Dangerous visions
Two books decrying US intervention abroad take a narrow view, a critic argues
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
By James Carroll
Houghton Mifflin, 657 pp., illustrated, $30
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq
By Stephen Kinzer
Holt, 384 pp., illustrated, $27.50
One of the most disastrous effects of the war in Iraq is that it has rekindled naive isolationism in the United States. That isolationism, what historian David Fromkin has called the United States' ''exclusive concern with self," dominated America's foreign-policy psyche for a century and a half before the Great War. It took that war, along with genocide in Europe and a belligerent Japan 20 years later, to shake Americans from the assumption that events elsewhere in the world were not their concern. Following the end of the Cold War, America was once more tempted to recoil into its comfortable North American confines. But the Balkan genocide ensured America's continued global engagement. Now, the aftermath of war in Iraq threatens to withdraw America from world affairs once again.
Pushing this new isolationism has been a stream of books from journalists-turned-historians, and vice versa, bearing the message that Iraq proves that America's purpose in world affairs -- promoting democracy -- is fundamentally flawed. The latest is Stephen Kinzer's ''Overthrow," a cobbled-together history of 15 ''regime change" operations carried out by the United States over the last 100 years or so. Kinzer is a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and a onetime reporter for The Boston Globe who has reported from a number of the countries that his book discusses. His writing is characteristically excellent. But his underlying premise is less impressive. He traces the histories of US policies in such places as Chile, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and a host of other countries. These histories have been told before. But Kinzer ostensibly believes there is some value in bringing them together. By doing so, he hopes to show that when the United States tries to deal with oppressive or dangerous states via overt or clandestine military action, ''it destabilizes the world rather than stabilizing it."
Kinzer is right to point out that many of these interventions were flawed, and his writing details the shortcomings pretty well. No one would argue that the US approach in, say, Chile or Iraq has been perfect. The trouble is that the message Kinzer hopes readers will take away from his book is this: ''Modern history makes eminently clear that when the United States engages with oppressive and threatening regimes, using combinations of incentives, threats, punishments, and rewards, those regimes slowly become less dangerous." Just look, he says, at how much success the United States has had with engaging China and Russia. These seem odd examples to hold up as role models, considering that democracy has hardly succeeded in either. Both countries are arguably experiencing less democracy than they were just five years ago. More fundamentally, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who opposed the war in Iraq, noted recently in The
This fact appears increasingly lost on a growing number of Americans, particularly those who came of age during the Vietnam War and now use the war in Iraq as proof that America is little more than a vengeful, greedy empire. ''We do not ordinarily see ourselves as a vengeful people," James Carroll concludes in ''House of War." ''But it is what we have become." Carroll is an accomplished writer. He won the 1996 National Book Award for his memoir, ''An American Requiem." ''House of War" is part memoir too, as Carroll admits. His father worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the book begins with Carroll's recollections of playing in the Pentagon hallways as a child. Carroll's aim is to follow the rise of the Pentagon, from World War II to Iraq, and, along the way, prove just how dangerous an institution it has become.
Carroll's ability to blend together bits of history is as impressive as his writing. But he falls victim to some of the same tired cliches as Kinzer. His straw man is the military-industrial complex, which he portrays as inventing enemies, although ultimately in a more balanced and thoughtful way than does Kinzer. There is little doubt this book will be a hit with those who are looking for reinforcement of the conspiracy theories that say that executives at the Lockheed Martins and ExxonMobils of the world are the ones making the decisions in Washington. Yet Carroll makes a considerable effort to fulfill the historian's duty of considering individuals' decisions as they might have been made at the time. There are a few exceptions. His look at Truman's decision to drop the bomb goes beyond revisionist and post-revisionist history into the realm of moralistic, 20-20 hindsight. He is dismissive of the estimates of American lives that were saved by the bomb and argues that there was serious questioning of Truman's decision at the time. It's a line of thinking that is colored by Carroll's obvious hatred for all things atomic.
Engaging in that kind of history with regard to the dropping of the atomic bombs can be forgiven. But both Kinzer's and Carroll's books do the same with Iraq. They write the history of Iraq as though it has been decided; so decided, in fact, that we can now draw lessons from it about America's flawed purpose in the world. There is little question at this stage that history will harshly judge the way the war and postwar in Iraq were planned for and executed. But damning America's commitment to democracy promotion, which runs long and deep, should wait. Last November, I heard the Dalai Lama speak at Stanford University. His Holiness was asked in a question if the Iraq war was wrong. His reply was that it was too early to pass judgment. It was a wise response because it is easy to mistake failures of leadership for failures of purpose.
Michael C. Boyer is associate editor at Foreign Policy magazine. 
