Last week’s New Yorker had an important article about America’s invasion of the Philippines and the use of water torture — the “water cure” it was called.
Some background — because most of us learned the Spanish-American war was mostly about remembering the Maine (in Havana) and Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay.
U.S. forces seized Manila from Spain—keeping the army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering the city—and President William McKinley refused to recognize Filipino claims to independence, pushing his negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the islands to the United States, while talking about Filipinos’ need for “benevolent assimilation.” Aguinaldo and some of his advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a model republic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a period of mounting tensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war erupted, just days before the Senate ratified a treaty with Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops waged a war to “free” the islands’ population from the regime that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and about four thousand U.S. soldiers.
Go read Paul Kramer’s history of what followed. The parallels are striking.
Kramer is an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa.
It’s also worth remembering that the American take-over of the Philippines led to the rise of the militarists in Japan. The American presence in the Philippines was seen as a direct challenge to Japanese power, tilting the balance from a Japan led by those who sought peace and isolation to a Japan under the control of those who favored an aggressive foreign policy.
While no one ever said, “America is in the Philippines; let’s invade Manchuria!” it was the militarists who believed that Japanese Empire was desirable and necessary. Had they not been empowered, World War II might have been an exclusively European event.
While the historic model that is most often discussed is Vietnam, the Philippines seems a more apt set of parallels. The imperialists of the current Republican Party, have planted American forces in a far away place, amid a distrustful and restless foreign culture, in a way that appears to directly threaten the culture’s autonomy. Not surprisingly, the effect has been to radicalize the previously (relatively) peaceful center, empowering the radicals. Once in control, the actions the radicals take will — like Japans behavior pre-World War II — likely be intolerable to the United States. The result could, theoretically, be world war.
Whether this happens or not is largely a function of the U.S. convincing those not-yet-radicalized that our intent is not permanent occupation and control. The Bush Administration, in words if not yet deeds, has always been clear that we’re on our way out of Iraq, even if we’re taking our time. (We made it clear we were in the Philippines forever.) That should buy us time.
But we must be vigilant against those who want to make permanent our occupation of Iraq. John McCain’s comments about staying 100 years is exactly the wrong thing to say. If we convince that region that our goal is to stay forever, we could be setting in motion events that may lead — 20 or 30 years down the road — to another war on the scale of World War II.