The US
Military and the Philippines
By Bill Van Auken
November 21, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "WSWS" - -- In a brief statement last week on the impact of Typhoon Haiyan on the Philippines, President Barack Obama declared it a “heartbreaking reminder of how fragile life is.”
By Bill Van Auken
November 21, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "WSWS" - -- In a brief statement last week on the impact of Typhoon Haiyan on the Philippines, President Barack Obama declared it a “heartbreaking reminder of how fragile life is.”
As the
head of a government that has visited death and destruction upon
impoverished peoples from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to
Libya, Yemen and Syria, the US president hardly needed to wait
for nature’s fury to be visited upon the Philippine people for
such a reminder.
The US
military, the principal instrument for carrying out this
carnage—inflicting 100 times the number of deaths caused by
Typhoon Haiyan during the last dozen years of aggressive wars
waged by Washington—is now being promoted as the indispensable
Good Samaritan in the Philippines.
Some 50 US
warships and military aircraft and 13,000 American sailors,
airmen and marines have been brought into the relief effort, led
by the naval battle group of the nuclear-powered super-carrier,
the USS George Washington, along with the 3rd Marine
Expeditionary Brigade.
“We will
be present as long as we are needed—no longer than required,”
Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Wissler, the commander of the US
military operations in the Philippines, said on Monday.
The people
of the Philippines have ample reasons, rooted in both their
country’s tragic history and its present geo-strategic position,
to treat such promises with extreme skepticism.
There is
perhaps no more egregious example of the US military overstaying
its welcome than in the Philippines. It was there, at the end of
the 19th century, that US imperialism first cut its teeth,
becoming a colonial power by means of military conquest and
savage repression.
In
testifying before the US Senate Tuesday on relief operations in
the Philippines, a State Department official cited the “close
historic ties” between the two countries. Neither government
officials nor the media, however, show any inclination to
examine these “ties” in any detail, for the obvious reason that
it would serve only to expose a historic crime.
The US
military’s first appearance in the Philippines came in the form
of a navy squadron commanded by Commodore George Dewey, who
sailed into Manila harbor on May 1, 1898 and within hours sank
the entire Pacific fleet of Spain, which had ruled the territory
as a colony for the previous 300 years.
Brought
back from exile aboard Dewey’s warship was Emilio Aguinaldo, the
leader of a nationalist movement that had been fighting to end
Spanish colonialism for three years before the US armada
arrived. US forces were able to take Manila only because it was
surrounded on land by these independence fighters. Washington
posed as their ally and the liberator of the Philippines just
long enough to secure control of a territory it coveted as a
market, a source of cheap labor and raw materials, and a base
for the projection of US power in the Pacific, particularly
toward China.
It then
turned savagely against the Filipinos and signed a treaty with
Spain paying it $20 million for a land the Spanish no longer
controlled. The Filipinos, who had proclaimed an independent
republic, the first to be formed in Asia as the result of an
anti-colonial rebellion, were excluded from these negotiations.
What
followed was the imposition of a US colonial regime and over a
decade of bloody counterinsurgency operations that would claim
at least several hundred thousand Filipino lives. In 1901, Gen.
Franklin Bell, who commanded US forces in Luzon, the island
group that included Manila and roughly half the country’s
population, told the New York Times that there alone
some 600,000 had been killed in military operations or died from
disease.
As another
American general put it, “It may be necessary to kill half the
Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may
be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present
semi-barbarous state affords.”
Mark
Twain, the most prominent and passionate opponent of the US war
in the Philippines, defied the “support our troops” rhetoric of
the day, denouncing the US military for massacres that left “not
even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother.” The celebrated
American author referred to US occupation forces as “Christian
butchers” and “uniformed assassins.”
The
Philippines campaign was among the first counterinsurgency
operations waged by the US military, and it introduced all of
the atrocities that would later be visited upon Vietnamese,
Afghans and Iraqis, from massacres, to torture, to
“re-concentration” camps.
US
colonial rule continued until the end of World War II, after
which Washington backed a series of semi-colonial governments,
including the hated martial regime of Ferdinand Marcos, who
ruled the country for two decades. Until 1991, the Pentagon
maintained control of the massive Subic Bay naval base and
Clarkson Air Force base, which played crucial roles in both the
Korean and Vietnam wars.
This is no
mere ancient history when it comes to the plight of the
Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan. The widespread
poverty, social inequality, inadequate housing and government
corruption that are the legacy of colonial and neo-colonial
oppression played at least as great a role as the blind forces
of nature in inflicting so much death and destruction.
Nor are US
designs on the Philippines a matter of a bygone era. Reuters
news agency noted Wednesday: “As US ships deliver food, water
and medicine, they are also delivering goodwill that could ease
the way for the United States to strengthen its
often-controversial military presence in one of Southeast Asia’s
most strategic countries.”
If the US
military first came to the Philippines as the instrument of a
rising imperialist power seeking to secure new markets in Asia,
it now returns as the spearhead of a waning one, determined to
encircle and contain a rising regional and global rival, China.
The
Philippines is strategically crucial to the Obama
administration’s so-called “pivot” to Asia. Its government,
having closed the giant US military bases in 1992, has since
allowed US special operations troops to return for training and
for carrying out joint operations and has hosted visits by 72 US
warships and submarines at Subic Bay during the first six months
of this year alone. Meanwhile, negotiations are ongoing to
secure US rights to bases for ships, planes, supplies and
troops.
Naval base
construction is proceeding at Oyster Bay on the island province
of Palawan. Officials are referring to the facility as a
“mini-Subic,” and plans have been reported for stationing both
US warships and Marines there. Situated on the country’s
western-most island, it is in close proximity to the Spratly
Islands, the site of a provocative territorial confrontation
between Manila and China egged on by the United States.
Thus, the
“humanitarian” operation of the US military in the Philippines
is inextricably bound up with war plans that could well drag the
country into a global conflagration.
The
predatory calculations of the US ruling class aside, there exist
among the masses of American working people genuine feelings of
sympathy and solidarity with the workers of the Philippines. The
deep ties are expressed most concretely in the estimated
presence of 4 million Filipino-Americans in the United States.
The
catastrophe wrought by Typhoon Haiyan only underscores the
necessity of a united struggle to sweep away the conditions of
poverty and inequality in both countries, along with the
capitalist profit system that has created them.
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