Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer (born August 4, 1951) is an American author, journalist, and academic. A former ''New York Times'' correspondent, he has published several books and writes for several newspapers and news agencies.

Reporting career

During the 1980s, Kinzer covered revolutions and social upheaval in Central America and wrote his first book, ''Bitter Fruit'', about military coups and destabilization in Guatemala during the 1950s. In 1990, ''The New York Times'' appointed Kinzer to head its Berlin bureau, from which he covered Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from the Soviet bloc. Kinzer was ''The New York Times'' chief in the newly established Istanbul bureau from 1996 to 2000.

Upon returning to the U.S., Kinzer became the newspaper's culture correspondent, based in Chicago, as well as teaching at Northwestern University. He then took up residence in Boston and began teaching journalism and U.S. foreign policy at Boston University. He has written several nonfiction books about Turkey, Central America, Iran, and the U.S. overthrow of foreign governments from the late 19th century to the present, as well as Rwanda's recovery from genocide.

Kinzer also contributes columns to ''The New York Review of Books'', ''The Guardian'', and ''The Boston Globe''. He is a Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Views

Kinzer's reporting on Central America was criticized by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book '' Manufacturing Consent'' (1988), which cited Edgar Chamorro ("selected by the CIA as press spokesman for the contras") in his interview by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting describing Kinzer as "just responding to what the White House is saying". In chapter 2 of '' Manufacturing Consent'', Kinzer is criticized for deploying no skepticism in his coverage of the murders of GAM leaders in Guatemala and for "generally employing an apologetic framework" for the Guatemalan military state.

Kinzer has since that time criticized interventionist U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America and more recently, the Middle East. In '' Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq'' (2006), he critiqued U.S. foreign policy as overly interventionist. In a 2010 interview with ''Imagineer'' Magazine, he said:

In his 2008 book ''A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man who Dreamed It'', Kinzer credits President Paul Kagame for what he calls the peace, development, and stability in Rwanda in the years after the Rwandan genocide, and criticizes Rwanda's leaders before the genocide, such as Juvenal Habyarimana. According to Susan M. Thomson, the "book is an exercise in public relations, aimed at further enhancing Kagame's stature in the eyes of the west", is one-sided due to heavy reliance on interviews with Kagame and even apologist.

In a 2016 opinion piece, Kinzer wrote that Aleppo had been liberated by Bashar al-Assad's forces from the violent militants who had ruled it for three years, but that the American public had been told "convoluted nonsense" about the war. He added: "At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on 'an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva.' The precise opposite is true. In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan's UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her."

In April 2018, he added:
Kinzer wrote that the 2018 Syrian Gas Attacks on Civilians in the Douma region was a "false flag" attack, suggesting the event was staged by either al-Qaeda, NATO, or Syrian Civil Defense.

Kinzer has opposed US support for Ukraine in response to the 2014 and 2022 Russian invasions, stating that the war is a proxy war provoked by NATO expansion. Kinzer said in March 2022, after Russia's initial invasion, that US provision of arms to Ukraine only "guarantees more suffering and death" and that it "provoke Russia to respond by killing more Ukrainians." Kinzer believes that "for American strategic planners, this war has little to do with Ukraine. They see it as a battering ram against Russia. Since saving Ukrainian lives is not their priority, they view diplomacy as an enemy." Kinzer has rejected the "villainous" depiction of Vladimir Putin, stating: "For years, we reveled in our moral superiority over colorful nemeses like Castro, Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein. Putin fits perfectly into this constellation."

Bibliography

See also

* Timeline of United States military operations

References

External links

*
* for ''Guernica Magazine''
*
* , on WNYC's ''The Brian Lehrer Show,'' April 26, 2006

Interview with Stephen Kinzer and Martha Cardenas (mp3)
February 10, 2008

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kinzer, Stephen
1951 births
Living people
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American foreign policy writers
American male non-fiction writers
American newspaper reporters and correspondents
Boston University faculty
Historians of the Central Intelligence Agency
Maria Moors Cabot Prize winners
The New York Times journalists
Northwestern University faculty
Brown University faculty
Boston University alumni