Winning A Hard Peace After An Easy War

Although successive US generals proclaimed victory at hand, American soldiers kept dying in ambushes, telegraph lines kept getting cut, and army convoys kept getting attacked.

If you substitute oil pipelines for telegraph lines you could easily be describing the situation in Iraq today. But the description is of the Philippine War from Max Boot's much praised (and deservedly so) book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power:

Pacifying the Philippines had proved to be much more difficult than virtually anyone had predicted. Between 1898 and 1902, a total of 126,468 American soldiers served there (though never more than 69,000 at one time) and fought in 2,811 engagements. By July 4, 1902 the US had lost 4,234 dead and suffered 2,818 wounded. By comparison, only 379 Americans were lost in combat in the Spanish-American War. By their own count US forces killed 16,000 Filipinos in combat. As many as 200,000 civilians also died, victims of disease and famine and the cruelties of both sides. Yet in the end the US did triumph. Decisively.

Hopefully the Philippine War will not prove to be the model for the current counter-insurgency in Iraq. It was a nasty brutish war on both sides and far too many soldiers and civilians died as a result. And we certainly don't want to wait forty years before allowing the Iraqis to have complete independence as we did with the Philippines. But it is an example that needs to be recalled more often, especially when most members of the mainstream media historical grasp of conflicts of this sort begins and ends with Vietnam.

There are also political lessons that a certain party should draw from the Philippine War:

Aguinaldo (the Filipino guerilla leader) intensified his campaign in the months leading up to the US election of 1900, hoping to deliver a victory for the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who had proclaimed his opposition to imperialism. Some of the more outspoken American anti-imperialists even openly wished for Aguinaldo's victory "against our army of subjugation, tyranny, and oppression." Many soldiers were bitter about the antiwar rhetoric coming from home. "If I am shot by a Filipino bullet," complained General Henry Lawton, who was in fact killed shortly thereafter, "it might just as well come from one of my own men...because...the continuance of the fighting is chiefly due to reports that are sent from America."

The perceived link between the insurrectos and the Democrats backfired for both. The Republicans were able to paint their opponents as unpatriotic, and Bryan, who had actually abandoned anti-imperialism as an issue just before the election, was trounced by the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket.