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