War and Consequences

There was a Republican administration in power and a belief that God was on our side and America was led by Manifest Destiny. Suddenly, there was a report of a terrorist attack against America and a rush to a preemptive war, despite no evidence of the foreign country having any connection to that attack. We quickly defeated the enemy and began an effort to win the hearts and minds of the people and build a new democracy where there had not been one before. Soon however, we were facing occupation not a war. There was no organized military facing us. There were instead Insurgents, for we had already won that war, but lost that peace. We won the war, but we continued to build up troops there as it was argued to leave would create chaos there and in the entire region for this was a region vital to Americans and filled with great natural resources. There were surges of troops and conflicting reports of massive civilian deaths, but America stayed to avoid defeat.

America stayed in the Philippians from 1899 to 1946 and had military bases for an additional fifty years. Estimates are the death of 1.4 million Filipinos as either collateral damage or victims of insurrection against the authority of the United States. The country still sees continual revolt among the Muslim insurgents and the left-wing New People’s Army. Both groups have been fighting for more than six decades now, since the Philippines gained independence from the US in 1946. Is it possible to make knee-jerk judgments on the character and fate of nationalist movements in colonized territories without looking at the complex relations between the “liberator” and the “liberated”?

Is there interaction between their forces as well as others caught in the conflict? To ignore this would be a disingenuous utopianism for the only remaining superpower claiming to act in the name of freedom and democracy. For one cannot escape the reality that over time the “liberator” becomes the foreign occupier and the “liberated’ become the ungrateful insurgents. For as in Vietnam, the Philippians, and in Iraq the” liberated” must control their own destiny to truly be free and the “liberator” must leave to truly give freedom.