn then. At the least, it is certainly of interest to the modern reader of All The Shah’s Men to know that even in 1960, Love’s observations suggested that the fanatical American anticommunists were wrong; wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Mossadegh. It is of interest to know that these observations were, and still are, being kept under lock-and-key. Truman and Acheson were right, and Kinzer does us a disservice by not giving them stronger posthumous support for their views through Love’s comments.

HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL   AMERICA'S QUEST FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE,by Noam Chomsky.   (Metropolitan, 2003)

Henry Holt makes it easy to request permission to quote from its books, and I was granted permission to quote up to 750 words, with the following credit line:

But the ‘great beast' must be persuaded to support the elites' drive for hegemony. Thus, Chomsky notes:

Further on in the book, Chomsky suggests that elites will seek hegemony even at the cost of survival. (As it happens, the liberal Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galibraith agrees with him: "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." Los Angeles Daily News, Oct or Nov '88.) In his final chapter A Passing Nightmare?, taken from his closing quote of the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell, Chomsky observes:

Hegemony or Survival will perhaps be more satisfying to his loyal fans (count me as one such) than to those who are not familiar with his earlier work. Many of Chomsky's citations are not easily accessed, in the sense that they often refer to his earlier books, wherein the original citations can be found. Moreover, many quotes have no references, and it is unclear whether they come from a just-cited source, or are Chomsky's own rhetorical fragments from earlier work. It is something of a tough read for the non-specialist.

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In Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson focuses on the inextricable ties between imperialism and militarism, and suggests that America will go the way of Rome:

"Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx."

A simple list of Johnson’s four sorrows, encyclopedically described in the text, should suffice to suggest the meaning and importance of the book.

1. Perpetual war. On purpose?

"In fact, given the widespread political unrest and a strong revival of militant Islam, the United States seems inexplicably intent on providing future enemies with enough greivances to do us considerable damage."

2. Threat to democratic government. Johnson documents the attacks on our civil rights and on Constitutional guarantees for the survival of the republic. Brings to mind Ben Franklin’s answer to a question as to the kind of government the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had given Americans: "A republic, if you can keep it." Whether Franklin meant that the "great beast" was not responsible enough to "keep it," or whether he foresaw that elite interests, or perhaps the military, would recreate autocracy is unclear.

Indeed, an internal threat to the republic has not been unthinkable:

"The most illustrious of World War II's militarists, General Douglas MacArthur, chalenged the donstitutional authority of President Truman during the Korean war, writing that it was 'a new and heretofore unknown and dngerous concept that the members of our armed forces owe primary allegiance or loyalty to those who temporarily exercise the authority of the Executive Branch of the Government rather than to the country and its Constitution which they are sworn to defend. No propostition could be more dangerous.'"   Truman fired MacArthur for insubordination on April 11, 1951.

Or, perhaps Franklin had a different threat in mind.

Candidate Bush, during the second presidential debate in 2000:

"If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator."

A year later President Bush tells it like it is to reporter Bob Woodward,

"I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Under the protection of the Praetorian Guard, Roman Emperors didn’t think they owed anyone an explanation either.

3. "...the replacement of truth by propaganda and disinformation and an acceptance of hypocrisy as the norm for declarations coming from our government." Where’s the WMD?

4. Financial ruin. To paraphrase Porgy: "Oh, Lord, we’re on our way."

Johnson neatly sums up the exquisitely Roman attitude that underlies the Bush administration’s foreign policy. "From Cato to Cicero, the slogan of Roman leaders was

"Let them hate us, so long as they fear us" (Oderint dum metuant). (p 285.)

ROGUE NATION   AMERICAN UNILATERALISM AND THE FAILURE OF GOOD INTENTIONS, by Clyde Prestowitz.    (Basic Books, 2003)