All happy occupations, like Tolstoy’s families, resemble one another; but each unhappy occupation is unhappy in its own way. Of course it is too early to tell which our occupation of Iraq—not to mention Afghanistan—will be, happy or unhappy. As of this writing, the portents are ominous, with mounting numbers of Iraqis dead in violent street demonstrations; the Shiite, Iranian backed clergy clearly positioning themselves to make a power grab; and the remnants of the Taliban still conducting hit-and-run attacks in Afghanistan. We are only at the beginning of what promises to be a years-long process, however, and it remains to be seen what men of good will and patience can do.
The Bush administration, of course, prefers not to use the word “occupation” at all, and when it must it prefers to dote on the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after World War II, our shining successes of the twentieth century. Ironically, though, the very ferocity of the Second World War actually abetted those occupations. Both nations had been completely—and literally—pulverized, discrediting their old, fascist regimes, and leaving their people physically dependent upon the Allied occupiers. They were, as well, largely homogenous, industrial, Western states, with at least some past experience in democracy.
A more analogous occupation to that of Iraq—an ethnically divided, Arabic state jerry-rigged into existence by the British Empire in 1920, after four centuries of Turkish rule—might be our very first exercise in nation-building.
The Philippines came into our possession before most Americans knew where they were; an enormous, gorgeous, tangled archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, and almost as many different ethnic groups, religious sects, and aboriginal tribes, located halfway around the world. They had been claimed by Spain since Magellan stumbled upon them in the sixteenth century, and their political history would be most famously described as “Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.”
“Hollywood” arrived in the form of Commodore George Dewey, early on May 1, 1898, just days after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Over the course of a morning, Dewey reduced the Spanish fleet to so much flotsam and jetsam in Manila Bay, and we had our first colony—more or less. The only hitch was that Dewey had virtually no men available to occupy our new possession. Instead, Manila was surrounded by some 30,000 Filipino rebels, under a 29-year-old general named Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy.
Spanish rule had become both vicious and senile, and the Filpinos had been fighting for their independence for some two years already by the time Dewey arrived. A nine-month interval now ensued, during which time the U.S. and Spain negotiated a formal end to the war, and America held a caustic debate over whether we should annex our first colony. President William McKinley used the time to rush some 22,000 American troops out to replace the Spanish in the fortifications around Manila—the first U.S. troop commitment outside the continent of North America. He also sent Brigadier General Thomas Anderson, to assure Aguinaldo that “In one hundred and twenty-two years we have established no colonies. I leave you to draw your own inference.”
McKinley was torn between a small but influential phalanx of progressive imperialists, led by a young Theodore Roosevelt, fresh from San Juan Hill, who wanted the Philippines as a naval base to project American power, as a portal to the China trade; above all as proof that the U.S. was a real Western power, ready to take up what Rudyard Kipling had so infamously dubbed “the white man’s burden”—and the anti-imperialists, as weird a collection of political bedfellows ever assembled, who feared that the islands would become an intolerable burden, or despised the Filipinos on racial grounds, or who, like Mark Twain, believed that taking on a colony would permanently distort and betray the principles the American republic was based on.
In the end, McKinley came down on the side of the imperialists. He could not, he claimed, “fling them, a golden apple of discord, among the rival powers.” Later, he also told a visiting committee of Methodists that he had received a religious vision exhorting him to “civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos—apparently either not realizing they had already been Catholics for over three hundred years, or not expecting his Methodists to accept the “Church of Rome” as sufficiently Christian. The Senate ratified the peace treaty with Spain by a single vote, and accepted the “burden.” With Americans and Filipinos occupying trenches just a few yards apart from each other, it now needed only the slightest spark to set off a new round of war, and it was provided when a pair of Nebraska volunteers fired on some inebriated Filipinos who stumbled toward their sentry patrol without giving a password.
The American troops, bored and disgusted with their long inaction, erupted from their trenches with all the fury of their own “shock and awe” offensive. Before the first day was over, they had broken the rebel lines and killed at least 3,000 Filipinos. A desperate Aguinaldo tried to offer a truce, only to be told by Major Gen. Elwell Otis, “The fighting, having once begun, must go on to the grim end.”
And so it did. His army shattered, Aguinaldo turned to guerrilla warfare, but as the scion of a wealthy, Chinese-Spanish mestizo family he was hardly adept at this, and was captured before very long.
The rebellion went on, the fighting degenerating into a savage and merciless struggle. Both sides resorted to torture. U.S. troops, increasingly frustrated by their inability to tell friend from foe, repeatedly avenged the deaths of their comrades by killing every man, woman, and child they found in nearby villages, then burning the huts to the ground.
When Filipinos ambushed and hacked to death some 54 American soldiers on the remote island of Samar, Brigadier Gen. Jacob W. Smith actually proclaimed that Samar “must be made a howling wilderness” and ordered that his soldiers kill any Filipino they encountered over the age of ten: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
Smith earned the sobriquet “Howling Wilderness” Smith in the U.S. press, and was subsequently cashiered, but his tactics were not unique, and the war seemed to be sinking into the proverbial quagmire. By the summer of 1900, the war had there were 75,000 Americans, or three-quarters of the entire U.S. Army, in the Philippines.
If all of this sounds like an eerie precursor to Vietnam, nothing was more familiar than the seeming schizophrenia of American troops and administrators toward the people whose land they were occupying. U.S. soldiers cursed the Filipinos continually as deceitful, lazy, “brainless monkeys,” “niggers,” and “gugus,” and longed to go home. At the same time, they threw themselves into all sorts of efforts to improve life in the country they were occupying, building sewers, distributing food, vaccinating people against smallpox, and even replacing the Spanish judiciary with Filipino courts. American G.I.s started and taught makeshift schools throughout the islands, bringing formal education to many rural areas for the first time.
It was, as one observer put it, “a harsh and philanthropic war at the same time.” By the time President Theodore Roosevelt declared the conflict officially over, on July 4, 1902, the war in Cuba ended up costing the U.S. 4,234 dead and 2,818 wounded, not including “thousands” more who later died at home of diseases they had caught in the islands. Another 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 civilians died, out of a population estimated at 8 million—a higher percentage of the total population, in other words, than died in the ten years of our involvement in Vietnam.
Even before the war was over, though, our occupation had taken a more “philanthropic” turn, when a federal judge named William Howard Taft arrived to serve as the islands’ first civilian governor. Taft was no more tolerant than he was slender; he considered most of the rebels no better than murderers, started a private club that excluded Filipinos, and had the unfortunate tendency to refer to his new subjects as his “little brown brothers.” Yet he was also a highly competent administrator, and imbued with a strict sense of public duty.
“We hold the Philippines for the benefit of the Filipinos, and we are not entitled to pass a single act or to approve a single measure that has not that as its chief purpose,” he declared on arriving in the islands, and in his considerable wake came thousands of American volunteers, who would quickly transform our first colonial possession. They would build roads and railroads everywhere, along with ports and mines, dams and water systems, dams and irrigation systems. They would reform the archaic law and tax codes left over from the Spanish, stimulate industry and finance; break up the old, monastic estates and distribute the land to rural villagers. They would tie the islands together both symbolically and literally for the first time, giving the Philippines its first, more-or-less common language—even if it was English. Before long, Filipinos would enjoy the highest literacy rate in Southeast Asia. Vast improvements in public hygiene and health care would go a long way toward doubling the population of the islands by 1920.
“Compared to European colonialism, the United States was indeed a model of enlightenment,” journalist Stanley Karnow writes in his seminal work on the subject, In Our Image, America’s Empire in the Philippines. As early as 1901, Taft had encouraged the formation of a Filipino political party. Local elections followed soon after, and a national legislature was elected in 1907. In 1916, an act of Congress pledged eventual independence to the Philippines, the islands were made a semi-autonomous commonwealth in 1935, and while full independence was delayed by the war, it became a reality in 1946.
Yet in Karnow’s assessment, the American performance in the Philippines “was neither as brilliant as their publicists claimed nor as bleak as their critics contended”. The Americans pushed through dramatic reforms in the Philippines, but to ease the burdens of occupation they also left the country’s neo-feudal class system largely intact. They tried to make the Philippines over into another America, but made clear they considered the Filipinos their racial inferiors. They preached democracy, but dispersed patronage to those Filipino politicians who supported U.S. policies. They fought side by side with their “little brown brothers” against the Japanese, during some of the most ferocious combat in World War II, and against Asian communism during the Cold War—but felt free to suborn the Philippines’ nascent democracy for years, backing the grotesque Marcos dictatorship.
Since the Reagan administration’s tardy but decisive backing of Cory Aquino’s “People Power” movement, U.S.-Filipino relations have attained a more even keel. But it was not enough to keep Aquino’s successors from closing key American military bases in 1990s—the primary reason we took the islands in the first place.
Of course, Iraq presents its own, unique challenges and possibilities. Among other differences, the U.S. does not view it as a colony at all, and certainly not a possession upon which its national “manhood” is predicated. But if we can learn anything from our long adventure into the Philippines, it is that we need a policy that will be consistent not only in deed, but in word and attitude as well; one that will avoid condescension, and will be directed toward making a restored, democratic Iraq truly independent.