Iraq, Vietnam and the Philippines

A year ago, some commentators compared the Iraq War to the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902. There are many parallels between the two wars just as there are between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. What frightens me is that it may be the case that the Neocons who brought us the Iraq War may also see the parallels with the Filipino-American War. Why is that scary? Here is E. San Juan, Jr.:

A moment of reflection returns us to what Bernard Fall called "the first Vietnam," the Filipino-American War of 1899-1902, in which at least 1.4 million Filipinos died. The campaign to conquer the Philippines was designed in accordance with President McKinley's policy of "Benevolent Assimilation" of the uncivilized and unchristian natives, a "civilizing mission" that Mark Twain considered worthy of the Puritan settlers and the pioneers in the proverbial "virgin land." In Twain's classic prose: "Thirty thousand killed a million. It seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing circumstance." This was a realization of the barbarism that Henry Adams feared before Admiral George Dewey entered Manila Bay on May 1, 1898:

"I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines where... we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric trailways."

In "Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982), Stuart Creighton Miller recounts the U.S. military's "scorched earth" tactics in Samar and Batangas, atrocities from "search and destroy" missions reminiscent of Song My and My Lai in Vietnam. This episode in the glorious history of Empire is usually accorded a marginal footnote, or a token paragraph, in school textbooks. Miller only mentions in passing the U.S. attempt to subjugate the unhispanized Moros, the Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao and Sulu islands. On March 9, 1906, four years after President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over, Major General Leonard Wood, commanding five hundred and forty soldiers, killed a beleaguered group of six hundred Muslim men, women and children in the battle of Mount Dajo. A less publicized but horrific battle occurred on June 13, 1913, when the Muslim sultanate of Sulu mobilized about 5,000 followers (men, women and children) against the American troops led by Capt. John Pershing. The battle of Mount Bagsak, 25 kilometers east of Jolo City, ended with the death of 340 Americans and of 2,000 (some say 3,000) Moro defenders. Pershing was true to form - earlier he had left a path of destruction in Lanao, Samal Island, and other towns where local residents fought his incursions. Anyone who resisted U.S. aggression was either a "brigand" or a seditious bandit. The carnage continued up to the "anti-brigandage" campaigns of the first three decades, which suppressed numerous peasant revolts and workers' strikes against the colonial state and its local agencies.

With the help of the U.S. sugar-beet lobby, the Philippine Commonwealth of 1935 was established, constituted with a compromise mix of laws and regulations then being tried in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Hawaii. Eventually the islands became a model of a pacified neocolony.

Why is the possibility that Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al., see the Iraq War as being like the Filipino-American War so frightening? Because in spite of the barbaric result of the American invasion of the Philippines, psychopathic imperialists think of it as a success. The Philippines have been firmly under control of the United States since then, what's not succesfsul about that?