U.S.-led wars in the Middle East have killed some four million Muslims since 1990.
The recently published Afghanistan papers, provided an insight
into the longest war in U.S. history and revealed how U.S. officials
continuously lied about the progress being made in Afghanistan, lacked a basic
understanding of the country, were hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable,
and had wasted as much as $1 trillion in the process.
Unfortunately, this phenomenon is nothing new. While most people
accept that the United States has been interfering with Muslim populations quite
heavily since World War II, the truth is that the U.S. has been fighting
“forever wars” against Muslim populations for well over 100 years. (If you want
to really go back
into history, Thomas Jefferson was also fighting Muslims in the oft-forgotten Barbary Wars in the
early 1800s).
The average American school curriculum likely doesn’t feature
the fact that the U.S. waged a war from 1899 to 1913 in
the southernmost island of the Philippines. Known as the Moro War, it was the
longest sustained military campaign in American history until the war in
Afghanistan surpassed it a few years ago. As a result, the U.S. and the Philippine
governments are still embroiled
in a battle with Islamist insurgents in the southern Philippines, which takes
the meaning of “forever war” to a whole new level.
Despite over a century passing since the U.S. led a
counterinsurgency war against the Islamic Moros, its similarities with the
Afghanistan war are incredibly noteworthy, to say the least.
Even reading accounts of the terrain in which both conflicts
were fought suggest they were equally as treacherous. As detailed in the memoir
of Captain John Pershing, fighting the Moro Wars “entailed guerrilla warfare in a country unknown to us, with its
swamps and rivers and its hills and mountains, every foot of which was familiar
to the inhabitants and their insurrecto troops.”
While the U.S. often boasts about fighting for freedom, many
Americans may be wondering how it is that their freedom came to be located in
the Philippines in the first place. Was it worth sending 75,000 American troops
in just 1900 alone to the Philippines to fight and die? And was the operation
even remotely successful?
More importantly seems to be the indication that the U.S.
military was not welcome in the Philippines, much as it is not welcomed by
Afghanistan or any other Muslim-majority nation which has to duel with the U.S.
Empire. After the U.S. defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and annexed the
Philippines under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Moro population were not even
consulted. The U.S. then sought to “pacify” them using brute force.
“I want no prisoners,” ordered General Jacob Smith on
Samar Island during the war in 1902. “I
wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will
please me.”
Fast forward over 100 years later and it is difficult to see how
U.S. military doctrine has changed for the better. A video came to light in 2010 of
then-General James Mattis saying that it was “a hell of a lot of fun to shoot” people in
Afghanistan. Mattis was later rewarded for his heroism and bravery by being
crowned Donald Trump’s secretary of defense for a short while.
As you can imagine, General Smith received his wish just as
Mattis after him, with perhaps half a million locals dying as a result of the
U.S. invasion. At Bud Dajo, some 1,000 Moro separatists, including their
families had fled to the crest of a volcano to escape the American invasion.
Allegedly, American troops reached the top of the volcano and fired down into
the crater until they killed 99 percent of the inhabitants. The colonizers then
took the time and effort to pose for a photograph with the hundreds of dead
bodies (no, seriously).
It is also worth noting that some 4,000 U.S. soldiers lost their
lives during this particular war. This closely mirrors the number of coalition
deaths since 2001 in Afghanistan—and for good reason. To minimize U.S.
personnel deaths in the Philippines’ war, the U.S. military deployed Filipinos
led by U.S. officers into battle. (Sound familiar?)
At one stage, Filipinos ended up doing almost all of the dying
as U.S. soldiers slowly left the battle theatre. In fact, the final year of
conflict was the bloodiest year of the Moro war. This seems to be the trend in
a number of U.S. wars. This is certainly true with respect to Afghanistan, with
the U.S. military and its Afghan lackeys on the ground killing more civilians than the
Taliban in recent times.
But what is all this senseless violence for? To put it simply,
whether in the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, this rampage is
all borne out of the belief that America’s subordinates are not capable of
ruling themselves and will ultimately profit from American occupation. This was
actually the firm thinking of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who saw it as the
duty of the United States to maintain the Philippines as a protectorate. This
idea was famously (or infamously) termed the “White Man’s Burden” in a poem
written by Rudyard Kipling, who sent the poem to Teddy prior to
his decision to engage in the Philippine-American war. A 1902 Life Magazine cover even
depicted an apparent waterboarding of a Filipino POW by U.S. personnel (the
supporters in the background seem to be watching with glee).
When not much has changed, it seems it never
will. We can also expect this type of activity to continue for the foreseeable
future, given the geopolitical stakes at hand. In the case of the Philippines,
it was recently reported that Chinese and
Philippine foreign ministers have sealed an agreement for the two nations to
pursue joint oil and gas exploration in the hotly contested South China Sea.
As it turns out, the South China Sea could contain anywhere
between 125 billion barrels of crude oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural
gas. The idea that a foreign adversary, especially one rising to prowess on the
world stage such as China, could control the majority of these resources
unchecked is a major blow to the U.S. Empire.
Whether it is lithium, opium, and geostrategic chess moves in Afghanistan;
or natural gas and oil in the South China Sea, Muslim populations will continue
to suffer in a colonial terror campaign which has been unfolding for over 100
years.
Think of it this way: if another century passes and your great
grandchildren had never heard of the “forever war” that took place in
Afghanistan in the early 2000s, all the while watching a new war unfold in the
Indo-Pacific region for similar reasons, you would rightfully be fuming in your
grave.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/12/no_author/white-mans-burden-the-us-has-been-fighting-forever-wars-against-muslims-for-120-years/
