The War in Iraq now appears to be headed toward an outcome that is almost like the Philippine-American War. The Iraqi government is asking the U.S. to agree to a timetable for withdrawal in order to curry favor with the electorate in the upcoming Iraqi campaign cycle (no doubt with some U.S. presence in Iraq for years to come- regardless of who gains office in the 2008 U.S. presidential election).

The fact that U.S. electoral politics leading up to 1902 hinged so much on feelings for and against the Philippine-American War tempts the credulous to make comparisons with the war in Iraq. One interesting source of information about this foray into American colonialism is “A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902“, by David J. Silbey.

William Jennings Bryant, was an “anti-imperialist” (and a Democrat). The leaders of the Philippine Liberation thought that if they could bleed the U.S. long enough to get Bryant elected, then a U.S. troop withdrawal would result. It really seems that the more things change the more they stay the same.

The Philippines was the first overseas possession for the U.S. Teddy Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and William McKinley was President when the Spanish-American War broke out in Cuba. Since his boss was temporarily indisposed, Roosevelt took it upon himself to send American warships to attack the Spanish fleet in Manila and Admiral Dewey succeeded in destroying the Spanish Navy in Manila Bay.

The big question was what to do after we controlled Manila Bay; the McKinley Administration landed troops in Manila and then played it by ear. Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo had already fought the Spanish and had previously accepted exile to Hong Kong.

Aguinaldo had accepted a large grant to feather his retirement as quid pro quo for renouncing his compatriates as “bandits“. Now it looked like his constituents (elite members of the Philippine landowning families that funded the insurrection from Hong Kong) were finally to wrest the Philippines from the Spanish with the help of Admiral Dewey who escorted Aguinaldo back to Manila.

But American troops, many of whom were National Guard members from the Western United States, entered Manila in a way that blocked their Philippine allies and cut them off from the City of Manilla. When the dust settled the erstwhile allies were fighting each other. Thus the war against Spain was now a war against “our little brown brothers“.

Aguinaldo was not revered by all the men that fought for the cause of Philippine freedom. Aguinaldo had already caused the murder of the leader of the KKK, (Kataastaasan, Kagalanggalang na Katipunan nang manga Anak ng Bayan or Katipunan for short). The KKK or Katapunin are like Paul Revere and the Minutemen in U.S. history, legendary hereoes of the revolutionary period- not related at all to the American Ku Klux Klan organization known by the same acronymn. Andres Bonifacio, a hero to the common people, was murdered in order to further Aguinaldo’s own ambitions as a leader of the liberation.

In the course of discussing why the Filipinos normally retreated at 200 yards and why so few casualties occurred to the U.S. troops, it is worth reading the detailed comparison Silbey makes between the American rifles (*Krag Jorgensens and single shot Springields) and the Mauser action rifles deployed by the Philippine troops. Both sides had weapons that were highly accurate at ranges well beyond three hundred yards. The author suggests that the factors that emboldened the Americans to proceed into the enemy lines were poor ammunition on the side of the Filipino nationalist forces (the Filipinos loaded their own). The other factor was that the Filipino troops normally shot high because there was not enough ammo with which to practice. The fact that the American troops were from places like Montana and Idaho seems to have contributed to very high marksmanship ability on the part of the U.S. troops.

Another even more serious problem for Aguinaldo’s forces was that his chain of command, such as it was, was based on traditional Filipino patron-client relations and there was little commitment to dying on a battlefield where the loyalties were so fragmented. My knowledge of Philippine society is that such a problem may still exist today and the U.S. seems to be developing some national characteristics that are analogous, manifested in our partisan politics.

There were elite illustrado benefactors (educated in Spain) and the common people like Bonafacio, a warehouseman. Additionally, cultural and language differences played a big part in dividing loyalties on the far flung chain of archipelagos. The Filipinos were a people who were only beginning to gain a sense of nationhood during the bloody battles and guerrilla warfare that ensued.

The U.S. occupied Aguinaldo’s capital and the war entered its guerrilla phase. Arthur MacArthur was the military governor in charge of the operations referenced herein. His offspring, Douglas MacArthur, became a beloved hero to most Filipinos when he liberated them from the Japanese during WW II.

The insurrectos and civilians were forced into prison camps and atrocities were committed on both sides. For every Filipino wounded it is claimed that fifteen were killed; during the U.S. Civil War, on the other hand, there were five wounded for every man killed. The allegation that ratio of deaths compared to wounding was so high raises the issue of whether the U.S. was executing prisoners of war and possibly engaging in genocide.

At least one officer in Samar gave an order not to take prisoners after an attack by bolo-wielding guerillas who infiltrated a U.S. Army camp in Samar; before the Americans could reach for their weapons the guerillas, some disguised as women, chopped up the troops during breakfast . The orders to U.S. troops to kill prisoners and civilians were eventually contravened but not without great loss of life to civilians.

The casualty statistics for Americans during the Philippine-American war were comparable in some respects to the conflict in Iraq; i.e., 4,324 American soldiers died, only 1,000–1,500 of which were due to actual combat; the remainder died of disease- 2,818 Americans were wounded. Philippine military deaths- 16,000 actually counted (but surely many more), while civilian deaths numbered between 250,000 and 1,000,000 Filipinos, including death from cholera, etc.

Disease killed as many Filipinos as were killed by actual military aggression and the conditions in the forced concentration camps were such that cholera was almost inevitable. The author discusses many of the racial aspects of the conflict that contributed to the lack of humanity. Maybe the most interesting point made is in a chapter that discusses how black U.S. soldiers reacted to hearing Filipinos referred to as “niggers” during a time when segregation in the U.S. military was all but universal. Needless to say, any thinking human being would experience some conflicted feelings about such a state of affairs.

According to the author, the Philippines was America’s “last frontier“. Even Jose Rizal, the George Washington of the Philippines (executed by the Spanish before the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, was inspired to think of his country as a kind of American Wild West, apparently after viewing a Wild West Show during his extensive travels. Somehow, according to author Silbey, the Philippines became the new venue in which to express manifest destiny, the philosophy that American power was destined to expand westward, civilizing or at least subjecting brown-skinned peoples.

Of course, U.S. Manifest Destiny was probably not first and foremost in Dr. Rizal’s speculations, but it is nevertheless difficult to look at subsequent Philippine history without a sneaking suspicion that it is a new saga in the frontier dream with its own lawless elements, alongside courageous crusaders for justice and hapless citizens caught in the cross fire.

The war with the insurrectos shaded into “Blackjack” Pershing’s war with the Islamic Moros in Mindanao (technically a separate conflict between the U.S. and the Islamic rebels that overlapped with the U.S. war against the Philippine Army of Liberation). The Moros and various other factions continued to resist for many years after 1902. Even at present, it is not a secret that U.S. Special Forces are assisting the Philippine Army with training operations under a Visiting Forces Agreement in Southern Mindanao and the islands of the Sulu Sea.

Most Filipinos harbor affection for America today and American culture is deeply embedded in Philippine society. People in the Philippines complain about many aspects of American policy but the complaints are similar to opinions expressed by most Americans at one time or another. There are some Communist rebels but not even the Communist NPA totally rejects American culture. The roots of the NPA were in the HUK army, guerillas that sometimes fought alongside American troops to liberate their country from Japanese overlords during WW II.

The Moros in Southern Mindanao are still fighting and groups like Abu Sayyaf are losing the war of attrition only to be replaced by other more aggressive Al Qaeda affiliates like Jemaah Islamiya that move through the chain of islands in the Sulu Sea that link Indonesia to the Philippine archipelago:

“…the Sulu Sea was outlaw territory, a haven for pirates variously called Malay, or Sulu, or Moro—pirates- so fierce that for centuries even Western warships gave the area a wide berth. The most infamous of these pirates hailed from the Sulu Archipelago, which is home to the Sama people, notable for their seagoing ways and for their embrace, centuries ago, of Islam. Officially part of the Philippines, the provinces in this region have long been at odds with the nation’s larger, primarily Christian collection of islands to the northeast, and for generations guerrilla forces have roamed the triple- canopied jungles of its island interiors.”

Jihadists in Paradise, by Mark Bowden (March 2007, Atlantic Monthly).

Events in Mindanao culminated in the Moros taking a stand atop the cone of a volcanoe. The Datus (tribal chieftans controlling sultanates in Mindanao and the Sulu chain (which is similar to the Florida keys) counseled against fighting the Americans but lesser datus that lacked traditional authority and refused to give up their slaves decided to take their families with them in a primitive version of jihad that ensured the deaths of numerous women and children.

Needless to say, allowing units to become surrounded on top of a volcano by a technologically and numerically superior army is poor planning from a tactical standpoint but continues to command great emotional and propaganda power for jihadists that continue with bombings at airports, electrical infrastructure, ferry boats and within Manila itself. The last I heard bin Laden’s brother was in Mindanao and many of Al Qaeda’s leaders have used the Philippines as a base of operations.

The Krag-Jorgensen was eventually replaced largely because Moros had a habit of going “juramentado” and their long curved kris could be deadly even after the kris-wielding Moro had been shot several times:

According to the Moro belief, it was within the power of one man, and his kris, to break in a stride from the miserable nipa shacks of the Sulu shores to the scented gardens of Paradise where the houris waited. For the Koran offers great reward for the slain in battle. “On couches with linings of brocade shall they recline, and the fruit of the two gardens shall be within easy reach. Therein shall be the damsels with retiring glances whom no man hath touched before them. Theirs shall be the houris, with large, dark eyes, like pearls hidden in their shells, in recompense of their labors past.”

With these rewards before their eyes, the young Moros met in the darkness of night, in the mosques, where the Imams made elaborate preparation of the body in order that they might appear before God in the most favorable light. Prayers were offered, and the candidates were formed in a circle to repeat the oath of organization. Hands on the Koran, they intoned, “Jumanji kami hatanan ing kami ini magsabil karna sing tuhan.” (We covenant with God that we will wage this Holy War, for it is of God.) The young aspirants for martyrdom were then bathed, the nails were trimmed to the quick and the teeth were washed. The eyebrows were shaved until they resembled “a moon two days old.” The head was shaved, the scanty beard was plucked, and the waist was encircled with a tight, wide band for strengthening effect. The candidate was clothed in a white robe and crowned with a white turban. The genitals were bound tightly with cords, and the body was bound here and there with cords, tightly, to prevent circulation and loss of blood. A man so prepared was able to remain on his feet although dying from fatal wounds.

To the broad belt at the waist was attached the anting-anting, the charm that was to ward off the bullets or blows of the enemy. The edged blade, kris or barong, was honed to razor edge and beautified and polished, and the Moro was ready to take up that short bloody path that ended in Para dise. These men were known to the Moros as Mag-sabils, taking the Parang-sabil, or Road to Paradise. We remember them today as juramentados.

Drugs and religion have been demonstrated to have deadly consequences going all the way back to the “Hashishins” who operated an Islamic version of Murder, Inc. from their Syrian fortress in the Eighth Century. The adoption of Colt semi-automatic pistols in .45 caliber also owes a debt of gratitude to the Moro juramentado. Thus, all adherents to the 1911 pistol as your pistol of choice can hoist one to the Moros!

*Note: The United States formally adopted the Krag-Jørgensen rifle in 1892 to replace the single shot Springfield. Around 500,000 ‘Krags‘ were produced at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts from 1894-1904. It was the U.S. military’s main rifle from 1894 to 1903 when it was replaced by the M1903 Springfield rifle with its ballistically similar .30-03 cartridge, and found use in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War as well as in the Boxer Rebellion

See Jungle Patrol, The Story of the Philippine Constabulary.

See also Hostile Intent.