Infinite Monkeys

Slouching Toward Manila?

For some of us, a flourishing democracy in Iraq was never as important as a quiescent Iraq. Better for the United States to be feared than loved, hated perhaps but respected rather than despised. Last year's elections offered some reason for optimism, as did reports -- mostly from enterprising milbloggers and independent journalists -- that Iraq's transformation on the ground was going much better than the mainstream press was letting on.

But history is an unforgiving teacher. Americans have long and bitter experience spreading the gospel of liberty and equality to the world, with limited success and much disappointment. Consider the Philippines.

Priscilla Tacujan compares America's colonial ventures in the Philippines in the early part of the 20th century with the late adventures in Mesopotamia and draws some disturbing parallels:

The failure of American-style constitutional democracy to blossom in the Philippines can be explained in large part by the philosophically inspired shift in American colonial policy during the critical early period of the Philippine experiment (1900 to 1921). Initially, the belief guiding American policy in the Philippines was that ... Americans should be "republican schoolmasters." [Americans] were not shy about the superiority of their ideas to local customs and prejudices. But by 1913 America had a new president, the Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who argued for and put into effect a policy of "self-determination" for the Philippines as the sine qua non of democracy.

President Bush's Wilsonian tendencies are well-known, if not entirely understood. And so in Iraq, Tacujan argues, we find ourselves tripping down Wilson's path, "encouraging the formation of a government of 'consensus,' ... a coalition government composed of political parties and groups created along ethnic and religious lines instead of encouraging a 'national unity government' where excellence and justice can be measured by some common standard..."

Self-determination, in other words, is a sucker's game. When Iraq's constitutional government fully implodes into treachery and violence, Tacujan will have offered a persuasive historical diagnosis why.

But the comparison to the Philippines is apt for another reason. It was in the Philippines a century ago that the United States last defeated a determined Islamic insurgency. We would do well to learn from our successes as well as our mistakes. (Via No Left Turns.)

Posted by H.L. Monkey at March 15, 2006 07:29 AM