Road to the Iraq War: Two Views of U.S. Imperialism

[struggle4progress]

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 286 pages, hardcover, $25.00.

Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 384 pages, hardcover, $27.50.

... The United States’ first overseas military venture was an undeclared naval war with France, 1798–1800, in which U.S. Marines captured a French privateer in the Caribbean. The first of several Barbary wars followed with the war against Tripoli, 1801–05 (giving the Marines their anthem, “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli”). Between the first and second (the 1815 attack on Algiers) Barbary wars, the U.S. Navy invaded Spanish Mexico on the Pacific (1806); operated out of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico against Spanish and French privateers (1806–10); seized Spanish western Florida (1810); attacked Spanish east Florida (1812); built a fort in the Marquesas Islands (1813–14); took Pensacola, Florida (1814); and engaged pirates in the Caribbean (1814–25). Engagements in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean were continuous and U.S. warships took possession of Oregon in 1818. The United States raided the slave trade in Africa during 1820–26; began tormenting Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1822; and landed in Greece in 1827. The United States was busy in the Falkland Islands (1831–32); Sumatra (1832); Argentina (1833); Peru (1835–36); Mexico (1836); Sumatra (1838–39); Fiji (1840); Kingsmill Islands and Samoa (1841); Mexico (1843); Ivory Coast (1843); Mexico (1844), with all out war from 1846–48, seizing half its territory; Smyrna (1849); Turkey and Joahanna Island east of Africa (1851); Argentina (1852–53); Nicaragua (1853); the “opening” of Japan (1853–54); Ryukyu and Bonin Islands in the Pacific (1853–54); China and Nicaragua (1854); China (1855); Fiji and Uruguay (1855); Panama—then part of Colombia and China (1856); Nicaragua (1857); Uruguay, Paraguay, Mexico, China, Fiji, and Turkey (1858); Angola—Portuguese West Africa—and Colombia (1860); the U.S. Civil War being no barrier to continued imperialism: Japan (1863–64); Panama (1865); Mexico and China (1866); Formosa (1867); Japan, Uruguay, and Colombia (1868); Mexico and Hawaii (1870); Korea (1871); Colombia and Mexico (1873); Hawaii (1874); Mexico (1876); Egypt (1882); Panama (1885); Korea, Samoa, and Haiti (1888); Hawaii (1889); Argentina (1890); Haiti, Bering Sea, and Chile (1891); Hawaii (1893); Brazil (1894); Nicaragua (1894); Korea, China, Colombia, and Nicaragua (1894–96) (Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, 73–76, 102–110). All that before the Spanish-American war that historians dub “The Age of Imperialism,” mostly explained by “the protection of American interests.” Those “interests” were commercial and economic, that is, capitalistic. Exporting capitalism is how the system works, and that’s called imperialism; it’s not a dysfunction ...

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0107dunbar-ortiz.htm