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Which previous war does our current Iraq war most
resemble? The replies run the gamut of American history
from our Revolutionary War, invoked on Washington's
Birthday last week by President George W. Bush, to our long
struggle in southeast Asia, as expressed by a sign in the
back of a local taproom: Iraq is Arabic for
Vietnam.
Another common comparison is our Civil War. Many
northerners doubted that the South could ever be subdued by
arms, especially as casualties mounted in the summer of
1864. But President Abraham Lincoln remained steadfast, and
on May 10, 1865, President Andrew Johnson stated that
armed resistance to the authority of this government in
the said insurrectionary states may be regarded as
virtually at an end.
The analogy continues, since there was a decade of
military occupation after that Mission Accomplished
statement. Also there was a terrorist insurrection, perhaps
best epitomized by the Ku Klux Klan, that lasted for about
a century. Suppressing the insurrection required federal
soldiers from time to time, as with Little Rock, Ark., in
1957 and Oxford, Miss., in 1962.
But a long-forgotten conflict might offer an even better analogy: the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the ensuing Philippine-American War that continued after the Spanish surrender.
Both conflicts started under flimsy pretenses after years of tension. In 2003, Iraq was supposedly developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting the Al Qaida terrorist network. On Feb. 18, 1898, the U.S.S. Maine was reportedly sunk by a mine in Havana's harbor.
One justification in both wars was to liberate people from oppressive and brutal regimes. It was Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where indigenous rebellions had been quashed, and the Spanish with their concentration camps in Cuba, where indigenous rebellions had been put down.
The direct military action terminated quickly. The invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003, and Baghdad fell to American forces on April 9. On May 1, President Bush declared the end of major combat operations.
The United States declared war on Spain on April 20, 1898, and by August, Spain was negotiating a surrender that ended its rule over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Why the Philipppines? America had sent a fleet to Manila to prevent the Spanish fleet in the Pacific from reinforcing its ships in the Caribbean. Then ground troops were sent in.
For years before 1898, Filipinos had fought against Spanish rule. The insurgents, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, at first assumed the Americans had come to help them fight the Spanish. But after the Spanish surrendered and the American soldiers stayed, the insurgents fought the United States.
The struggle dragged on for years, generating controversy and criticism at home with revelations of torture by American forces operating against the insurgents.
Gen. Frederick Funston said critics should be hanged
for treason.
Mark Twain, a fervent critic, replied that
he was quite willing to be called a traitor -- quite
willing to wear that honorable badge.
Another critic, Colorado Sen. Henry M. Teller, praised
Aguinaldo as a worthy leader
and said the Philippine
war was damnable
and a disgrace to us.
He was
promptly accused of flat treason.
Colorado
re-elected him anyway in 1902.
The Philippines gained independence in 1947, while American military forces remained there until 1992 -- almost a century after the first soldiers arrived.
There are many differences between the wars, of course.
But over all, the splendid little war
of 1898, which
Twain called a quagmire from which each fresh step
renders the difficulty of extrication immensely
greater,
seems to fit well with Iraq. And that's rather
ominous, given how long America was in the Philippines.
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