Just Change Filipino To Iraqi
The one shameful American war that can be
truly compared to the Iraq misadventure
is the mostly forgotten Philippine-American War or,
as it was long known here,
the Philippine 'Insurrection'
If you don't buy that, Condoleeza Rice offers still another war, telling Ebony magazine that those seeking withdrawal from Iraq are like Northerners in the Civil War who wanted to make peace with the Confederacy and let slavery continue. I'm surprised she didn't add that these anti-war Northerners, known as Copperheads, were Democrats.
Never mentioned is the one shameful American war that can be truly compared to the Iraq misadventure. It is the mostly forgotten Philippine-American War or, as it was long known here, the Philippine Insurrection.
(The Library of Congress didn't acknowledge the Filipinos were fighting for their independence and officially designate the insurrection a war until 1999.)
Imperialism became all the rage after the United States won the Spanish American War in 1898 and one of the spoils of that war was the Philippines, whose people had begun fighting for their freedom from Spain in 1896.
The U.S. bought the Philippines from Spain for $20 million in order to make it a colony but the Filipinos, who had formed an independent republic when the Spanish left, wanted no part of foreign rule, whether Spanish or American.
Undeclared war
The U.S had a force of 126,000 in the islands and was successful at first but when the Filipinos turned to guerilla warfare, things got rough.
Filipino prisoners were often shot and there were reports they were tortured in American concentration camps. To counter those charges, the American commander, Gen. Elwell Otis, reported Filipinos were torturing American prisoners in a “fiendish fashion.”
Emelio Aguinaldo, the Filipino president, tried to get the International Red Cross to inspect his prisons but Otis blocked the inspection. When Aguinaldo smuggled four foreign reporters into the country, all four wrote that American prisoners were well treated.
The Americans eventually captured Aguinaldo and in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt declared the hostilities had ended, mission accomplished.
But sporadic fighting against the occupiers by Filipino Muslim insurgents, who objected to the non-Muslim American presence on the island of Mindanao, continued for 10 more years.
The war left 4324 Americans and tens of thousands of Filipinos, including many civilians, dead. The U.S. didn't grant the islands commonwealth status until 1935 and independence until 1946.
The war tore the United States apart and it was especially unpopular in the northeast, where the Springfield Republican was the most outspoken journalistic critic.
Many prominent Americans like Grover Cleveland, Henry James, William Jennings Bryan, Jane Addams, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain were against the war.
Twain was vice president of an anti-war movement, known as the American Anti-Imperialist League, from 1901 until his death in 1910.
During the war, Twain wrote, “I have tried hard and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. I thought we should act as their protector, not try to get them under our heel.
"We were there to relieve them to set up a government of their own. It was not to be a government according to our ideas but a government that represented the feelings of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas.
"But now, why, we have gotten into a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.”
Change Filipino to Iraqi and it could have been written yesterday.
Dick Ahles/The Day