Was Conquering the Philippines Worth It?
Manila skyline (wikimedia)
Ross Douthat offers a pregnant historical analogy:
These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs. Like Iraq, they were wars that Americans were eager to forget about as soon as they were finished.
I think the Iraq-Philippines analogy is an interesting one, because it’s something that both proponents and detractors of American imperialism can embrace as illustrative. I recall that George W. Bush himself analogized his imperial adventure in Iraq to McKinley’s in the Pacific. And while the situations don’t bear any resemblance in detail, there is a certain vague similarity in that while I would say counterinsurgency in the Philippines “worked” it’s hard for me to see that it actually achieved anything. I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?
It seems to me that unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any. Anti-American rebels lost, but we didn’t really win anything of note. We spent a lot of money, suffered some casualties, killed a lot of people and in exchange got some military bases that were overrun by the Japanese as soon as it looked like they might be strategically useful.
81 Responses to “Was Conquering the Philippines Worth It?”
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July 27th, 2009 at 11:39 am
unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any
BINGO!
July 27th, 2009 at 11:43 am
The Phillipine-American war gave us Mark Twain’s finest writing, the anti-war piece called “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”
http://www.historywiz.com/primarysources/sittingindarkness.htm
July 27th, 2009 at 11:43 am
One Word: bases. “Having” the Philippines was seen for a long time by naval power enthusiasts as they key to a robust American presence in the Pacific. Heck, there was even a muted panic in the ’70s and ’80s about how, having lost Cam Ranh Bay on Vietnam, what would happen if we got kicked out of Subic Bay and Clark Field. We seem to be doing OK without them now, for what that’s worth. Not that Iraq is about bases…..
July 27th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Everybody who was anybody in the 19th century were imperialists. If we didn’t have lots of our color on the map, we were going to eventually gets squeezed off the globe.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Sums the whole dirty business up nicely. All the Americans needed to do in 1898 was offer to protect the Phillipinos from the Germans, British, and Japanese, all of whom were waiting like vultures for the Spanish to pull out of the archipelago. The other imperial powers would have backed down, we could have gotten a contract for the coaling stations we needed to keep some influence in the region, and the Phillipines could have been independent as soon as they got a government organized.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:50 am
The Phillipine-American war gave us Mark Twain’s finest writing
ITYM, “most indulgent writing”. I love Clemens but he was definitely of two minds about most everything — he could go all satirical on Monday and suck up to Andrew Carnegie on Tuesday. His finest writing is, as is well-known, Huck Finn. And after that his tall tales, particularly the unclassifiable Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Everybody who was anybody in the 19th century were imperialists. If we didn’t have lots of our color on the map, we were going to eventually gets squeezed off the globe.
We didn’t need lots of “color on the map” in Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle-east, or in China. Our economic power was suffcient to give us a seat at the table, and a nominal military presence to make the Kaiser take us seriously. The coaling and repair stations needed to maintain a naval presence did not require colonies. Diplomatically, all conquering the Phillipines did was compromise our ability to be a neutral broker.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
The US presence in the Philippines helped pave the way for one of the most famous shoe collections of all time.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
The Philippines adventure was simply another nasty episode in a nasty history of American misbehavior, worthy of the late and unlamented Genghis Khan. I’m certainly glad that no one here is defending it. I respect Mr. Douthat’s intelligence and moral insight, so I’m not sure why he doesn’t just come out and condemn the Philippines adventure. I find this disappointing.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
The Pinkertons had established that the Philippines were developing weapons of mass destruction, and would certainly have those “deadly motherfuckers” (their words) within the next 150 years. A preemptive invasion was necessary. Good call, McKinley.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
If we didn’t have the Philippines, where would American Catholic parishes get their supply of English-speaking priests, now that the reliable supply of Irishmen has slowed to a trickle?
July 27th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The Philippines were independent of the US twice in the 1940s. When the Japanese kicked us out in the early 40s and when the blatant hypocrisy became too much in the late 40s. I guess there were too many little brown brothers to make it into a state, like Hawaii or Alaska, or just possess it, like Peurto Rico or parts of Cuba.
The essential mass slaughter of civilians is , but one, enduring quality of the US military.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
By 1910 occupying the Philippines was viewed as a strategic error. FDR had to ORDER the U.S. Army to seriously plan to defend the place on the verge of World War II. All in all it was probably the dumbest strategic move in American military history.
I can make better arguements for World War I, Vietnam, AND the current adventure in Iraq making sense.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I’m surprised Ross didn’t explain that the Navy clearly needed a steady supply of stewards.
Also to think there are long-term benefits of invading Iraq is silly at most.
Invading countries preemptively is not a ideal conservative trait, yet Ross does not go into that. Not surprising at all.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I don’t think we have the first clue whether our lives would be better or worse if some abstruse colonial brouhaha had come out the other way over a century ago.
Would my life be substantially worse if the Sepoy Mutiny had never happened? Perhaps! Did the failure of Teddy Kennedy’s invasion of Cuba help or hurt the US in the long run? Who knows!
July 27th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
The “killed a lot of people” part is what’s missing from Douthat’s piece. He does talk about “murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs,” but he doesn’t say that what this really means is many many many thousands of people killed. One can maybe sometimes make the argument that some things are worth doing even if they are going to get that number of people killed, but Douthat and people like him don’t even try to make that argument. Those dead people simply are not high up on the priority list, and scarcely even enter the calculation when adding up the plusses and the minuses of a war. It’s just despicable. And he’s the less crazy right-winger!! For him a whole bunch of dead foreigners are just a matter of indifference, rather than something to be proud of.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
The idea that Iraq was “worth it” comes from the right-wing idea that they simply had to get Iraq’s oil to market ASAP and couldn’t do it with Saddam Hussein in power. Snarling, self-satisfied Dick Cheney was urging W to ditch the Iraq embargo early in 2001.
So few principles, so little time.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Those dead people simply are not high up on the priority list
Right, because they died *outside* the womb, and thus fail to make Douhat’s priority list.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
This is ridiculous. The situations aren’t the least bit analogous.
At the time we took over, the Philippines weren’t a country governed by a native-born dictator. They were a rebellious Spanish colony, ceded to us by the Spanish without the consent of the governed. They spent 14 years fighting us for independence, as they had fought the Spanish before. They ultimately lost–with tens of thousands dead (hundreds of thousands if you count the cholera epidemic).
The only argument you could possibly make as to why this would be “better” than an independent Philippines from the Philippinos perspective is that arguably having the Americans there stopped someone worse from invading and taking the place over. Of course, then the Japanese did it in 1940, so it’s a pretty pathetic argument.
And from the American perspective, it was a total waste of resources. Seriously, what was the long-term benefit? We could have just liberated them after WWII and had basically the same relationship. Better, arguably.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
“One Word: bases. “Having” the Philippines was seen for a long time by naval power enthusiasts as they key to a robust American presence in the Pacific.”
Indeed. They were our first Pacific naval base.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
What’s missing from this thread is that there are still 130,000 US troops in Iraq 6 months after Bush left office, and now the Iraqi prime minister/future dictator is talking about extending their presence past 2011.
Obama is looking at the map of Iraqi oil and wondering what’s in it for the military industrial complex. Change people believed in!
So the answer to Matt’s question is ‘yes’ as far as the elites are concerned. Conquering and occupying any country is always worth it.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Guam was the necessary pacific naval base. Colonizing the Philippines was not. McKinley did it, so he said, to “Christianize” the (already-Catholic) Phillipines.
And Emilio Aguinaldo was not “anti-American”. He supported the US until it became apparent that they came a colonizers, not liberators. Then he fought them.
The Spanish-American war was, if anything, less defensible and more unAmerican than the Iraq war (which was mostly a fit of post-9/11 pique). That Douthat has a real knack for analogies.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
By 1910 occupying the Philippines was viewed as a strategic error. FDR had to ORDER the U.S. Army to seriously plan to defend the place on the verge of World War II. All in all it was probably the dumbest strategic move in American military history.
Solidly true. Ironically, if we had been as much of a murderous, bloody-minded greedy imperial power as the Ameriphobes keep claiming we were, you might have been wrong. Another power would have fortified the place properly, done a better job of exploiting its wealth, and put in an efficient colonial government. Since American imperialism was never that popular at home, among conservatives or liberals, we tried to pretend we weren’t colonial masters, collaborated with the local elites to keep the corrupt, economically feeble status quo, and didn’t have a big enough military to actually defend the place when it was attacked. A cooperative alliance with Aguinaldo would likely have done both countries a helluva lot more good.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Well, I suppose we should be grateful that conservatives represented by Douthat are moving on to another line of defense. Previously, the line was that the Iraq War was a necessary defensive war, directly against a WMD-packing madman and indirectly against the looming Islamofascist Hordes.
Now the story is that the war was an imperialist war, like the war in the Philippines, but that imperialism is good in the long run for the conquered.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
“The Spanish-American war was, if anything, less defensible and more unAmerican than the Iraq war (which was mostly a fit of post-9/11 pique).”
Meh.
The rules of international relations were different before 1945. The Spanish-American war was a solid strategic move for the US. It gave the US a foothold on the Pacific Rim that has benefitted the nation over the long-term.
The infuriating thing about the Iraq war, OTOH, is that it doesn’t seem as if it makes any long-term strategic sense whatsoever.
Having Guam and Subic Bay as bases was actually helpful. Chasing a European power out of the Caribbean was actually helpful. But the Iraq war didn’t help anyone other than folks selling oil.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Seedee Vee Says:
July 27th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The Philippines were independent of the US twice in the 1940s. When the Japanese kicked us out in the early 40s and when the blatant hypocrisy became too much in the late 40s. I guess there were too many little brown brothers to make it into a state, like Hawaii or Alaska, or just possess it, like Peurto Rico or parts of Cuba.
The essential mass slaughter of civilians is , but one, enduring quality of the US military.
============================================================
In the late 1930s FDR and Congress had enacted laws that would have made the Philippines independent in 1944, with a transition timetable. In 1942 they merely traded US control (already on the way out) for the much more onerous control of Japan.
Other commmenters are right, I think. Hawaii, Midway, and Guam were probably enough to support any desired US naval presence in the Pacific. At the time, everyone was hooked on the theories of Mahan.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
And from the American perspective, it was a total waste of resources. Seriously, what was the long-term benefit? We could have just liberated them after WWII and had basically the same relationship. Better, arguably.
============================================================
The Navy and most of the Army realized the re-conquest of the Philippines in 1944 was really “out of the way” in the path of invading Japan. Most favored bypassing the PI and invading Taiwan instead.
McArthur was psycho on the subject however, wanting to redeem his 1942 failure. FDR gave in to political pressure. If he didn’t support McArthur he was afraid Republicans would use it against him in 1944 election.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Having Guam and Subic Bay as bases was actually helpful. Chasing a European power out of the Caribbean was actually helpful. But the Iraq war didn’t help anyone other than folks selling oil.
Ending the sanctions was helpful. Getting rid of a genocidal warmongering dictator was helpful. It looks like it helped things in Iran.
Vietnam on the other hand was a waste. The Vietnamese were engaged in an anti-colonial struggle and China just turned into a supercharged capitalist state which developed a symbiotic relationship with the US.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
I think the Philippines case is arguable. But Korea? We have 30,000 Americans guarding the DMZ in perpetuity and that benefits us how?
July 27th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
The infuriating thing about the Iraq war, OTOH, is that it doesn’t seem as if it makes any long-term strategic sense whatsoever.
Well, having a permanent military presence right in the heart of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region, plus a massive administrative and intelligence headquarters for US Inc. in the middle of Baghdad is no small thing.
But I think liberals should avoid getting drawn into national interest bean-counting, and try to adhere to the principle that it is just wrong to kill many thousands of innocent people, people who aren’t attacking you, even if doing so does win you some strategic prizes on the big board.
From the beginning of this mess, Washington and elite discourse has been dominated by people who have been convinced that concerns about mere life and death, and attachment to the most fundamental and universal moral standards of humanity, are naive kids stuff, and that the Grownups only talk about national interests, national profit and strategic payoffs.
But I prefer to rest the case against Iraq on “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. Civilized human beings everywhere recognize strict boundaries and taboos on the shedding of blood. Those standards need to be reaffirmed and insisted upon by decent people around the world, in the face of the psychopathically corrupt obsessions with national self-interest and gain that characterize the capitals of great powers.
The Iraq War wasn’t a strategic blunder. It was an atrocity: a villainous riot of unjustified killing and destruction.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
“Getting rid of a genocidal warmongering dictator was helpful. It looks like it helped things in Iran.”
Well, Saddam wasn’t going to do any more genocide, or any more warmongering, for the rest of his life anyway; we had the country completely contained. As for Iran, I’m fairly impressed that you’re sticking to that line even after the protests have essentially been quashed and the prospect of a democratic Iran is actually more remote, not less, than it was before this successfully stolen election.
But I think Dan Kervick is right: comparing pros and cons in the face of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed with no justification whatever is pretty perverse. So let his argument be mine:
July 27th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Ending the sanctions was helpful.
And when you end sanctions against a country, the next logical step is to bomb, invade that country. You just have to.
Getting rid of a genocidal warmongering dictator was helpful.
You forgot: killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a war of choice (chosen by the US, against the ‘warmongering dictator’) was helpful. Making millions of people leave their towns, or even the country was helpful. Torturing people to death was helpful.
It looks like it helped things in Iran.
It looks like you are living in another dimension, or a hardcore supporter of the ayatollahs.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Of course, if it hadn’t been for McKinley’s initiating a century-long engagement by the U.S. with the Filipinos, it’s highly unlikely we’d have Michelle Malkin (nee Maglalang) to kick around. We can reasonably hope that if we stay the course now, if we’re lucky in a century or so you’ll have an Afghan moonbat blogger to enjoy the same way. So be careful what you wish for.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
(I’m guessing southpaw meant “Teddy Roosevelt” rather than “Teddy Kennedy” in reply #16. You guys probably already figured it out for yourselves, but it had me scratching my head for a bit.)
July 27th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
The infuriating thing about the Iraq war, OTOH, is that it doesn’t seem as if it makes any long-term strategic sense whatsoever.
Hussein was a lunatic sitting on a pile of cash. In the twenty years before the invasion he had invaded two neighboring countries and massacred scores of his own people. He repeatedly taunted the world about his intention to build nuclear weapons and openly flouted UN sanctions designed to keep him from international aggression.
Ultimately, removing Hussein (and his successors) served the same strategic purpose as our current Iran policy: avoiding nuclear proliferation across the Middle East. Whether the war was the best method to achieving this purpose or worth the cost in absolute terms is deeply unclear (I’m very doubtful on both counts), but the strategic purposes seems clear enough.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
We have 30,000 Americans guarding the DMZ in perpetuity and that benefits us how?
Aside from any geopolitical Cold War analysis I won’t embarrass myself by trying to argue, there are 50 million South Koreans who are currently not living under the totalitarian rule of an increasingly loco despot, so… that seems like a good thing at the bare minimum.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
It looks like you are living in another dimension, or a hardcore supporter of the ayatollahs.
It’s you who is in denial about how bad Saddam was. It’s not just rightwing propaganda.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
How long is Douhat going to get to occupy that prized piece of journalistic real estate? The Times’ decision to give him a column is one that, in retrospect, have generated no short or long term benefits.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
It’s you who is in denial about how bad Saddam was. It’s not just rightwing propaganda.
Saddam was terrible. As was our assault on Fallujah. There are around, IIRC, 2x more excess Iraqi deaths due to our invasion of Iraq, the Iraq-Iran war, and our blockade of Iraq than are attributable to Saddam.
The ironic thing was that Saddam’s worst days for killing his own were done while he was a US asset. As the famous picture of Rummy shaking his hand recalls. (General Pace in the paper today admits to Rummy being a son of a bitch. Yet, nobody launches an invasion of Rummy’s house. Go figure.)
July 27th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Just to be clear how hypocritical the pro-war people still are:
Hussein was a lunatic sitting on a pile of cash.
He wasn’t a lunatic, and had less cash than the Saudis funding fundamentalist schools, or the ayatollahs funding terrorism.
In the twenty years before the invasion he had invaded two neighboring countries
Like Israel.
and massacred scores of his own people.
Who killed more Iraqis, Saddam or Clinton and the Bush family?
He repeatedly taunted the world about his intention to build nuclear weapons
Like North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel.
and openly flouted UN sanctions designed to keep him from international aggression.
Like Israel.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Like North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel.
Correction: he denied building nukes, and let the inspectors in (unlike all those countries leaders who did build nukes).
Of course, Poptarts would point that those inspectors were not credible, in fact were laughable: they didn’t find the WMDs Saddam was planning to use in an American city!
July 27th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
That McKinley “Christianize” quote is B.S. What’s been made clear by this post is that no one here seems to know anything about the Phillipine War. Here’s a place to start:
http://www.amazon.com/Philippine-War-1899-1902-Modern-Studies/dp/0700612254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248719834&sr=1-1
I don’t think the Phillipine and Iraq wars are in anyway comparable.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
ITYM, “most indulgent writing”. I love Clemens but he was definitely of two minds about most everything — he could go all satirical on Monday and suck up to Andrew Carnegie on Tuesday. His finest writing is, as is well-known, Huck Finn. And after that his tall tales, particularly the unclassifiable Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn.
To be fair to Twain, his views on the war weren’t inspired by capricious impulses. He really did by McKinley’s line about bringing American-style freedom and democracy and assumed that we would be leaving soon after we arrived. Once he saw that we were slaughtering Phillipinos and were there to stay, he changed his opinion pretty fast. He spoke out against it at high cost also, he was called a traitor, received death threats, etc.
His Letters to the earth has always been a favorite of mine.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
At the time of the Spanish-American War, the USA was beginning to feel like a world power. The Philippines looked like a good Pacific base, and what is more, at the time Americans believed that if we didn’t take it some other power would.
Of course, in hard-nosed strategic terms Manila turned out to be too far from Hawaii (let alone the U.S. mainland) and too close to Japan. The Army generals wanted out of the Philippines, because those Navy bases were impossible to defend– as we learned the hard way in 1942.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
The rules of international relations were different before 1945. The Spanish-American war was a solid strategic move for the US. It gave the US a foothold on the Pacific Rim that has benefitted the nation over the long-term.
While taking out the remnants of the dying Spanish Empire was helpful in getting international recognition, I don’t know why people say that getting pacific rim bases were a strategic boon. We never garrisoned enough troops or powerful enough navel squadrons to hold off a full-blown Japanese attack (or an unlikely British attack) and the supply lines were tenuous. We lost it all except for Pearl Harbor and Midway in 1941 and had to reconquer it all. How was this a boon until the cold-war years?
July 27th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Well, Saddam wasn’t going to do any more genocide, or any more warmongering, for the rest of his life anyway; we had the country completely contained. As for Iran, I’m fairly impressed that you’re sticking to that line even after the protests have essentially been quashed and the prospect of a democratic Iran is actually more remote, not less, than it was before this successfully stolen election.
Antiwar people believe Iraq is another Vietnam and are in denial about how bad Saddam was and that he was “in the box” whereas the box was falling apart.
With Saddam gone, Iranian Shia pilgrims could visit holy sites again in Iraq and could see how elections worked there. You don’t know shit about Iran and don’t give a fuck about Iran as long as we dont’ bomb them.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
It really would be a good thing to have a world rule of law to tie down America, because there are many Americans who want to kill non-Americans. I can’t think of any other country that is as much of a wannabe Empire power these days.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Of course, in hard-nosed strategic terms Manila turned out to be too far from Hawaii (let alone the U.S. mainland) and too close to Japan. The Army generals wanted out of the Philippines, because those Navy bases were impossible to defend– as we learned the hard way in 1942.
Exactly. The other nations with colonies and bases in the Far East had armies capable of defending them. Our army before 1943 wasn’t actually big enough to defend our own territory. When the Japanese called our bluff in 1939-1940, we didn’t ships, planes, or men to put up more than a token resistance.
I’ve never been convinced of the viability of that whole “bypass the Phillipines and go for Taiwan” strategy, and was pleased when I finally read a major scholar, Gerhard Weinberg, willing to debunk it. The point of driving west across the Pacific was to cut off Japan from her oil supply in Indonesia. The Phillipines were ideally situated for that strategic maneuver. Why attack Taiwan, which was heavily fortified, in range of Japanese land-based air support, and garrisoned by a huge Japanese army? Apparently a lot of people thought that we needed to “link up” with China, but by 1944 it should have been obvious that Nationalist China was useless as an ally or as a strategic resource. MacArthur got that one right, I think, morally, politically, and strategically. If Homma hadn’t put up such a brilliant defense, the result would not have been so debatable.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
“You don’t know shit about Iran and don’t give a fuck about Iran as long as we dont’ bomb them.”
Well, if we bomb the Iranians, then a number of their very valid concerns about democracy and human rights will suddenly be irrelevant. So, yes, my desire that we not bomb them trumps my very strong desire that Iran become a liberal democracy, or at least improves its human rights record.
As for what I know about Iran, maybe you could share with me the evidence that Iran is improved since the Iraq invasion? Because what I see is a regime that stole an election, got away with it, suppressed dissent, arrested and silenced reformists, and generally tightened its grip on power.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
My history professor back at Notre Dame argued that but for the decision to keep the Philipines there would have been no attack on Pearl Harbor and no Vietnam War. I am not sure I agree with that (although it is likely that unless we at least stayed in the Phillipines as an “ally” with bases, either Japan, Great Britain, or Germany would have attempted to move in that being unfortunately the Zeitgeist of the pre-WWI period). We would still have involved in China protecting our “treat rights” (see the “Sand Pebbles”) and in 1941 would have still been sending nasty notes and imposing our embargo on oil on them in reaction to their invasion of China, occupation of Vichy Indochina, and threats agains the British and Dutch colonies in what was then called the East Indies. FDR and Cordell Hull might have been even more agressive and firm with the Japan without the worry of the indefensibilty of the Phillipines and the Americans committed to the place. Like all guerilla wars the Phillipine Insurrection was a horror of ambushes, reprisals, and massacres. But we then had the honor to prosecute our war criminals.
July 27th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
As for what I know about Iran, maybe you could share with me the evidence that Iran is improved since the Iraq invasion? Because what I see is a regime that stole an election, got away with it, suppressed dissent, arrested and silenced reformists, and generally tightened its grip on power.
What’s new is the brazen dissent, by regular people and high level people who participated in the original revolution.
The most recent development is that conservatives are now attacking Ahmadinejad who appointed a reformist deputy (their children are married). The deputy had pissed off by conservatives when in parliament he said he could live with Israelis in peace. The deputy was sacked.
“President Obama has given Iran until late September to accept an offer of talks to give up its nuclear ambitions, and until the end of the year to show some progress on the issue.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/world/middleeast/26israel.html?scp=2&sq=Iran&st=cse
Otherwise Israel will attack and then you will see how important the Middle East is and that as 9/11 showed you just can’t stick your head in the sand and pretend that events in other parts of the world won’t effect you.
July 27th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Did we carpet bomb Phillipino cities for 40 days and 40 nights? I’d like to know that we will never invade another country and slaughter its citizens again. We dropped more ordinance on that small country than was dropped in all of WW II. That such a thing could even be breathed in the same sentence with the word “defense” is an abomination.
July 27th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse?
Assuming you are actually asking the question…
Japan would have taken over the Phillipines much, much earlier. And they would know what to do with it. They would have had a consolidated power base there at the start of World War II, and would have had one less place to conquer on the way to dominion of the Pacific. They conceivably could have conquered Hawaii. It is still hard to believe that they would have ended up winning, but they may have made a better fight of it, requiring more American resources.
If those resources were necessary on the Pacific rather than the Atlantic front, then we may not have been able to keep Russia in business for long enough. Without the Russians D-Day would have failed, and the Cold war could have been against the Nazis.
That would have made everyone’s lives worse.
July 27th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
He talks about “successes of the surge,” which sounds a lot like “the surge worked.” It worked in getting Iraq off the front page, it worked in reducing US casualties, but the violence continues. As of the end of June 2009, there are 144 overall security incidents per week, 115 attacks per week, 42 IED explosions per week, and 4 High Profile Explosions per week. Forty-two IED explosions a week in a country that’s much smaller than the US doesn’t sound peaceful to me.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
My history professor back at Notre Dame argued that but for the decision to keep the Philipines there would have been no attack on Pearl Harbor
The idea here, I guess, is that Japan wanted the Dutch East Indies for their oil and rubber, and couldn’t see itself taking them with the Philippines sitting atwart their route. We owned the Philippines, so Japan figured it had to go to war with us anyway; hence, Pearl Harbor. Had we not owned the Philippines, we would’ve posed less apparent threat to Japan’s goals. So on that theory, your professor may’ve been correct.
I have always thought that Japan guessed wrong here — that, had it simply ignored the Philippines, we would’ve scolded them but not gone to war.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
They conceivably could have conquered Hawaii.
Anything is conceivable, but the idea that Japan could’ve taken and held Hawaii is difficult to credit. A carrier raid is one thing; keeping an occupation supplied is several orders of magnitude more difficult.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse?
The question is difficult to answer until you work out the details of how the United States would have left the Phillipines. We gave Cuba its independence quickly, minus the naval base at Guantanamo. That base plus the Monroe Doctrine kept the European powers from being a threat to Cuba.
When it became obvious that Spain was losing its grip on the Phillipines, the question internationally was not “when will it become independent?” but “who will take over when it happens?” The British had considered taking over Luzon, at least, since the Napoleonic Wars. The French, Russians, and Italians were scouting up additional colonies at the time, and the Germans and Japanese were new players, looking for territories that would allow them to become major imperial powers.
The Americans had no particular interest in colonies, but had just figured out that they would not be able to be a major influence in international politics without a navy. When they forced the issue in 1898 by going to war with Spain, they were looking for coaling stations for the brand new navy they’d just built. Dewey got to Manila and beat the Spanish fleet, then, while waiting for reinforcements to arrive, had to negotiate with the Phillipino revolutionaries on land while fending off the British and German naval squadrons that had virtually followed him into the harbor, looking for an opening.
The question, then, was what sort of deal would the Americans make with Aguinaldo and the revolutionaries? Arbitrarily seizing power was a stupid move, fueled by bone-headed racism, and the example of Cuba shows it didn’t have to happen that way. On the other hand, if the Americans had simply left, someone else with a fleet and an army would have replaced them.
As it was (I haven’t read up the details recently) the Americans ended the war and put a bandaid on the whole Imperialism issue by promising the Phillipinos limited autonomy now and full independence in 40 years. Since mainstream American thought was that imperialism was evil and decadent and was going to die out in about that period of time, everyone expected a peaceful separation.
I can add that, when the Pacific crisis began heating up in the late 1930s, the Phillipines were already an “autonomous commonwealth” with their own government and army. Douglas MacArthur from 1937 into 1941 was not in the Phillipines as an American army officer, he was the Field Marshall of the Phillipine Army and an “advisor to the Commonwealth.” He became an American commander again in July 1941 when Roosevelt realized that war with Japan was pretty much inevitable.
All of this gives some idea of what alternative arrangements could have happened if the United States had dealt fairly with the Phillipines in the first place. On the other hand, leaving the islands to the tender mercies of the Germans and Japanese . . . it could have been much, much worse.
July 27th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
The idea here, I guess, is that Japan wanted the Dutch East Indies for their oil and rubber, and couldn’t see itself taking them with the Philippines sitting athwart their route. We owned the Philippines, so Japan figured it had to go to war with us anyway; hence, Pearl Harbor. Had we not owned the Philippines, we would’ve posed less apparent threat to Japan’s goals. So on that theory, your professor may’ve been correct.
The counterargument to that is that the Philippines were not the reason that Japan went to war with the United States. Japan went to war with the United States because they wanted to conquer east Asia, replacing the old British, Dutch, and French empires with an empire of their own, and completing the isolation of China so it could be conquered and colonized. The United States had been seen as the opponent that would have to be defeated to accomplish that goal since the end of the Great War. The British Empire had been nearly bankrupted by that conflict, the fleet units she could deploy to the Pacific fleet were mostly obsolete and badly under-supported by the available ports and facilities. The Japanese fleet had been built to defeat the American fleet, which, while still obsolete, was stronger, newer, and better based in California, Washington, and Hawaii. Japanese militarists of the 1920s and 1930s therefore expected to have to go to war with the United States over Southeast Asia and, once the Americans began modernizing their fleet in 1938-1940, they pushed to get the war started so it could be fought and won before the American “Two-Ocean Navy” could be a threat, by 1943 or 1944. With Japan thinking on a scale that large, the existence of a badly defended additional American base in the Philippines was not a decisive factor in Japan’s strategic planning.
Even from the narrower point of view, whether the United States “owned” the Philippines or not, the islands still posed a strategic threat to Japan, like a gator sleeping on the front walk between you and your mailbox. The Americans might, might not, maybe, coulda, delayed going to war if they weren’t attacked directly, whether in the Philippines or elsewhere if the Philippines had been independent, but Japan could not bet her entire existence on that possibility. Further, the Americans would have to go to war with them eventually, from the Japanese point of view, so why sacrifice the advantage of strategic surprise to gain a few months?
July 28th, 2009 at 2:24 am
I’ve been translating a book by a war-era Japanese intellectual, and the irony to me is that his attitude towards China was “they will greet us as liberators!” I really think that the Japanese were the original neocons. As far as the intelligentsia of Japan were concerned, the war was about establishing a “Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere” in which the Asian races would be able to throw off the white man’s yoke. (And throw on the Japanese man’s yoke, but shh! Anyway, that’s just temporary, like the Green Zone embassy!) You have to remember, America was really racist back then, and Churchill’s racism is fairly notorious as well. To the Japanese way of thinking about it at the time, if all the whites were racists, the Germans were at least cultured racists with trains that run on time. As long as the Germans let them do their own thing in the East, (unlike the other imperialists like Britain, Netherlands, pre-invasion France, and the nearby Soviets), that would be good enough.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Yeah, I don’t know about “long-term benefit”, but the Spanish-American war is definitely the best analogy for Iraq in US history. War pumped up about a false threat with irresponsible journalism, US invades several nations for strategic and economic advantage, US gets embroiled in a quagmire fighting citizens of those countries who want it to clear out…. all of it fits.
And just as the Spanish-American war ushered in the start of American overseas empire, the Iraq War shows the birth of a new phase of it – one where the United States claims the right to attack any nation regardless of whether or not they can even pretend to have been attacked or threatened by it.
Also, change a few words in Mark Twain’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)” and it fits the Iraq War excellently.
July 28th, 2009 at 6:30 am
It’s kind of weird how some people talk about how we “removed Saddam” like we did some operation against one guy instead of systematically de-structuring Iraq which hardly exists as a functioning nation anymore.
July 28th, 2009 at 7:17 am
It’s kind of weird how some people talk about how we “removed Saddam” like we did some operation against one guy instead of systematically de-structuring Iraq which hardly exists as a functioning nation anymore.
“Remove” is such a wonderful euphemism, isn’t it? You get to be all calm and reasonable sounding, like a dermatologist who just removed a wart. Like you didn’t use the wrong knife and no anesthetic, there wasn’t a screaming patient with blood spraying all over the room, infection, gangrene, and years of reconstructive surgery to rebuild the patient’s face.
All you did was “remove” it.
July 28th, 2009 at 8:27 am
That Ross Douthat breezily takes it as given that a 19th-century war of naked imperialism yielded “long-term” benefits to the imperial power, offering not a scrap of evidence or argument, tells you everything you need to know about his grasp of history, policy and morality.
The man is a privileged idiot, who knows nothing more than to nuzzle against the legs of the world order that has been so good to him. From time to time, someone scratches behind his ears, and he thinks that proof of his genius.
July 28th, 2009 at 10:15 am
El Cid:
It’s kind of weird how some people talk about how we “removed Saddam” like we did some operation against one guy instead of systematically de-structuring Iraq which hardly exists as a functioning nation anymore.
Really its was the decade of sanctions + Saddam which destroyed Iraq. They should have taken out Saddam after he invaded Kuwait, but instead we listened to allies like Sunni Saudi Arabia who want to keep the majority Iraqi Shia and Iran in check.
It’s really weird how so-called antiwar people blame everything on America but nothing on former Baathists or Al Qaeda in Iraq or Saddam, who wasn’t that bad in their minds. It’s weird that they aren’t crying about our imperial adventure in Afghanistan more.
July 28th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Midland:
“Remove” is such a wonderful euphemism, isn’t it? You get to be all calm and reasonable sounding, like a dermatologist who just removed a wart
What’s sad is that so-called antiwar people get to sound all self-righteous about dead Iraqi babies, but they don’t give a fuck about anything going on outside of America. Genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia or Darfur, they couldn’t care less. They just like to bitch about America the big bully.
July 28th, 2009 at 10:48 am
If Japan had invaded an independent Phillipines and left Hawaii alone, would Roosevelt have had enough support in Congress to go to war? The answer certainly isn’t an obvious Yes.
July 28th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
If Japan had invaded an independent Philippines and left Hawaii alone, would Roosevelt have had enough support in Congress to go to war? The answer certainly isn’t an obvious Yes.
True enough. The context of independence, though, becomes a key. The Philippines being independent in 1940, ahead of the 1946 scheduled date? Maybe, but how about the Philippines not guarded by American naval and air bases in 1940? Quite the long shot, that. The Americans predicated independence on the basis of there being no serious foreign threat to the Philippines, and that situation wasn’t getting better in the 1930s, it was getting worse.
July 28th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
[...] 28, 2009 in history and current events | by silbey Matt Ygleisas notes a Ross Douthat column that invokes one of William McKinley’s splendid little wars, this one in the Philippines. He [...]
July 28th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
A War of Frontier and Empire « The Edge of the American West
The Philippines changed that. It made America an Asian power and an Asian power that presented a direct threat to the Japanese. Coupled with the radical militarization of Japan that occurred in the 1920s and 30s, it led directly to the outbreak of the war in the Pacific,
I always get a power krokazhit moment whenever I read a historical comment suggesting that a militarist, brutal empire would not have caused devastation, oppression, and fear across an entire continent if only we’d been a little nicer to them.
Yep, it was Poland getting control of a corridor to the sea through Prussia, coupled with the radical militarization of Germany, that led to Word War II in Europe. If only Poland had been more reasonable with Germany! Hector would not have to be mourning the loss of Prussia along with all his other grievances.
July 28th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
[...] and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 has a very enlightening post bolstering the argument I made yesterday that “victory” in the Philippines wasn’t really worth anything. [...]
July 28th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
The United States had been seen as the opponent that would have to be defeated to accomplish that goal since the end of the Great War.
Note that the bolded words are necessary, because there was certainly no U.S. *guarantee* of East Asia, and if there had been, it would’ve been worth its weight in paper.
It would’ve been a gamble for Japan to conquer east Asia without attacking the Philippines and the U.S.
But that would have been a much better gamble than the one they took in attacking the U.S. — a gamble that they could foresee at the time as a doomed throw of the dice.
Japan, like Nazi Germany, seems ultimately to’ve gone to war with the U.S. out of a sense of fatalistic inevitability, rather than for any rational reason.
July 28th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Another thing no one mentions about how Gulf II is different than ANY OTHER WAR THE US HAS BEEN INVOLVED IN……is that there are no little half american babies and muslim warbrides in this one.
Because unlike the Phillipines, Japan, Germany, Vietnam, Korean, there is no prostitute population in the occupied country and well brought up muslimahs were NEVER allowed to socialize with occupation forces.
If there were other incidents of Menchaca/Tucker goon squad rapists, we haven’t heard about them.
July 28th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
So, yeah…there just isn’t that strong cross-cultural bond of half-philipino babies and warbrides that cemented our fab new relationship with the Phillipines, Japan, Vietnam, Germany, etc, lol!
Sealed in semen.
Douthat is a profound waste of spacetime.
He’s just Bill Kristol with a thesaurus and more hair.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
#34, yeah . . . sorry about that.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
#33
I just explained why that isn’t going to happen.
No interbreeding with Afghanis and Iraqis.
No whores.
July 29th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Yglesias is right that for people like Douthat, it’s partly about the ennobling steely gaze that war gives a nation, its supposed quality of binding us up in a greater project, however minor the contribution to our actual security.
Also, this Douthat comparison is an echo of a lot of wankery that arose out of a bunch of warbloggers sweatily reading Max Boot’s “Savage Wars of Peace” right as they began drumming up the invasion of Iraq.
The favorable comparison with the Philippines is that however independent they became in name, they’re still a client state basically, and not an enemy like the previous regime in Iraq. This is now the default best-case scenario for Iraq and for anyone like Douthat who’s hoping that occupation doesn’t discredit further adventurism.
July 29th, 2009 at 3:48 am
It’s very hard to play “what if’s” about the past despite an apparently flourishing alternative history lit genre. The Philippine-American War was, in my view, totally uneccesary, but it’s a perfect example of what can happen when rival ambitions (in this case the spirit of American “expansionism” expressed as “Manifest Destiny” and a newly-minted Filipino nationalism flush from battle) come together without any intelligent mediation. Something was going to happen sometime on the ground and it did. Once the shooting began in the trenches around Manila between the erstwhile allies, the fighting became general, and those on both sides who had been spoiling for a fight got what they wanted. Hopefully, this is not the kind of thing that can happen nowadays.
There are two interesting aspects about the start of this war. On the local Philippine scene, the top Philippine revolutionary leadership, having fought and won one revolution against Spain, by an large did not want another war. So desperate were they as they watched the steadily increasing number of American troops arriving in their country, that they were willing to accept an American protectorate (a very tidy arrangement done by many Imperialists at that time) and even some basing rights. The Americans never seriously considered this option.
On the international strategic level, after the Battle of Manila Bay, the British were actually in Philippine waters to keep an eye on the Kaiser’s naval units. There’s a lot of unproven but suggestive stuff floating around in the record that the British had been signaling the Yanks to take over the Philippines to keep out the Germans. Perhaps London just had to nudge Washington in the right direction (the Brits have been known to do this kind of thing you know…par for the course, eh what?)
As for what arrangement could have been made if the Americans had decided to cut a deal with the Filipinos rather than take over their country, who knows? But for sure, it would have been Germans or Japanese fighting against Filipinos rather than Americans. Maybe things would have been worse for the Philippines. On the other hand, it might tempt some to speculate on what an externally well-supplied and ferociously motivated nationalist resistance might have cost the Germans or the Japanese. Might it have changed their view of the world, or at least tempered their ambitions later on?
July 29th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
lol….it isn’t even mildly interesting to anyone that Iraq is our first occupation where american soldiers haven’t interbred with the occupied population?
July 30th, 2009 at 2:47 am
.it isn’t even mildly interesting to anyone that Iraq is our first occupation where american soldiers haven’t interbred with the occupied population?
Not that you’ve heard of… yet.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
President Manuel Luis Quezon put it rather bluntly… he preferred a country run like hell by Filipinos as to a country run like heaven by the Americans.
July 30th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
What would have happened with the United States (U.S.)if it pursued its policy of isolationism? The ramifications would have been too immense. The balance of power probably would have tilted favorably for Germany and shared by other totalitarian states under Communist rule.
A change in foreign policy objectves resulted in the U.S. expamding its presence in the West and most notably in the Far East. The eventual purchase of the Philippines from Spain did not result from a war of conquest. The colonization of the Philippines by another foreign power was a natural consequence of U.S. foreign policy that was unavoidable. After forty six years of being a trust territory, they granted the Philippines autonomy paving the way for its independence.
A senator from the Philippines predicted that, over time, the Philippines would just be an extension of China. I do not believe that the U.S. would allow that to happen.