It’s a few years into the new century, and the nation is at war. This war, unlike others, is not a war declared by an act of Congress. The purpose for this war has changed since it started. The goals and objectives of the war also have changed. The initial phase of the war went quickly and successfully. But American soldiers now find themselves fighting an insurgency and taking casualties almost daily.
The Army finds itself pushed to the limit of its ability to provide enough soldiers to effectively fight this insurgency. The location is distant, and we have very little in common with the indigenous population. The people welcomed us as liberators in the beginning. We delivered them from an oppressive regime. We promised them they would be given the right of self-determination and self-government.
A report that details possible prisoner abuse makes its way to the media. Although the abuse was being investigated within the military and had been reported to the secretary responsible for such matters, the slowness of the process became news. Initially, it appeared as if the administration was attempting to downplay the atrocities or to make them look less egregious.
Eventually, the story gets out in the media and the administration is forced to take action.
A message from Washington to the general in the field says in part, “The President desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial matter all the facts. … For the very reason that the President intends to back up the Army in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work, he also intends to see that the most vigorous care is exercised to detect and prevent any cruelty or brutality, and that men who are guilty thereof are punished. Great as a provocation has been in dealing with those who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men; nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army.”
The president then orders several investigations to be conducted, and directs that several officers be punished for allowing the prisoner abuse to occur. Of note, the officers punished up to this point were those deemed to be directly responsible for the abuses or irresponsible in the execution of their duties.
The investigators are to look at the highest-ranking officers in the field to determine their possible culpability.
Right now you may be saying to yourself, “This all sounds familiar. I have read of this or seen it on TV during the last year. This is nothing new.”
You would be entirely correct.
But what you have just read occurred in 1902. The president was Theodore Roosevelt. The country was the Philippines. Initially, our purpose in invading the Philippines was to free the Filipino people from the oppressive yoke of Spain. In that regard, the U.S. Army was welcomed in 1898.
But five bloody years later we still were fighting an insurgency, and our goals and objectives for the war changed. We were fighting in the Philippines to bring democracy. Sound familiar?
Here is where it gets interesting. The atrocities were true. Generals were responsible for implementing a scorched-earth policy in response to the insurgency.
Included in that policy were words like “I wish you to kill and burn, and the more you burn the better you will please me,” and “The interior of Samar [a province in the Philippines and the center of the insurgency] must be made a howling wilderness.”
Interestingly enough, the policy worked.
As the president, the press and some members of Congress were voicing their strongest condemnation of these acts, the organized insurgency quietly ended with the surrender of the last Filipino guerrilla leader.
History does repeat itself.
Human behavior, in spite of all our progress and sophistication, has not changed since Cain killed Abel.
This being the case, one has to ask, why we are so surprised at the events in Iraq? We should have been able to predict with absolute certainty the outcomes there.
We did not do so because we don’t even know our own history, much less that of Iraq.
What is particularly interesting is that as our task and purpose in the Philippines changed to bringing democracy to the Filipino people, so has our task and purpose changed in Iraq to bringing democracy to the Iraqi people.
The senior American government administrator on the ground in the Philippines, William Howard Taft, told President Roosevelt that it would take 50 to 100 years of U.S. military presence and expenditures to bring democracy to the Philippines. History proved Taft to be right.
Some would argue that the Philippines even today is not really a democracy.
Any country where the military determines who will be the next president is not a democracy. I would be amazed if certain key members of today’s administration have not advised President Bush of the same.
Taft based his comments on the inability of the Filipino people to understand and practice democracy. Having been to Iraq in the Gulf War, I will tell you that the Iraqi people also are culturally incapable of embracing and practicing democracy. Democracy requires a separation of church and state. Such a separation in Iraq can only be achieved by force through a Saddam-like dictator.
In spite of this, there is a bigger issue to be considered.
We are engaged in fighting an insurgency in Iraq. There have been more than 1,000 U.S. casualties. To effectively defeat an insurgency one must remove the support of the people from the insurgents. There are two ways to achieve this.
The first is to “win the hearts and minds” of the populace. This of course takes the 50 to 100 years that Taft predicted. It takes that long because you’re trying to persuade the populace not to support their own fathers, brothers and uncles who are fighting in the insurgency. A “hearts and minds” campaign against an insurgency never has worked. So it remains a theoretical construct.
That leaves the only other method of defeating an insurgency: eliminating the support for the insurgents by either removing the entire population, as in the Boer War in South Africa, or by killing the population. Although we hate to admit it in modern-day America, that is exactly how we defeated the insurgency by Native Americans.
Battles like the Washita River and Wounded Knee were waged against women and children and old men in the camps while the warriors were drawn away. We removed forcibly and permanently the support structure for the Native American soldiers.
Many of the senior officers fighting in the Philippines in 1904 had participated in the Indian campaigns. What they did in the Philippines was nothing more than what they had done in America. But times had changed.
The American public was no longer willing to accept that kind of warfare.
Nor are they willing to accept it today. And they are right.
We are culturally and psychologically incapable of winning an insurgency by an indigenous population. We learned this in Vietnam. We tried the “hearts and minds” approach, but it was too slow.
We lost interest.
We are a nation wedded to instant gratification. Insurgencies are long-term projects. And as noted above, the only real way to defeat an insurgency in a reasonable amount of time is to either completely remove the population or kill it.
We are not capable of doing either. And that is a good thing.
The first lesson of war is to never engage in a war that you cannot win.
This is so obvious that it hurts to have to say it. We are the only superpower.
But regardless of how many airplanes, ships, tanks, bombs or other combat power we have, if the enemy blends in with the population and initiates an insurgency, we cannot win.
In a recent article, Joseph L. Galloway of Knight-Ridder suggested that we withdraw all coalition forces into enclaves on the borders.
That way our troops no longer would be at risk and the Iraqis would have to sort out who and what they wish to become. My suggestion is to place the enclaves on the Iraqi oilfields. That way our soldiers would be safe and we would have some leverage for the Iraqis to get on with it.
We would have to be willing, of course, to accept a less than perfect democracy in Iraq as a result. But that’s going to happen no matter what we do.
