Addison Road

Here’s how a post at the Belmont Club begins today:

Friday, November 17, 2006

The First Iraq

Although history never quite repeats itself, current events often resemble earlier occasions so closely there is a temptation to draw lessons from them. Imagine a time when America found itself in a war against a foreign foe whose strategy was to inflict a constant rate of loss on the army; invited US and British reporters to feed antiwar elements with atrocity stories; when US commanders who expected a quick war against a corrupt and oligarchic native elite found they had roused the countryside against them. Imagine a time when the issue of this war was central to an American Presidential election, caused a split in one of the major parties and planted the seeds for a world war. Not Iraq. The war was Philippine-American War and the election that of 1912.

This is a truly fascinating read, written with a lot of insight into the history of the Phillipines since the Spanish-American War.  There really are very many parallels to the Iraq conflict.  The post discusses the political parallels involving presidential elections, the impact of the press, the strategy of the “insurgents” to simply weary the USA (not really to “win”), etc. There are more similarities.

What’s fascinating in all this is that one of the more decisive weapons in the battle was a ship full of newly-minted teachers, who fanned out and began teaching English, among other things.  These teachers were called Thomasites, for the ship that brought some of them, the USS Thomas.  (Obviously the teachers were sent mostly into relatively secure areas…  exactly the situation now with social services in Iraq, which can only be provided in areas where the terrorists don’t immediately murder the service providers.)  The long term effect?

It proved the decisive weapon. How decisive was illustrated 40 years later, when Filipinos would fight side by side with the US Army against the Japanese. Taft  [president in 1901] could little have imagined in 1901 that another Chief Justice [Taft became Chief Justice of US Supreme Court after his presidency], Philippine Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos, would choose in 1941 to be executed by the Japanese rather than renounce his allegiance to the American flag.

The Phillipines had some rough history between then and now, including more-or-less fascist dictatorships and Islamic extremists on opposite poles.

In the early 21st century, 11.5 % of the entire Filipino population works abroad.  Maybe more.  And 13.5% of the GNP of the nation is generated by them, in money sent back to families.

One of the key graphs in the post, for me:

Perhaps most importantly, many Filipinos no longer expect the government to do anything for them. They simply go out and do it for themselves. 

A bit of personal side-story (I’ve been told that you all love that here):  My mom had a stroke about 4 years ago.  Since she was no longer able to care for herself, after she got out of rehab she moved into a “care home” run by a Phillipino family, and staffed exclusively by Phillipino caregivers.  They tend to have about five “houseguests” at a time.  They do a good job, by and large.  They tend to stay for 6 months or so, then go home.  My mom has been there long enough that we’ve seen people come back in the “rotation”.  And if you read the post I’ve linked above, you’ll see that’s the trend in Filipino society.
And because no post from me is complete without a reference to the threat of Islamic extremisim, I offer the following quote, indicating that radical Islam seems to have figured out the lesson of the Thomasites handily:

Parenthetically, it was the Wahabi religious authorities which began its own “Thomasite” program in the 1970s as it flooded the southern Philippines and many other countries of the world with teachers and textbooks. This is now acknowledged to have greatly influenced the rise of Islamic extremism. A senior Southeast Asian official with whom I recently spoke said that Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) education officials were exploring ways to influence Imam training and texbook provision for the madrassas.

Because history never exactly repeats itself, it would be foolish to copy the Thomasite tactic of Taft. However, it reinforces the argument that the War on Terrorism is largely a war of ideas. Taft understood this. Does anyone now?

No war is won ONLY by ideas…  guns, people and bombs are required.  But recognition that ideas are central in any conflict seems late in coming to many in the USA, as does recognition that we won’t know the results of the Iraq experiment for decades… unless we leave prematurely, which will produce quite sudden effects, all negative.