About : standard furniture vietnam
Title : standard furniture vietnam
standard furniture vietnam
welcome to books of our time produced by themassachusetts school of law and seen across the nation today we shall discuss a book entitledoverthrow by stephen kinzer a former reporter for the new york times who has reported formore than fifty countries on four continents overthrow is about america's more than onehundred year long history of overthrowing foreign governments that we don't like byamerican invasions or by american sponsored coup de tats we have a long history of militarizedaction some would say militarist action usually in service of our commercial interests andnote that the long history of military action discussed by kinzer does not even includemajor wars like world war i world war ii and korea kinzer sees our current actions in iraqnot as a mere aberration due solely to george
bush but as following in train of one hundredplus years of similar actions and philosophy which americans don't know about because heelaborates a long standing foreign policy tradition that most of us are largely ignorantof kinzer's book is vital to anyone who wants to understand american's foreign policy todaystephen kinzer is here with me to discuss his book and i am lawrence r velvel the deanof the massachusetts school of law thank you for sitting for a second interview stephenuh i must say that i think a lot of people who i hope read the full book probably learninga great deal that they didn't know before as i did when i read the book and in listeningto you also in the second half of the twentieth century there seemed to be a break when insteadof overthrowing other governments by invasion
the smedley butleresque type of action westarted overthrowing them in many cases by fomenting coup de tats and this occurred onemight say on the watch of a fellow who's been largely forgotten now john foster dulles anduh then uh another person who had an enormous impact on american foreign policy subsequentlytwenty years later was henry kissinger i'd like to discuss each of those individualsbefore we discuss things like iran panama and other times when we overthrew governmentstell us if you would about john foster dulles who he was his background uh what he did professionallywhat his world views were uh and what his views were as secretary of state john fosterdulles was a fascinating figure i really think as you say he has been a little bit underestimatedin terms of his importance i i think that
he set patterns for the united states whichwe followed for almost all the second half of the twentieth century and even up to thepresent day uh dulles was a corporate lawyer in new york with the firm of sullivan andcromwell uh that was the most powerful uh multi national law firm in america and uhdulles was the most powerful and most highly paid international lawyer in the united statesthe list of the clients of sullivan and cromwell is more or less a list of all the big multinational corporations of uh the period of the mid twentieth century everything fromthe international nickel company to the cuban sugar cane company to the haitian railroadcompany to the united fruit company uh dulles clients were digging ports in brazil and openingbanks in saudi arabia mining in columbia they
were all over the world so he developed thisidea that the most important thing the united states could do in the world is make surethat american companies could work freely that was his idea of what the us governmentshould be doing uh and by the time he became secretary of state he was already well passedsixty his world view was very well formed in addition to his experience as a corporatelawyer he also had another aspect of his personality that i think was very important and that isreligious aspect dulles' father was a clergy man when dulles was a kid he used to haveto go to mass every day three masses on sunday he had to memorize fifteen lines from thebible and one psalm every week his grandfather was a missionary who had been buried in ceylonwhich is now sri lanka uh for a time he was
considering becoming a preacher and actuallydid become an elder in the presbyterian church a trustee of union theological seminary sohe was also shaped by a particular kind of religious belief can i ask a question wasn'tdid didn't he have a grandfather also who was secretary of state who he used to accompanyabsolutely john watson foster after whom foster dulles was named was actually the secretaryof state who helped organize the overthrow of the government of hawaii fifty years beforedulles came into office so dulles came in with a sort of silver spoon he came from afamily of great privilege uh his religious belief i think lead him to conclude the worldwas divided between the good and the evil and that uh as he once put it there are peoplewho are good and christian and believe in
free enterprise and then there are the othersyeah uh dulles uh fervently opposed any kind of compromise with those that he consideredamerica's enemies dulles had actually been quite friendly with nazi germany as a lawyerhe spent a lot time in germany his law firm represented some of the major firms that supportedthe nazi regime right up until the mid 'til about 1942 he only left germany because theother partners in the firm insisted on it so he never really saw a danger in nazismbut he saw a huge danger after the war in communism it was communism that he built upas the ultimate evil in the world and for example he was against any negotiation withany communist country he was against cultural exchanges even with the soviet union he foughtfor years to prevent us newspapers from sending
correspondents to china he believed that evidenceof agreement with the soviets on any subject was bad for the us because it was just a ruseto get us to let our guard down so they could come in and hit us so uh dulles came intooffice with this very manachean good evil view of the world and there was also therewas also a couple of vey interesting factors about the era in which he emerged in the earlynineteen fifties the first has to do with something you mentioned in your introductionand that is big change in the world that had occurred that made it impossible for the unitedstates to overthrow foreign governments by invading the way we had been doing it in thepast and what was that big change it was the emergence of the soviet union now there wasthe red army that functioned as a kind of
counter balance to the united states and ifwe invaded some country this risked provoking soviet reaction which could spiral way outof control and chinese communists reacting after nineteen fifty absolutely so we werelooking for a new way to overthrow governments and uh that was when uh dulles decided toturn to the cia in addition i think you have to put yourself back in that era and uh realizethat uh many americans got the feeling that uh communist power was on the march and wewere losing don't forget that the chinese the communists took over in china they almosttook over in greece the soviet union developed a nuclear bomb we had the berlin airlift wehad the take over of eastern european states by the soviet union a whole series of eventsincluding the korean war lead us to believe
we were being surrounded now from the sovietpoint of view considering its history the idea of wanting to take the states in easterneurope as buffers made sense it didn't look that way to us but the soviets didn't havethe interest in say taking over countries in latin america we didn't believe that thoughwe didn't realize that at the time we had the feeling that everything that happenedin the world that was bad for the us or bad for an american corporation must have beenpart of a plot that was formulated in the kremlin so dulles came into power with thebelief as h had stated during the election campaign in 1952 that the united states neededto go out and roll back communism and that became kind of a light motif of his time inoffice if i may interject that was a disgrace
like kennedy's claim about a missile gap wasalso a few years later because uh there was no way that we milit we militarily were goingto roll back communism and he said truman was soft on communism this is the guy whowent into korea by himself without a congressional declaration and he's soft on communism wellthe odd thing was that uh dulles came to believe that the only way the united states couldroll back communism was to attack countries that in the end were not really communistas you said it wasn't realistic to think that we could attack real communist countries likechina or soviet union so once he came into office he was faced with this reality we needto roll back communism because that's what we promised to do but where are we going todo it and so instead of focusing on countries
that truly were communist we focused on countrieswhere there were nationalist leaders that were bothering big multi national companieswe decided that if they were doing that they must be communists so they would be our targetright right people tend to forget that in addition to places like iran dulles was largelyresponsible for what happened in vietnam because the americans would not participate in thegeneva settlement and in fifty six when there were supposed to be elections to unite thetwo halves of the country we were the ones who persuaded the south don't do it actuallythere's a wonderful story that i tell in my book about uh vietnam you're absolutely rightso in nineteen fifty four there was a conference held in geneva in which uh following the withdrawalof the french from vietnam a decision was
made that uh vietnam would be temporarilydivided into a north and a south and then two years later there would be an electionthrough the whole country and then the country would be united under whoever won the electionit became clear as 1956 came closer that the winner of this election by far would be hochi minh who was a communist he was the nationalist leader who had overthrown the japanese whohad fought the japanese in world war 2 and had overthrown the french so he was the georgewashington of vietnam and certainly would have been elected president as even eisenhowerpublicly admitted so i have this scene in my book which i find absolutely fascinatingin which the person we had selected as the interim president of south vietnam ngo dinhdiem has sent a cable to dulles and the stories
actually recounted by a guy who is in theroom when dulles is reading the cable and he said i remember distinctly the clock tickingthe seconds away on the wall as dulles read this cable and finally he looked up and saidi don't think diem wants to hold this election and i think we should support him on thisso the whole beginning of the crisis that lead to the vietnam war began with the decisionof the united states which was actually the decision of john foster dulles not to followthe agreement which was reached in geneva and allow the unification of vietnam in the1950's. and what happened in the end if we had allowed vietnam to become unified as thetreaty had agreed we would have had a unified vietnam under communist rule instead we foughta 20 year war we lost 50,000 americans and
millions of vietnamese were killed and whatwas the end result a unified vietnam under communist rule it had the same result yeahexactly alright we'll come back in just a few minutes we'll have more on these fascinatingsubjects with steven kinzer i remember theday my future started i was walking with beau thinking about my life ihad big dreams but my career was going nowhere that's when idiscovered the massachusetts school of law a few yearslater i'm here with beau but now i'm thinking aboutmy client's problems instead of my own teachers with real worldexperience up
a fun campus and the most affordable law schoolin new england change your life at the massachusettsschool of law at andover your future starts here one of the things that's really fascinatingabout dulles as you describe him that is particularly fascinating in view of the contemporary stresson teamwork is you say dulles was a man who communed with himself to make decisions hewent into a room and thought by himself would go home at night have a couple of drinks andthink by himself every night and this is how he made decisions even the assistant secretariesof state didn't know what dulles was thinking it used to be said that he carried the statedepartment in his hat and you know i have
a particular quirk as i think a lot of peoplewho are interested in history do i like to go to the actual places where history wasmade rooms or fields or places or edifices i have put my hand on the door where martinluther nailed his 93 theses, i've been in the room where dostoyevsky wrote his greatworks when i was making a visit to texas i discovered something quite remarkable andit is that the living room of john foster dulles's house where he used to sit and havehis drinks in front of the fire place and although no one knows what he was thinkinghe was planning these overthrows of foreign governments has actually been taken in itsentirety out of the house where it used to be and is now a museum exhibit in a libraryin austin texas on the campus of the university
of texas so i was actually able to go intothat room and you actually see there's the drapes and there's the furniture and there'sthe fireplace and there's all the little knick-knacks and the books and the souvenirs and his littlejade collection and gifts that he'd been given by foreign leaders and i was looking at thatchair and thinking john foster dulles was sitting in that chair looking in that fireplacein this room when he was plotting the overthrow of governments like iran and guatemala somuch of what changed the world came from right out of this room it was a very moving experience.yeah startling they're redoing the anderson cottage where lincoln did a lot of time andwe'll get some of the same feeling in fact it's open now i understand after having beenredone alright that's dulles a most unusual
character in american history. henry kissingerwhat kind of person was he and what was his world view all about did it comport with thetraditional american world view kissinger of course was born in europe he was a jewishrefugee from nazi germany and i think he did not grow up with the appreciation of americandemocratic principles that many americans grew up with he drew from world war two ithink two lessons that many people of his generation drew and i think they have bothbeen tragically misapplied those were the lessons of munich and the lesson of pearlharbor the lesson of munich is never negotiate with your enemy it's only a trick and thelesson of pearl harbor was no matter how quiet you think things are there could be somebodyout there plotting to destroy you and he's
going to bomb you with no warning so you haveto go out there first and hit him so these were parts of the kissinger mentality kissingerwas also very much a product of the european diplomatic tradition he wrote his thesis atharvard on prince metternich who was one of the greatest practitioners of big power diplomacykissinger had this idea that the us should project its power in the world through a seriesof regional allies in every part of the world we should have one country that was big andpowerful and we would arm that country we would support it's government regardless ofwhat that government did we would allow it to be as oppressive as it wanted as long asit would allow us to use that country as a base from which to project our power thatbecame the congo, later zaire in africa, indonesia,
iran during the shah's rule certainly wasa part of that now there's one very interesting difference between kissinger and dulles dulleshad spent his entire life in the service of corporate power kissinger had no interestin and almost a kind of a disdain for business and for economic interests and i think thisshows you that theres an interesting process that happens when americans carry out theseinterventions the first phase is always that some company gets in trouble with some foreigncountry and then the leaders of that company come to washington and complain and ask theus government to do something about it but the us government and the leaders of our countryand kissinger is a classic example of this do not overthrow foreign governments onlyto protect american businesses they convince
themselves that any government that wouldbother a big american or a big foreign corporation must be anti-american anti-democratic repressivebrutal probably a tool of our enemies and therefore it must be overthrown not becauseit bothered this american company but because the fact that it would do so means that it'sa political and strategic threat to the us so this is how kissinger was able to convincehimself for example that the reason he was directing the overthrow of salvador allendein chile in 1973 was not because allende was nationalizing the copper industry he was notdoing this to protect the big copper companies anaconda and kennecott he was doing this becauseallende had proven by the fact that they want to do this that was a strategic enemu of theunited states so he convinced himself that
he was acting for political rather than economicmeans something that dulles never had to do economic goals were enough for him. we alwaysact in the name of higher principle allegedly and we always assume the worst possible casewill happen unless we do something right now most recently this is called preventive warwe're going to a short break stay with us we'll be right back with a discussion by stephenkinzer of what happened in iran with mossadegh the british and ourselves in the years late1952 and really 1953. allison was a legal assistant with much bigger dreamseric turned his business background into so much morethey found their futures at the massachusetts school of lawand so can you immerse yourself in a fun supportive
campus environment learn professional skillsfrom instructors with real-world experience take the first step in changing your lifeat the most affordable law school in new englandthe massachusetts school of law at andover yourfuture starts here welcome back why don't you tell us now ifyou would steve about the iran situation the first thing that we need to understand whenlooking at iran and what happened in iran in the early 1950's is what has always beenthe central fact of life in modern iran which is iran is sitting on an ocean of oil thisis what makes iran an important country in the world now in the early part of the twentiethcentury the british through a corrupt deal
with the former emperor of then persia asit was called took over the entire iranian oil business what it meant was that all theoil that was produced in iran all the oil that was refined in iran all the oil thatwas exported from lran was the property of one single british company owned mainly bythe british government that was the anglo iranian oil company exactly ango iranian oilcompany now it meant that while iran had this huge resource it's people were living in someof the worst standards of living to be found anywhere in the world and the benefit of iran'soil wealth went exclusively to britain as i understand it britain paid a pittance toiran for the oil a pittance especially in comparison with the fact that other countrieswere paying something like forty fifty percent
to countries whose oil they were taking actuallythe british agreed to pay i think 12% of the oil revenues to iran but there was also anothercatch to that first of all the oil company was heavily taxed in britain now it was ownedby the british government so these taxes were essentially going from one hand of the britishgovernment to another hand but the company was able to claim that that was taxes so thatshouldn't count as part of a sum from which the iranians should get 12% it was net revenuesnet and then they jiggered the net so that it would be very low in addition to that therewas another provision which was that no iranians would be allowed to look at the books so theyjust had to take the british officials word for what 12% was and as you say around thesame time in the late forties the united states
first went into the oil business in saudiarabia and their deal was 50 50 split 50% of the money for the country that has theoil and 50% for the country that has the technology and does the investment to extract it butthe british were never willing to make that kind of a deal so this was that great contradictionthe entire standard of living that british people enjoyed in the 1920's and 30's and40's was a result of iranian oil that's what powered all the factories in britain britainhas no oil britain has no other colony that has oil the royal navy which projected britishpower all over the world was fueled 100% by oil from iran that would be one of the majorreasons maybe the major reason why hitler wanted to get egypt and the suez well thatwas one of the reasons and it was one of the
reasons for the battle of stalingrad becauseit was in stalingrad that the nazi army was stopped on it's way to azerbaijani to capturethe oil fields of azerbaijani and northern iran oil has always through the 20th centurybeen a key factor in the politics of the middle east and i think americans have now even gottento the point where they realize that when american leaders say this is not about oilif it's in the middle east it's about oil. or sub nom kuwait and iraq indeed yeah soin the period after world war 2 the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism were blowingthrough africa asia and latin america and in iran nationalism meant one very obviousthing we got to take back control of our oil and we have to use the wealth that our oilrepresents to develop our own country we shouldn't
allow it to be sent somewhere else for thebenefit of people in another country it was this national obsession with taking back controlof the oil that lay under iranian soil that lead to the election of mohaamad mosaddeghas prime minister of iran now it's hard to believe today but iran at that time periodafter world war 2 was a functioning democracy with a variety of political parties and functioningparliament a constitution and actually when mosaddegh too power in an election by theiranian parliament before he agreed to accept he pulled a paper dramatically out of hispocket and he said this is the law to nationalize the ango iranian oil company first pass thisthen i will accept becoming prime minister and my job will be to implement it and thatlaw was passed unanimously by both houses
of the iranian parliament. so by the by atthe time the british because they thought it would help them had nationalized theirown coal and railroad industries. exactly but what they thought was appropriate at homewas not appropriate for other countries to do so the british were suddenly faced withthe loss of their biggest and most important richest foreign property they tried a varietyof means to overthrow mosaddegh first they wanted to they tried to bribe him they triedto assassinate him at one point they brought him to the un security council which refusedto condemn him then they brought him to world court which also refused to condemn him theyblockaded the port through which iran would export it's oil so that even if iran couldproduce any oil it wouldn't be able to sell
any the british technicians who worked forthe ango iranian oil company and wanted to stay in iran and continue working for thenationalized company were forbidden to do so were all pulled out by the british governmentand mosaddegh told the british very clearly i don't care if we can't produce any oil orif we can't export any oil we'll just leave it in the ground we'd rather do that thanlet you continue to have it so the british finally decided they had to overthrow mosaddeghthey ordered their secret agents who were operating undercover in tehran to do so butmosaddegh found out about the plot and he did the only thing he could have done to protecthimself he closed the british embassy and he expelled all the british diplomats andamong these diplomats were of course the secret
agents who were plotting the coup so now thebritish had nothing and they were in a real panic the election in the united states atthe end of 1952 that brought dwight eisenhower to power and with him john foster dulles assecretary of state sent a surge of excitement through the british foreign office and thebritish secret service they thought that maybe now we can get the united states to reversepolicy and agree to carry out the coup they had originally asked president truman to doit but truman had refused so that left them with nothing but after this election in 1952they thought they could change the american's minds and ultimately they did manage to dothat by telling the american's we don't want to overthrow mosaddegh because he took awayour oil company they knew that this argument
wouldn't move americans they said we wantto overthrow mosaddegh because he's leading iran toward of course communism that was thebuzz word and that got dulles suddenly fascinated this was the country that he could then useas the explanation for how he really had carried out his campaign pledge to roll back communismnow mosaddegh was an elderly aristocrat whose mother was a princess and who actually despisedall socialist and marxist ideas but that was just a little detail the american's made theargument that it's true he wasn't a communist but he could die or he could be overthrownand there could be instability and that could lead to communist government emerging in iranso the united states did go in and overthrow through a covert operation that actually tookonly a few weeks the government of mohammad
mosaddegh. this was done by a guy was a grandsonof tr named kermit roosevelt he was head of the cia operations in the mid-east at thetime is that right? history delights in these little jokes and sure enough it was the grandsonof theodore roosevelt who helped bring america into the regime change era who was responsiblefor overthrowing the mosaddegh government in the summer of 1953. lets look back at whathappened as a result of our overthrow wait before you do that tell what he did you knowabout bribing everybody and their brother and i love the story about the two peoplewho didn't want to do it and he said i'm going to kill you right here if you don't take my50,000 dollars and do this. the story of how kermit roosevelt was able to overthrow mosaddeghreally illustrates to me how easy it is for
a rich and powerful country to throw a poorand weak country into chaos. it was the same technique that was used a year later in guatamala.essentially kermit roosevelt came in and bribed a lot of newspaper editors to start publishingterrible articles about mosaddegh he bribed religious leaders mullahs to denounce mosaddeghfrom their pulpits as an atheist they bribed members of parliament they bribed police andmilitary commanders and suddenly there was a huge wave of anger against mosaddegh iniran but all of this had been artificially fomented and he had these two iranian agentswho he used to hire street gangs and at one point as you said they decided they'd hadenough and it was getting too dangerous and he told them they had a choice either if theycontinued to help him he had 50,000 dollars
in cash for them if they didn't want to helpthey would kill him right on the spot so that is sort of a persuasive argument. and oneof the things that i thought was so brilliant about how kermit roosevelt did this was hedid one thing that would seem reasonable i would have thought of that too and that isthrough his iranian these two iranian guys he hired one of the main thugs in iran toput together a gang of toughs and violent people and run through the streets uh destroyinguh mosques and breaking shop windows and yelling up with mosaddegh we love mosaddegh then theywould beat people break windows uh destroy mosques but next but what he did was evenbetter than that was he hired another mob to attack that mob essentially this gave theimpression to the people in tehran that the
situation in iran had gotten totally out ofcontrol and mosaddegh wasn't able to control the country any more but not only was oneof these mobs controlled by the cia they both were so that all of this together resultedin the overthrow of mosaddegh and again it was a case of the tool the openness of democracygave the americans the uh ability to create this sort of artificial anti mosaddegh climatenow after overthrowing mosaddegh we placed the shah back on his throne this guy was notexactly a brave guy he he said i'll let issue certain things but then i'm getting in myplane and flying off to somewhere else this was actually sort of a surprise to me as iwas researching this episode i remember the shah during his last year and he was a veryauthoritative strong self confidant person
it was only when researching this book thati realized actually in his earlier years he was a totally scared pipsqueak and a littlemouse who was afraid of his own shadow and maybe ask your psychiatrist friends againit was to compensate for this fact that he put on this bravado in his later years yeahthe shah ruled with increasing repression for twenty five years his repression producedthe islamic revolution in the late 1970s that revolution brought to power a clique of fanaticallyanti american clerics who've spent the last twenty five years undermining if i can interjectsomething american power if i can interject something he created an organization calledsavak which is was as bad as the nkvd or uh hitler's uh hitler's gangs and the only placeas i understand it from your book the only
place that uh people who dissented could findan outlet was in the religious schools and the mosques you're absolutely right therewas there was no such thing as an opposition political party or a trade union movementor a trade union movement or independent student groups or any kind of civil society if youwanted to be against the shah the only place that was open to you was the mosque and thatis how the opposition became so heavily influenced by religion so we helped create that situationuh that of course helped lead to the explosion of uh discontent in the late 1970s and thatbrought to power this regime that we are now confronting so threateningly in tehran ittells me again that if we had allowed iran to continue on it's democratic path we mighthave had a thriving democracy in the heart
of the muslim middle east all these fiftyyears uh instead we created a whirlpool of instability and uh great threats to americahave emerged from this place and from this maelstrom that we ourselves actually createdthis government that's now in power in iran that is so directly confronting the unitedstates would never have come to power had the united states kept its hands off iranin '53 yeah yeah alright we'll come back in a few minutes for more on these fascinatingsubjects with stephen kinzer stuck in a cubicle jess was going nowhere carol made the switchfrom a tech company everald was an undergrad who knew he wanted more he deserved more findyour future at the massachusetts school of law immerse yourself in a fun supportive campusenvironment learn professional skills from
instructors with real world experience takethe first step in managing your life at the most affordable law school in new englandthe massachusetts school of law at andover your future starts here my understanding is that we were at a completeloss in 1979 a period i remember to understand why they weretaking over our embassy and why they hated our guts and uh and that of course ruinedcarter's uh presidency yes it did and even more importantly perhaps was the success ofthe fundamentalists in iran i gather which lead to the rise of fundamentalism elsewhereand to the initial jihad against the russians when they invaded because of afghanistan becauseof a fear that afghanistan was turning fun they had a communist leader but they wereafraid he was turning fundamentalist it's
certainly true that the affect of the takeoverby muslim radicals in iran was felt way beyond the borders of iran a lot of these jihadistgroups or muslin extremist groups in other parts of the islamic world had been functioningoff in the corners of mosques and never thought of themselves as being able to seize powerin an entire state it was the example of iran that made them think wow we can takeover awhole country we don't just have to keep talking to ourselves in cafes so that was somethingi think that did inspire muslim radicals all over the world including those in afghanistanwho went on to form the taliban and then i gather that when we decided and sent uh beardenover there uh to arm the uh mujaheddin what was his first name milt bearden yeah we channeledall the aid through pakistan which made sure
that it went to the fundamentalists in afghanistanit was another example of wanting to achieve a short term goal and not thinking about whatthe long term implications were we actually printed millions of quarans and distributedthem to these jihadist fighters and encouraged them to believe that they needed to fightagainst the infidel invader and they naturally after having overthrown the soviets didn'tchange their mind about this it's just that we then became the infidel invader yeah andso from that came afghanistan came the whole movement uh for al qaeda 'cause al qaeda werepeople whom we had trained or who got trained because of afghanistan let's put it that wayand uh the essence of the whole deal is that what we did in 1953 is bedeviling us todaywhen i started out to write my book about
iran called all the shah's men uh it's aboutthis 1953 episode i remember thinking to myself i might write a better book than this or abook that sells more copies than this but i'm never going to find a story that was sohugely important in shaping the world that's so unknown do you think so unknown is a realkey uh you may not want to answer this question i wouldn't blame anybody who doesn't wantto answer this question steve do you think we owe the iranians an apology i think weowe them more than an apology we owe them some help in trying to climb out of the terriblepit that they're in what i would like to see us do with iran now is open up a real dialoguewith its leaders and see if we can't reach some new kind of global accord with them youknow the united states and iran are not only
not fated to be enemies forever we actuallyhave many strategic interests in common we want to see a calm middle east certainly acalm iraq 'cause it's right on the border of iran we both want to see oil flowing feelyout of the middle east towards the west the iranian oil industry is really in a shamblesit needs billions of dollars in investment that investment can practically only comefrom the united states iran hates the radical sunni movement like al quaeda and the talibanthey hated those movements even before we had discovered them there not so friendlywith arabs either as is the case with us we have a lot in common with iran you know whenwe started our opening to china we did it what i think was a very sophisticated waythe first document that was signed between
the communist chinese government and the unitedstates was something called the shanghai communique and that communique was the beginning of theprocess of normalization all it was was a list of all the issues that the two sidesdisagreed on and needed to discuss so this i think would be a great start for us withiran let the representatives of the united states sit down and tell the iranians allthe things we don't like about them and then let the iranians tell us all the things theydon't like about us and lets make a list of all of our differences and then agree to negotiatethem it's not going to work to try and negotiate just on the one issue that we care about whichis their nuclear program i think they would be willing to negotiate that but only if weare willing to negotiate some of the issues
that they're upset about. so i think thereis the possibility for us to calm this crisis down dramatically but united states i thinkpartly because it is still psychologically scarred by the overthrow of the shah and thehostage crisis has not been able to make the leap towards agreeing to sit down unconditionallywith the iranians and discuss all these questions. i was curious as we sit here taping this showthere has been some kind of agreement apparently to engage in some kind of discussion withthe iranians and the syrians and that in itself is a breakthrough i guess because until thenwe were adopting george bush and dick cheney were adopting the john dulles position theywill not talk to people it's a very odd view that we should not negotiate with people thathate us who else do you negotiate with you
don't need to negotiate with your friendsyou only negotiate with your enemies that ones that hate you that you hate that arekilling your children. that's what negotiation is all about so this idea that certain countriesare disqualified from negotiation because of the way they behave i think it's crazyit's the fact that they behave that way that makes it so urgent for us to be in dialoguewith them. alright we'll come back in just a few minutes for more on these fascinatingsubjects with stephen kinzer. over 25 years ago we said legal educationwas broken change is uncomfortable but it's oftenneeded so we rolled up our sleeves and we fixed itlaw schools are just too
expensive ours isn't most schools don't teachneeded professional skills ours does because our professors continueto have real world experience to often you settle for a career that'sless than what you hoped for you shouldn't come see the future the massachusettsschool of law at andover your future starts welcome back steve lets talk about chile whathappened in chile who were the dramatist personae an all star group of evil people in my judgementand why did it all happen first of all chile had at the time we became interested therein the early 1970's one of the longest democratic traditions in latin america this was not somebanana republic ruled by military tyrants this was a country that had more than halfa century of strong uninterrupted democratic
rule and over the period starting in the late1950's salvador allende had been one of the leading politicians in chile he had been presidentof the senate he had run for president several times he was totally at home inside the chileanpolitical establishment he was a leftist he was a marxist but he was also very much inthe chilean political club he was even a mason not so common for a marxist third generationmason actually so what happened was that in 1970 allende was running again for presidentand the united states decided to do something that it had never done before which was tryto overthrow a leader before he even got elected president. that's called preventive somethingor other yeah preventive electioneering so we poureda lot of money into the chilean election and
we were not successful and allende did emergeas the leader then during the period of his before he was inaugurated we made a numberof efforts to try to overthrow him why did we do this there were several large americancorporations working in chile the most famous was itt which was very involved in the projectof overthrowing allende but actually the industry that was for chile what oil was for iran andwhat banana production was for guatamala was copper chiles the world's largest copper producercopper is a vital resource for the world the chilean copper industry was dominated by twogiant american companies kennecott and anaconda it was allende's idea that these companiesshould be nationalized and the wealth and the profits from the copper industry shouldbe used to develop chile and not be sent out
to foreign corporations now one of the principalbusinessmen in chile a guy named agustin edwards was also the publisher of the main newspaperin chile and he happened to be among his many other business interests the director of pepsi-colain chile now i don't know if you know this but during the period when richard nixon wasout of office from the time he left in 1960 to the time he was elected in 1968 he wasthe international lawyer for the pepsi-cola company so he got to know the pepsi-cola networkand he knew agustin edwards very well edwards was an extreme right winger hated allendeand when it became clear that allende was going to become president edwards flew towashington and he went and actually met with henry kissinger and other senior officialsin washinton and told them that allende was
a terribly dangerous communist who was goingto destroy american power in latin america and it was actually nixon who made a veryinteresting comment during this period he said i will never support a policy of weakeningthe military in latin america the military is a power center that is subject to our influencethe others the intellectuals are not subject to our influence so here again was a classiccase and they were subject to our influence because many of them had been trained in theunited states and the military's ideas of how to run countries coincided with what theunited states thought was best in these countries. bare in mind although we like democracy inour own country in the countries that we deal with traditionally we have preferred authoritarianrule it's more predictable your not going
to have strikes your not going to have anysort of unrest it can all be easily repressed if there are dissidents or anti-american movementsthose people can be killed or thrown into jail that's why military run regimes are oftenpreferable to us a lot of this by the way was taught at something called the us armyschool of the americas where these people went wasnt' it and some of it is still beingtaught as that school still thrives having been moved from panama back to the unitedstates so the situation that happened in chile was that president nixon and henry kissingerhis secretary of state became obsessed with allende and although he had been democraticallyelected and although nobody suggested that he was going to try and overstay his timein office and all the candidates that were
lining up to secede him were more conservativethen he was the americans decided that they couldn't wait they had to overthrow this guyand it wasn't only because he was trying to nationalize the giant american copper companiesas i said earlier it isn't the economic motive that american leaders believe is pushing theminto action. nixon actually said this in one of his meetings was that the big problem withallende is that if a marxist who is anti-american is allowed to succeed this is going to senda terrible message through latin america we must make sure that chile is in chaos duringthe time that allende is in power otherwise other countries are going to think that theycan get away with this and sure enough it was the americans nixon who said i want youto make sure that not a screw or a bolt gets
into chile so we launched an unofficial embargoamerican companies stopped sending spare parts to chile at one point a third of all taxisin the capital in santiago couldn't work because they couldn't get any spare parts bank loansdried up international aid dried up and sure enough chile was thrown into chaos. we moreor less ordered people like ex-im bank world bank stop the loans exactly uh so we succeededin our goal of throwing chile into chaos and then we actually uh sent weapons into chileand we were in direct contact with military conspirators and we made it clear that wewanted allende overthrown we worked with the plotters and on september 11, 1973 allendewas overthrown there's one very interesting fact that ties together the four coups thatwere carried out by the cia that was uh iran
1953 guatemala 1954 south vietnam 1963 andchile 1973 and that is that the cia station chief in the country had to be fired beforewe launched the coup because he was against it now our cia station chief is supposed tobe the person that we pay to know the most about this country even more than the ambassadorthe ambassador is just dealing with diplomacy the station chief is dealing with realityis supposed to know everything that's going on above the surface and under the surfacein all four of the cases where the cia overthrew a government the cia station chief sent notesback to the united states saying don't do this this is not going to be in our interestand so the answer from washington great you're fired we're sending someone in who's for itso we didn't even trust the judgement of the
people we paid to be the greatest number oneexpert on this country and what these cia agents saw that we didn't want to accept wasthat these operations succeed in the short run but in the end they will not only resultin unhappiness and misery and repression in the target countries but they will also underminethe security of the united states yeah all right we'll come back in just a few minutesfor more on these fascinating subjects with stephen kinzer i remember the day when my future startedwalking with beau thinking about my life i had big dreams but my careerwas going nowhere that's when i discovered the massachusetts school of law a few yearslater i'm here with beau but now i'm thinking
about my clients problems instead of my ownteachers with real world experience a fun campus and the most affordable law schoolin new england change your life the massachusetts school of law at andover your future startshere what happened in chile after they overthrewallende who by the way was killed these people are always killed when we sponsor these coupsuh the regime that followed allende was a military regime so again we had an electedleader replaced by a very harsh military tyrant general pinochet uh we there are now todaytwenty five thousand chileans on lifetime government pensions as victims of tortureunder the pinochet regime and of course they were among the lucky ones because thousandsalso were killed under torture and uh in other
ways during the pinochet regime so there reallywas a reign of terror in chile during the 1970s and uh pinochet remained in power fora number of years until finally people voted against a plebiscite that he had staged totry to extend his period in power uh and chile i think although it's now returned to itsdemocracy has still not gotten over the trauma of what happened and interestingly enoughthe woman who is now the president of chile president bachelet uh lost her father duringthe coup her father was a military officer who uh refused to support the coup and waskilled and she herself was held in a prison for a number of months after pinochet tookover it was a prison where uh it was a women's prison that was famous for multiple rapesof all of the people that were inside of that
prison she herself has never spoken abouther own experiences were but one can only imagine the horror that she went through wenow have a regime in chile like the one that we probably would have had right after allendeand it would have spared chile a terrible pain the other thing that it would have sparedis the hatred and the opprobrium against the united states that exploded all over the worldthese are this is an example of how these operations create terrible anti american feelingsin the world and we are now involved in a world wide conflict in which having the mostsoldiers and the most advanced weapons is not enough like it always used to be in thepast if it were enough we would have won the war in iraq already what we need in this globalconflict we're fighting now the one most important
weapon is information we need to know who'sout there what are they planning what are they plotting what are they doing how do youget information you get it from people individuals intelligence agencies but they only sharetheir information with people they respect with people they want to share it with andwe have cut ourselves off by our actions in the world from the sympathy of the world populationand through that from the information that we desperately need in order to triumph inthis conflict steve how do you explain the fact which i gather is a fact that in eachcase there were all these american governmental meetings vietnam uh chile guatemala uh iranand there never seems and despite the uh what the cia station chiefs said there never seemsto have been any dissent and in fact you talk
about one meeting uh on october 24, 1963 aboutvietnam and ok it's what we're gonna do nobody's sure it's a good idea but hey i think thereis a con a thing that we call group think that takes over people understand what theleader what the leader wants everyone understood that president nixon was fixated on overthrowingallende everyone understood that president bush was fixated on overthrowing sadaam thereforerather than try to challenge entrenched assumptions the coterie of sycophants around leaders onlypresented opinions that supported the ones that had already been reached so any kindof intelligence information that contradicted what people understood had already been decidedwas systematically pushed aside and the people around the president served him and the nationvery poorly by insulating him from dissenting
points of view i don't know how you say itin french the more things change the more they stay the same if there's one silver liningto the iraq debacle maybe it will be that at least for awhile americans will be a littlemore reluctant to get involved in these projects and a little more hesitant to believe thatthe united states because it's so powerful can achieve anything it wants in the worldwell you know we all hope you're right and on the other hand i have to say after vietnamwho would've thunk it who would've thunk it well we're out of time thank you very muchthat was great thank you thank you very much to the audience i hope this was very informativeabout subjects which the american people desperately need to be informed about be with us againnext time thank you