The National Interest
Summer 20000

Extracts from
Attraction and Chastisement

by Max Boot

 

Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 427 pp., $39.95.

President Bush famously claimed to have buried the "Vietnam Syndrome" in the sands of Arabia. But, for a corpse, it is still showing plenty of signs of life. When Congress was debating an aid package for Colombia earlier this year, the specter of another you-know-what was once again invoked. Vietnam came up, too, when the NATO commander in Kosovo requested American reinforcements to help police Mitrovica and other trouble spots; the Pentagon blocked the request, in part because the generals apparently wished to avoid another "quagmire..

It is far from clear exactly what the "lessons" of Vietnam are supposed to be, but the general view (and, more important, the generals' view) seems to be that the United States should stay out of conflicts where it does not intend to use overwhelming force and where it lacks a clearly defined "exit strategy." This view, which was formally promulgated in the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine, implies that the United States should not become entangled in peacekeeping missions of uncertain duration. Such operations, after all, might involve combat against guerrillas, a term that has assumed an almost mystical connotation in the wake of America's withdrawal from Vietnam.

In countering this impression, it helps, but does not suffice, to point out that Saigon fell not to the pajama-clad Viet Cong (most of whom had been wiped out in the Tet Offensive), but to the tanks of the regular North Vietnamese army. The U.S. defeat can still be ascribed in some degree to the efforts of the Viet Cong because they kept the conflict going long enough to break the American will to win--the most that any guerrilla force could hope to accomplish. Still, Vietnam raises more questions than it answers. Was the war in Indochina an anomaly? Was it a conventional war or a guerrilla war? And if it was the latter, are American soldiers really incapable of defeating guerrillas in the field?

To answer these questions, we would do well to cast a glance backward, before a place called Vietnam even existed. We might be tempted to begin with the Indian Wars, the U.S. Army's most prolonged combat against irregulars. But as General William Tecumseh Sherman acknowledged in 1883, his army's victory over the Indians derived less from martial prowess than from "immigration and the occupation by industrious farmers and miners of lands vacated by the aborigines." A more reliable test case is to be found in the Philippine War, which formally lasted from 1899 to 1902 but in reality dragged on for several more years as a series of police actions.

Though the Korean War is called the "forgotten war", it is well remembered in comparison to what was once known as the Philippine Uprising. Oddly enough, even the Spanish-American War, which begot the conflict in the Philippines, is much better remembered, in spite of the fact that it involved fewer combatants, fewer casualties and considerably less time. No doubt this is because the Spanish-American War is widely thought to have heralded America's rise to world power, whereas, in the view of most historians, the Philippine War was a blind alley--a short-lived U.S. foray into colonialism.

When the Philippine War is remembered, it is typically for the purpose of denouncing the United States as an imperialist power. Here, after all, was another U.S. war fought in the jungles of Asia that generated considerable opposition at home and charges of atrocities committed by U.S. troops. (By their own count, U.S. forces claimed to have killed 16,000 Filipinos in battle, four times the U.S. casualties.) New Left histories, such as Stuart Miller's Benevolent Assimilation and Leon Wolff's Little Brown Brother, depict the U.S. war effort in the Philippines in a distinctly grim light. In their telling, the war is reduced to a simple tale of racist U.S. soldiers torturing, killing and raping Filipinos. Such works aim to prove that My Lai was no aberration-that this is how U.S. soldiers usually behave, or at least how they usually behave when fighting non-Westerners. . . .

. . . Ultimately the army pacified the islands using a two-pronged approach--what has been dubbed "attraction" and "chastisement." The policy of attraction--renamed "hearts and minds" in Vietnam--has been slighted by New Left historians, but it contributed significantly to the U.S. victory. The army ran schools, hospitals, sanitation programs and other charitable works. The colonial administration also granted generous terms to rebels who surrendered, and held out the promise of eventual independence for the islands. Eventually, more and more Filipinos tired of the war and concluded that American rule was in fact preferable to the "dons" who had come before, and perhaps even to Aguinaldo's oligarchy.

It is the policy of chastisement that has drawn unwelcome attention to the U.S. war effort, both in the early 1900s and in the years since. The American press avidly reported tales--some confirmed, some not--of U.S. soldiers shooting prisoners, burning down towns, gathering up natives in "reconcentration" camps and administering the "water cure" (restraining a suspect and forcing water down his throat) to gain information. This led to Mark Twain's mordant suggestion (not mentioned by Linn) that Old Glory be redesigned, with "the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones..

Many of these abuses did occur, but Linn puts them into proper perspective. He notes that isolated garrisons in the boondocks (a Tagalog word) had to operate against an unseen enemy who would kill or mutilate their buddies one day and be smiling "amigos" the next. It is hardly surprising that in such trying circumstances soldiers did not always heed Marquess of Queensbury rules. Then, too, it is not entirely fair to judge the actions of turn-of-the-century soldiers through a lens of contemporary norms. This was a more brutal time, when police departments in America routinely used the "third degree" to elicit confessions and U.S. soldiers themselves were subject to harsh hazing and physical punishment that would not be tolerated today. Indeed, by the standards of the day, the conduct of U.S. soldiers was probably better than average for colonial wars--certainly nothing the Americans did rivaled the depredations of the Belgians in the Congo. What Linn does not point out, but could have, is that U.S. forces probably killed more civilians in one night of bombing Dresden than in all of the Philippine War.

This is easy to overlook because most histories of the war concentrate on only a few of its more brutal episodes; for instance, General J. Franklin Bell herding thousands of residents of Batangas province into "reconcentration" zones where many died of disease. Linn widens this focus to look at what was happening outside the main island of Luzon, the heartland of the Tagalogs and hence of resistance to the occupation. He notes that in half the archipelago's provinces there was no fighting at all. Many of the minority ethnic groups were resentful of Aguinaldo's Tagalog-dominated government and were more than ready to cooperate with the occupiers. Thousands of local men even signed up to fight alongside the Americans in battalions such as the Macabebe Scouts, a unit renowned for its courage and ferocity (and which is today denounced as collaborationist by patriotic Filipino historians). . . .