Uniting Islamic Resistance -- Just As We Did In 1902

    American troops invaded Moslem territory "`in order to prevent war.'" They "learned too late" that American actions "had unified the Moslem leaders who had traditionally fought among themselves."
    It sounds like a gloss on reluctant admissions by President Bush and Pentagon officials that America's Iraq war has made common cause between "foreign jihadists," Al-Qaeda and diehard Baathists. But the quotes above come from historian Stuart Creighton Miller's book, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903.
    One hundred and four years ago, American troops were sent to occupy the largely Moslem southern islands of the Philippine archipelago. America had "won" the Philippines in the brief, breathtakingly optional Spanish-American War of 1898, a war sold to the American public as a crusade to free Cuba from Saddam-like Spanish strongmen such as Gen. Valeriano "Butcher" Weyler. But America ended up in possession of Spain's entire overseas empire, and many Filipinos -- expecting liberation, not occupation -- were less than grateful for the change of ownership.
    It took our army two years to destroy the Filipino patriot militia that had helped oust the Spanish from Manila, the colonial capital on the island of Luzon. As always happens when foreign troops pursue indigenous guerrillas, civilians suffered the most. An American general estimated that one-sixth of the population of Luzon died before resistance collapsed.
    Not surprisingly, in 1901, when American forces arrived in the Moslem islands to the south, they met with alarm and defiance. Moro tribesmen fought the soldiers however they could -- sometimes with swords against Gatling guns. Though they occasionally savaged unwary U.S. platoons or companies, it was mostly a war that killed a single American soldier today and another tomorrow. Acting on orders, army troops slaughtered Filipinos by the tens, by the scores, by whole villages.
    American policies unified Moslem groups long used to making war on each other. Consequently, organized resistance lasted far longer than any U.S. strategist had anticipated. In fact, despite massacres that depopulated entire districts, and the invention of a prototypical napalm to aid in burning villages, American troops never quite eliminated the Moro "insurgents": Their descendants are members of today's Moro Liberation Front and allegedly Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf.
    Miller's brilliant 1982 study is one of the few exhumations of this catastrophe in print. That's no surprise: Soured by court martials that indicated their "splendid little war" had degenerated into a drawn-out atrocity, most Americans decided to forget the conflict before it was finished. And that's too bad, since a national memory of the Moro war's horrors could have warned us about Vietnam -- and Iraq.
    The analogies are not specious, and they're no stretch. For instance, anti-American feeling in the Middle East today is exacerbated by the perception that Americans are "crusaders" -- a perception supported by Lt. Gen. William Boykin’s “Christian army” rhetoric. In 1902, Maj. Gen. Adna Chaffee drove the reportedly America-friendly Sultan of Bacalod into rebellion when he commanded the ruler to "cease from troubling the progress of Christianity and make up your mind to be good."
    In 1902, Secretary of War Elihu Root observed that American soldiers fought evildoers in "a population among whom it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe." While figures for Iraqi civilian casualties of U.S. “friendly fire” are in dispute, one need only Google up a search such as “+"Iraqis killed" +checkpoints +civilian” to be reminded that U.S. soldiers have once again been put in a place where self-preservation encourages them to shoot civilians first and ask questions later.
    In Iraq, we're referring to resistants by that time-honored misnomer, "insurgents" -- fighters in opposition to lawful authority -- as we did the locals who opposed U.S. occupations and puppet governments in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Vietnam and El Salvador. We’re back to destroying cities and villages in order to "save" them, back to “pacifying” people who have learned to identify us with everything other than peace.
    Perhaps this war will eventually sputter out, like the Moro conflict. But the Moros' island strongholds were far more easily isolated from outside aid and reinforcements. Whether the generals like to admit it or not, Iraq's long borders are a strategic problem with precedents in Vietnam -- and Afghanistan. And the long list of Saddam's former enemies and rivals who now cooperate to imperil U.S. troops is a page out of 1902.

--- HistoryBuff

'The Whiteness Checkpoint'in The Boston Globe

(Jan. 19 update: This protest has now appeared in regional papers including the Valley News and Keene (N.H.) Sentinel. Thanks, VN, for permission to use Laura DeCapua's photo! Strong e-mail and letter-to-editors reaction gives hope that people may be ready to challenge "terror war" policy...)

    My op-ed on the Border Patrol's checkpoint in Hartford, Vt., appears in The Boston Globe today.

        ARRIVING a few minutes late, I told my students about a delay at the Interstate 91 Border Patrol checkpoint in Hartford, 100 miles from the Canada line.
        "Oh," a twenty-something student asked, "you mean the Whiteness Checkpoint'?"
        His classmates didn't laugh out loud. They just snickered, appreciating an apparently well-worn joke.   ... click to read rest of Globe op-ed!

    It's great to have this piece appear in the region's "hometown" paper. These new "terror war" checkpoints, far inside our borders, won't stop terrorists, but they do institutionalize racial profiling and promote the administration's "stay scared" agenda. Click for links to stories on the checkpoint's intrusive operations and proposed $9-million HQ.
    Global protests couldn't stop the Iraq invasion-- but couldn't national and local protests stop the building of this first of many proposed "inland" roadblocks?

Battle Day in Concord: Shades of Insurgencies Past

This op-ed originally appeared in the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel and other New England newspapers.

    We stood by the hundreds on the river's east bank, boosting our kids so they could see the redcoats march down to the old North Bridge.
    April 21, 2004 was as fair a Patriots Day as I can remember in Concord, Mass., where they re-enact the skirmish Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the shot heard round the world" – the 1775 affray that started our Revolutionary War. A late but vehement thaw raised the Concord River high up the pilings of "the rude bridge that arched the flood," and a surge of tourism all but overfilled the battlefield park.
    The King's men -- marching in cadence, festooned with the latest in military hardware -- certainly looked like world-beaters, the Old World's greatest army. How could they be defeated by the homespun amateurs marching down the opposite bank?
    It's worth remembering just what the British were trying to accomplish that day: Troops had been sent to rescue the sensible majority of colonists – at least a third of whom were Tories, and another third neutral – from terrorist groups such as the Sons of Liberty.
    Of course, even local Tories understood that England – for all its crusading rhetoric – was serving its own strategic interests. The prime minister's hard line had less to do with colonists' welfare than with British re-election politics. But British generals believed the insurgents could be pacified if top rebels were jailed. The primary aim of the march on Lexington and Concord was to capture radical leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
    In other words, the British raid had much in common with American soldiers' 1993 attempt to capture a warlord in Mogadishu – and present American attempts to arrest or kill rebel leaders in Najaf, Fallujah and other Iraqi cities.
    "What North Bridge showed," the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, "was that sheer technical superiority isn't everything in warfare. Historians have been telling us lately that the fabled Minutemen weren't such hotshots after all. ... But then, neither were those Somali fighters, who made up for it with ferocity and sheer numbers."
    By the time they reached Concord, the British knew they'd failed to catch Hancock and Adams. They burned rebel supplies – but nearby Minutemen thought the British were torching the village. Enraged, they marched on the North Bridge, receiving a volley that, among other losses, killed their drummer boy.
    That was the moment when the British expected victory. Astonishingly, though, Emerson’s "embattled farmers" stood their ground – and fired back. Outnumbered and – more important – outmotivated by men who believed they were fighting for family and freedom, the British turned and ran.
    For all the good the next few years' fighting did them, the imperial troops might just as well have marched straight onto their ships in Boston harbor and sailed home.
    The essential lessons of the long debacle had already been learned: Overwhelming military might is a clumsy instrument to use on a popular rebellion. Insurgents in faraway countries don't have to beat you to win; they just have to keep fighting. If rebels can't be cut off from supplies and reinforcements, their will to fight will outlast yours. Troop masses can't move as nimbly as individual targets, and troops moving in rebel territory almost never achieve surprise.
    But learning lessons and learning from them are very different things.
    On Patriots Day 2004, as always, the Minutemen stormed across the bridge and the British – dragging their wounded – scurried away, with our children firing plastic muskets at their backs. We cheered the occupying army's defeat, the insurgents' victory.
    But it felt more than a little strange.

--- HistoryBuff

America Needs to Talk About The “O” Word: Oil

  Alright, America. It’s time to talk about the “o” word.
  No, not that one. I mean the one we really avoid talking about. The one we’ll do shocking things to get. Our most wanton, shameful secret.
  Oil.
  We need to talk, because all our excuses for invading Iraq have come apart like philanderers’ alibis for motel afternoons. Now it’s time to come clean.
  Americans and oil: We’ve got a thing going on.
  Of course, we never meant to hurt anybody. But admit it: Sometime before the invasion, you thought something like, “Even if there’re no WMDs, it’s a good thing to sack Saddam – and it wouldn’t hurt to pay less at the pump.”
  So we went along. Maybe we had misgivings, but we didn’t join those few protesters in the park. We answered “No War For Oil” with rationalizations ranging from “It’s not that simple” to “One 9/11's not enough for you people?”
  We more or less fell for the administration’s lines: Osama links, yellowcake, anthrax-laden drones, intercontinental missiles.
  They never mentioned petroleum.
  And if we brought it up, it was like discussing honeymoon intimacies at a church supper. One shock-and-awe day, I confessed to a friend – a Vietnam-protesting lefty liberal – my worry that the whole thing boiled down to oil.
  “I can’t believe you just said that,” he huffed. “It’s so simplistic.”
  “But,” I asked meekly, “what’s the one thing you can take out of this huge mess – terrorism, Iraq, Israel, the Middle East, America – that changes everything?”
  “9/11!” he hissed. “9/11 changed everything!”
  “Well, no. It’s not new, people hating us because we support rotten governments for oil’s sa –”
  “Go wash your mouth out!”
  OK, he didn’t say that, but he meant it. Talking about post-9/11 policies in terms of oil was like reducing romantic relationships to sex.
  How crude.
  But what’s the one element you could take out of the mating game that would change everything?
  We like to focus on mating’s romantic elaborations, rather than its imperative essence. And we’re free to do that: Assuming we’re single and childless, we’re only playing with our own lives.
  Similarly, Americans would like to focus on romantic, heroic reasons for invading Iraq – on avenging 9/11, promoting democracy, fighting terror – rather than on the real one.
  But we can’t.
  We can’t, credibly, because all the lies have been exposed.
  We can’t, morally, because we’re playing with many millions of lives.
  So it’s time to talk about the “o” word. About all the “former” oil company operatives directing this war. About the only Iraqi facilities we protected from looting (hint: not hospitals, not banks, not alleged WMD sites). About the only reason America pays more attention to Iraq than it does to, say, sub-Saharan Africa. About America’s 20-plus million barrel-a-day habit, and who’s paying for it.
  About the only word that can explain all this administration’s decisions.
  Alright, not the only one. We also need to talk about that “r” word we just ran into: re-election.

--- HistoryBuff