“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.”

- George Orwell

The proof that a different Islam thrives in the lush sultry jungles of Southeast Asia than in the Middle East is perhaps best described through the eyes of American soldiers who’ve been stationed there. While in Yemen “women were walking sacks and after a few weeks you found yourself staring at ankles,” in Southeast Asia “the main tourist attraction squirms up and down on your lap.

“It’s as if the women are kids at a toy store, and we’re the last Cabbage Patch dolls on the shelf.”¹

This aspect of Southeast Asian social life is only one of the reasons being stationed in Southeast Asia isn’t much of a hardship post for the thousands of American troops who’ve rotated through. It’s a post that’s been part of the informal American military empire since the turn of 1900s when Commodore George Dewey and his nine ships staged a nighttime raid on an inky Manila Bay, using the cover of darkness to sink the Spanish flotilla occupying the harbor.

Following that easy victory came a series of events that uncannily echoes the events which have followed what is only our second attempt in a hundred years to conquer and occupy a large overseas territory – the Second Gulf War. After seizing control of Manila Bay the American military used the help of Filipino insurgents to displace despotic Spanish rule from the archipelago, in the eyes of the Americans “freeing” the natives. However, as is the case in Iraq today, freedom “was understood in different ways” and then as now America “pursued the quest of empire in the name of freedom to civilize the world.”²

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Just as in Iraq, as soon as the despotic power was removed from the lives of the natives, tensions began to increase between them and their liberators turned occupiers. As the new national Philippine government begun to lose control of its faction-ridden armed forces, the troubles worsened. And in a specter that would occur again a hundred years later and an ocean away “anarchy and misplaced American idealism ignited into a full-scale war between American troops and a host of indigenous guerrilla armies.”³

In what’s now known as the Philippine War over 200,000 people lost their lives. And as is usually the case in guerrilla conflicts, the majority of the deaths were civilian. Unlike the war that’s been wracking Iraq with spasms of worsening violence for over four years and seems to be inevitably headed for a fifth and a sixth year, the Philippine War lasted only three years. America’s success there was likely due to “paying attention to the rudiments of counterinsurgency strategy,” which included “cutting of the guerrillas from civilian assistance and garrisoning the countryside.”⁴ It was in the Philippines that the American army first practiced the tactics of a counterinsurgency en masse, successfully rooting out and quelling a native guerrilla insurgency.

The Philippines are located entirely within what geographers call the Ring of Fire, a series of fault lines that traces across the globe wherever tectonic plates collide, spurting up volcanoes and shivering with earthquakes. And so the mountainous islands of the Philippines are what remains above water from the ancient volcanic eruptions and tremors that shot land above the waves thousands of years ago.