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Issue Number 29/30, May 2008
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 29/30, May 2008
REVIEW - Jeremy Agar
“UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE” - A DVD
In 1899 the Spanish were evicted from the
Philippines. President Teddy Roosevelt hailed the
“most gallant and heroic feat” of war that the
Americans and the Filipinos had pulled off. Their victory
was historically decisive, marking as it did the end of
one European’s colonial rule in the Pacific,
Spain’s demise as a big power, and its replacement
by what was to become an American global reach.
One imperialism out, another imperialism in. You can see
why Roosevelt’s invasion of the Philippines is a
significant event. At the dawn of the 20th Century,
Americans and Filipinos had become entangled in a messy
relationship. On the one hand, they were fellow democrats
seeing off that evil old Europe. That’s always been
Washington’s view of course. George Bush is seen
reading from his teleprompter about how his country still
stands “side by side” with the locals as
together they “liberate” the archipelago.
As this DVD indicates, the enemy now is harder to define.
The Philippines are heterogeneous. Muslim Sulu, in the
south, say some locals, has never accepted its
integration under Manila’s rule. A long-running
secessionist war drones on. In the hills are the remnants
of a splinter guerrilla army, the Abu Sayyaf Group. The
American presence, once overwhelming, is resented, its
motives distrusted. The Constitution forbids direct US
fighting involvement. American troops are meant to be
training, offering help.
This short, introductory film looks at an incident in
2005 which suggested that the US in fact has violated the
law by engaging one of its enemies. Because there is an
Islamic component to the cultural diversity in play, the
Americans go on about 9/11 and their “War On
Terror”, but any relationship between people in Sulu
and bin Laden would have been, at best, opportunistic and
fleeting. That’s if it has existed at all. The
Americans need a pretext to stay on, and they want to
stay on because they’re propping up their mates in
the Filipino elites. The stated concern of Bush and
Arroyo for this poor southern island is hypocritical, as
is the standard American rhetoric about democracy. This,
the general strategic context, is beyond the scope of
this small film, which is a usefully detailed background
for understand-ding the complex stalemate that is
Philippine politics. A hundred years after the Marines
landed, the rela-tionship between Americans and
Fili-pinos is as ambivalent as ever.
Jeremy Agar lives in Lyttelton and writes reviews for
Foreign Control Watchdog and Peace Researcher.
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