Quotes from Stephen Kinzer

Yet Haq was also an outspoken nationalist. His dream was that once the Taliban was overthrown, it would be replaced by a regime free of all outside influence.

Acheson immediately understood the urgency of this message. He summoned Ambassador Franks and told him that the United States resolutely opposed "the use of force or the threat of the use of force" against Iran, and that Truman himself had "stressed most strongly that no situation should be allowed to develop into an armed conflict between a body of British troops and the Persian forces.

As subjects, Pfeiffer used inmates at the federal prison in Atlanta and at a juvenile detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey.

This upheaval came while the region was still recovering from the shock of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which radically reshaped the strategic map of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Whatever doubts the Americans had about the wisdom of embracing Zia were overwhelmed by their determination to intensify the rebellion in Afghanistan.

To all of this the CIA agreed. It subcontracted to Pakistan the job of directing the Afghan rebellion.

the former colony itself becoming colonialist.

Muslim leaders ordered it cut to pieces to show their contempt for worldly wealth. They destroyed countless treasures, including the entire royal library. In an account of this conquest written by the tenth-century Persian poet Ferdowsi, a general laments: "Curse this world, curse this time, curse this fate / That uncivilized Arabs have come to force me to be Muslim.

McKinley could not believe that Aguinaldo's insurgents would be so stupid as to resist the power and benevolence of the United States.

Opponents denounced the treaty as an imperialist grab of a distant land that shamed American ideals

previous secretary of war, Henry Stimson, memorably put it, "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." One of the few American officials who had promoted intelligence

Most American-sponsored "regime change" operations have, in the end, weakened rather than strengthened American security.

Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam), and each ultimately led to the installation of a repressive dictatorship.

They led to the fall of leaders who embraced American ideals, and the imposition of others who detested everything Americans hold dear.

One of the most immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of empires and great nations. Some Americans, however, believe their country to be so far beyond comparison with any other country or empire that has ever existed that it has passed beyond the reach of history.

When her brother turned Pearl Harbor over to the Americans in 1887, she wrote in her diary that it was "a day of infamy in Hawaiian history.

Imbued as he was with the idea that only whites could rule the islands efficiently, he was able to consider this a form of patriotism.

In 1949 he was one of several scientists from Camp Detrick who traveled to the Caribbean island of Antigua for Operation Harness, which tested the vulnerability of animals to toxic clouds.

Americans overthrew governments only when economic interests coincided with ideological ones.

modern Afghan history shows that "an ounce of nation-building prevention will be worth a pound of military-operation cure.

The central reason that Bush rejected the ambitious option of long-term engagement in Afghanistan, however, was that his attention was focused elsewhere. He understood the importance of stabilizing Afghanistan and would certainly have been happy to capture bin Laden and his henchmen, but his zeal for these projects paled beside his obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

It would be a shame if the public uproar forced us to go beyond, and to damage the integrity of the CIA," Ford said. "I automatically assume what you did was right unless it's proven otherwise." That amounted to an assurance that, if at all possible, Helms would be shielded from accountability for the CIA's actions on his watch.

Agent James McC." Later he was identified as James McCord, who would go on to become a footnote to American political history as one of the Watergate burglars.

Had we to do it over again," he said in an interview sixteen months after the invasion, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success.