America and the World: The Double Bind

Volume 9, Peace and Policy

Kevin P. Clements

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138518711
• eBook ISBN: 9781351532983
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the world's first democracy with a written constitution and Bill of Rights, the United States has stood for global aspirations toward democratic liberty, equality, and solidarity since its formation in 1776. However, as it developed into an empire by the late nineteenth century, the United States also has threatened the liberties of other peoples, including Native Americans, Hawaiians, Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans. The American role in world affairs has long been polarized around two conflicting images and strategies. In the name of counter-terrorism, the Bush administration pursued a largely unilateralist policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet, in the name of protecting its national sovereignty, the United States also has rejected most of the recent multilateral treaties that strive to contain violence by fortifying the rule of international law. A unilateralist strategy also goes largely against the U.S. postwar multilateralism, which established the United Nations and its specialized agencies. This volume explores these contradictions. Contributors include: Kevin P. Clements, Tom Coffman, Audrey Kitagawa, Jeffrey F. Addicott, Steven Zunes, Vivien Stewart, Kathy Ferguson, Phyllis Turnbull, Bilveer Singh, Ibrahim G. Aoude, Richard Falk, Ann Wright, Beverley Kleever, Linda Groff, George Kent, Majid Tehranian, Mohammad Ali, Terrence Paupp, Gillian Young, Mihay Simaii, and David Krieger. The annual publication Peace & Policy, sponsored by the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, is now in its ninth year. It is dedicated to providing a forum for the discussion of all issues concerning peace, policy, and the rights and responsibilities of global citizenship. This latest volume fulfills that commitment.

Part I
The Double Bind

1
The American Antecedent to Iraq

Tom Coffman

Once upon a time, there was a small group of ambitious men who were driven by a desire to abruptly increase America’s power and wealth. After formulating a plan of national expansion, they were stirred to action by an event involving the violent death of a large number of Americans. In the aftermath, they maneuvered the president to the brink of war and then distorted intelligence to smooth the transition into battle.

With their advanced firepower, American forces quickly slaughtered tens of thousands of people. The conventional phase of combat was brief, as promised, but an ensuing guerrilla war was prolonged and deadly. What had been portrayed as a war of liberation became a war of hostile occupation. Periodically, the president would reassure the American people that the fighting was over, but the war would continue. Critics were attacked as lacking in patriotism. When, finally, this war was concluded, the event was quickly obscured in the construction of American history. In fact, it was not even accorded the status of a war, even though more than 5,000 Americans had died. Never learning of this war for overseas empire, the Philippine-American War, Americans were in no position to understand that such a thing might happen again.

Today, when questioned about occupying Iraq, America’s president, vice president, and cabinet secretaries have repeatedly likened it to the occupation of Germany and Japan after the Second World War. The occasional critic likens Iraq instead to the Vietnam War, an analogy more apt only in that Vietnam came to an unhappy ending.

A much more valid historical parallel exists, but we are unprepared to discuss it, being almost uniformly unaware of our own history of overseas imperialism. We in Hawai‘i are in a unique position to do something about this, being directly connected to, and daily affected by this history, because it was so intimately tied to America’s annexation of the nation of Hawai‘i.

Why we know virtually nothing about our most pertinent analogy to Iraq is a study in itself. In the words of the one well-known American imperialist, Theodore Roosevelt, “Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience.” Even we who oppose the Iraq war, oppose American unilateralism, and oppose resource imperialism, do not know how to speak to one another in the historical terms of the Spanish-American and then Philippine-American wars.

Two levels of history have been developed and are readily available. One is the Charles Beard-inspired interpretation of American expansionism jumping the bounds of the American continent. In this scenario, a country that has relied on perpetual conquest of the frontier develops an excess capacity for production, requiring greater access to overseas markets. America then secures an economic empire supported as necessary by military force.

The second, more intimate interpretation is about a cabal that synthesizes an agenda of expansion and does the dirty work to achieve it. Perhaps in the environment of George W. Bush we are more ready to entertain such a possibility. In a recent popular history, First Great Triumph, retired diplomat Warren Zimmerman broaches the i word, “imperialism, a word not very popular among Americans as a description of their past.” Despite its triumphal title, his book is a relatively unvarnished version of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organized around the subtitle, How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.

The original big three, Theodore Roosevelt, the naval captain and writer Alfred Mahan, and US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, were the heart of the cabal, a sort of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz combination of a bygone age. All lunched together at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, DC during the administration of William McKinley, clarifying their ends and looking for means. Lodge described aloud what today is thought of as the pre-emptive strike: “[W]e should take all the outlying territory necessary to our own defense, to the protection of the Isthmian Canal, to the upbuilding of our trade and commerce, and to the maintenance of our military safety everywhere. I would take and hold the outworks, as we now hold the citadel, of American power.”

Together these three not only firmed up but to an extent fashioned the imperial agenda—a greatly enlarged navy, domination of the Caribbean, control of the sea lanes to Central and Latin America, construction of an isthmian canal to facilitate the fighting of a twoocean war, control of Hawai‘i (‘the outworks’) as the mid-Pacific base for the projection of force, and control of the approaches to the imagined vast markets of Asia, particularly China. At the time our traditional adversary, Britain, was seeking an alliance with America; Spain was incapable of defending its colonies; no other European power was in a position to challenge America; so nothing really stood in America’s way.

Similarly, the open field for aggression in the post-Cold War era figures mightily today. Wolfowitz began drafting the doctrine of preemptive attack and unilateralism in 1992. By 1997, the New American Century Project advocated a remaking of the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq. Like Spain, Iraq looked vaguely formidable but was in fact virtually helpless. Again, nothing stood in America’s way.

As in the 1890s craving for markets, the New American Century Project spoke to an underlying economic crisis, resulting from the fact that America’s domestic oil fields were becoming less and less productive. George W. Bush came into office much as had McKinley, with key players promoting a fixed agenda to expand America’s power and influence. In The Price of Loyalty, then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill confides that the agenda of George W. Bush’s first meeting with the National Security Council was the invasion of Iraq. By February, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, through his Defense Intelligence Agency, had circulated maps and inventories of Iraq’s enormous oil fields and oil reserves, together with lists of potential contractors to exploit the resource (“their specialties, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest”).

Fragments from the late nineteenth century may sound familiar but need context. Roosevelt had precociously written a book on world navies and when his fellow Republican McKinley won the presidency in 1896, Roosevelt hounded him for an appointment as assistant secretary of the navy. From this position, Roosevelt gained effective control of the U.S. Navy. He candidly described his imperial tastes: “The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrillsstern men with empires in their brains, all these ... shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties.” He wrote to a friend, “I should welcome any war, for I think this country needs one.”

Propaganda for the war focused on the plight of Cubans, much as the rationale for the Iraq War focused on the suppression of Iraq’s citizenry by Saddam Hussein. One of the few well-known vignettes is of William Randolph Hearst dispatching the artist Frederick Remington to sketch heroic Cubans fighting cowardly Spaniards. Famously Remington had wired, “There is no war.” More famously, Hearst replied, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” A sensationalist press fed the idea of war, with fundamentalists in particular beating the war drum, claiming that to oppose it was to be a supporter of Catholic Spain.

The declining empire of Spain was the complete package, with Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines in the western Pacific. Between the isthmus of the Americas and Asia were strategically located fruit (in the imperial vocabulary of the day), ripe for the plucking. Most important of all was Hawai‘i, almost perfectly in the middle of the northern Pacific.

As a reminder of American proximity and power, the McKinley administration docked the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor. One evening the captain was writing to his wife: “I was enclosing my letter in its envelope when the explosion came. It was a bursting, rending, and crashing roar of immense volume.... There was a trembling and lurching motion of the vessel.... The electric lights went out. Then there was intense blackness and smoke.” The explosion of the Maine killed 266 Americans.

Roosevelt wrote, “A number of the peace-at-any price men of course promptly assumed the position that she had blown herself up; but investigation showed that the explosion was from outside.” To the contrary, an investigation conducted years later found that the Maine most likely had exploded from the inside out as a result of internal combustion.

Much as in the spring of 2003, the relationship between fact and a rationale for war came uncoupled. What mattered to the prospect of war was the fever of war. Again, Roosevelt wrote: “When the Maine was blown up in Havana harbor, war became inevitable.”

In the media-inflamed imaginings of the public, Spain was transformed into a fearsome and deadly foe, to which Roosevelt all but laughed aloud: “[We] attributed to this feeble nation plans of offen-sive warfare which it never dreamed of making.” Coastal American cities begged for naval protection from Spain. Businessmen in Boston moved their stocks and bonds to safety inland. Leases in Long Island were rewritten to say that if Spain destroyed the subject property, the lease would be voided.

In Hawai‘i, the coup d’état government of American missionary descendants, which previously had overthrown the Hawaiian kingdom with support from the United States government, now pleaded that Hawai‘i be annexed too, lest it be invaded by Spain.

Having exploited the tragic explosion and distorted intelligence about what lay behind it, the advocates of war now executed their pre-existing plans. As a result of Roosevelt’s orders and McKinley’s acquiescence, the fighting began not in Cuba, but in the Philippines. When Dewey sailed into Manila Bay, he destroyed the decrepit Spanish fleet in a single morning, without losing a man.

He directed that the American presence be perceived as high-minded: “It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of the occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not as invaders or conquerors but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights.”

Much as Cheney predicted that the American Army in Iraq would be “greeted as liberators,” McKinley predicted: “They will come to see our benevolent purpose and recognize that before we can give their people good government, our sovereignty must be complete and unquestioned.”

Just as local autonomy was suspended in Iraq, the US Army, rather than the Filipino army, was to be in power in the Philippines. Initially the Americans controlled the Manila area, and the Filipino rebels controlled most of the remainder of the country. Without active coordination in subduing the Spanish garrison, tensions mounted. The first shots were fired between Americans and Filipinos in early 1899, after Dewey’s naval strike.

In negotiations in Paris, Spain ceded its supposed ownership of the Philippine Islands, not to the people of the Philippines but to the United States government. America had indisputably become an imperial force. McKinley issued his Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation which in part read: “In the fulfillment of this high mission, supporting the temperate administration of affairs for the greatest good of the governed, there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority, to repress disturbances and to overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of the United States.”

Foreshadowing this imperial expansion, the nation of Hawai‘i was annexed in accordance with the desires of a small minority of white American settlers and their descendants, perhaps two percent of the population, and over the written objections of the large majority of native Hawaiians.

All the while these events were overshadowed in the popular imagination by fighting in nearby Cuba. An agitated Roosevelt resigned from the government to locate his mythological destiny in a charge up San Juan Hill. From this quick and easy war, America gained control of the Caribbean Sea, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the ocean approaches to the isthmus of Panama.

However, the Filipinos did not yield so readily to the American design, fielding a conventional army and fighting pitched battles in which they incurred horrific losses. McKinley pursued the war as if in a trance: “The Philippines were entrusted to our hands by the Providence of God. It is a trust we have not sought.”

An Anti-Imperialist League sprang up that included many of the nation’s leading citizens, such as former president Grover Cleveland, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and Mark Twain, who wrote: “I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines? I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered.... We can make them as free as ourselves ... put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific. But ... I have seen that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. And so I am an anti-imperialist, opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

When the Filipino regular army was defeated, Americans were told the war was all but over. In fact, the guerilla phase was just beginning. Captain Delphey Casteel wrote: “One day we may be fighting with thousands of their people and the next day you can’t find an enemy, they are all ‘amigos.’ They have hidden their rifles and may be working for you, for all you know.” With friend and enemy indistinguishable, the nature of warfare changed.

In one two-month period in one province, seventeen cases of abuse of Filipinos were reported. As a means of interrogation, pumping prisoners full of water was apparently commonplace. In the spring of 1901, guerillas attacked a garrison without inflicting casualties; in response, American soldiers burned down nineteen towns and 800 outposts and storehouses, killing 150 people. When guerillas killed forty-eight American soldiers, the provincial commanding officer, a Jacob Smith, infamously vowed to turn the island of Samar into “a howling wilderness.” “Kill everyone over ten years old,” he said, for which he was finally court-martialed and turned out of the Army.

Much as in Iraq today, the establishment of civil government was for a time thought to be the key to pacification, but arming and training local police seemed two-edged. A soldier wrote, “They should not be armed with weapons which could be used against us in case they prove treacherous.”

In the provinces of Luzon southeast of Manila, where resistance ran high, there were towns in which guerillas chose the slate of candidates, who then were put into office by American-sponsored elections. Avoidance of real representative government was widespread, as property requirements disqualified most Filipinos. In a town of 13,000 people only twenty-six people qualified to vote, and only twenty-one actually voted. Thereafter the town orchestra joined the guerilla movement.

In history, McKinley became an uninteresting man who systematically avoided committing his thoughts to writing. In such little historic debate as has occurred over McKinley, there are two opposing viewpoints that seem likely to foreshadow a future discussion of George W. Bush. One argues that he was a weak-minded president who was maneuvered into imperialism by more aggressive and experienced men. The other argues that he was a calculating navigator who always knew where he was going and exploited events to reach his destination.

McKinley was re-elected in 1900. The next year he was assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt, the young war hero, by then vice-president, succeeded him. In 1902, four years into the Philippine-American war, Roosevelt thanked the American force for its “successful conclusion” of the expedition. Active resistance continued well into 1903 and thereafter for another dozen years in the southern island of Mindanao.

Roosevelt mourned not having a much larger war to fight, but concentrated on consolidation of American power, wrestling Panama from Colombia and commencing the construction of the isthmian canal.

With that, the imperial agenda of that day was completed. Roosevelt took pride in the American administration of the Philippines: “I know of no country ruled and administered by men of the white race where that rule and that administration have been exercised so emphatically with an eye single to the welfare of the natives themselves” (Roosevelt, 1913). Late in life he reluctantly concluded that because of the proximity of the Philippines to Japan, the Philippines was an Achilles Heel, but by then America was in too deep to extricate itself quickly.

In 1916, Congress passed legislation aimed at making the Philippines independent by 1935. Actual independence came at the end of World War II, forty-eight years after Americans first arrived with the avowed aim of liberating the Filipino people. In the study of American history, the average citizen has learned a line or two about the Spanish-American War, likely to the effect that it wasn’t much of a war, while learning nothing at all of the Philippine-American war, not even that one occurred.

America retains Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the same base now used for offshore interrogation of prisoners in Bush’s “War on Terror.” The status of Puerto Rico as a US possession is perpetually a matter of dispute. Guam is an armed camp, an unincorporated American territory, its status likewise the subject of periodic dispute. Samoa remains divided between American Samoa, with its great natural harbor at Pago Pago, and the neighboring nation of Samoa. Hawai‘i was so thoroughly integrated that its history was forgotten until the early 1970s, when native Hawaiians began a slow, painful process of retrieving the record. Lately, American soldiers have been re-engaged in Mindanao, supposedly to fight al-Qaeda but more accurately to fight the descendants of Filipino resisters of a century ago.

As for history, Roosevelt came to be remembered for the preservation of wilderness and his victory over childhood asthma. A four-hour long film, TR, about Roosevelt’s impact on the twentieth century, gave not a hint of his involvement in the creation of an empire, nor his lifelong dedication to racism and imperialism.

Mark Twain was remembered for jumping frogs and Huck Finn, and not for a text written in 1900 and published posthumously:

The loud little handful will shout for war.... A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long—those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Double Bind
• Part II The Quest for Alternatives
• Part III Roadmaps to Peace
• References
• Contributors