« What I am Reading | Main | Graduate School »
پیر 20 اکتوبر 2003Monday, October 20, 2003
Iraq and Philippines
I was amused to read about President Bush’s comparison of Iraq to Philippines.
President Bush told the Congress of this former American colony on Saturday that Iraq, like the Philippines, could be transformed into a vibrant democracy. He also pledged his help in remaking the troubled and sometimes mutinous Philippine military into a force for fighting terrorism.
In an eight-hour visit, Mr. Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day.
“Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy,” Mr. Bush said, taking on the critics of his oft-stated goal to use Iraq as a laboratory for spreading democratic institutions in the Middle East. “The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. Those doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago.”
While the administration often speaks of the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II as rough models for the effort to rebuild Iraq, Mr. Bush used the visit here to make a less explicit analogy to the American administration of the Philippines, which also led to the formation of a democracy. But the comparison has less power to reassure, given that the Philippine government did not gain full autonomy for five decades.
Unqualified Offerings wrote about it before I could.
And before that there were the concentration camps, the 200,000 civilian dead in the 1899-1902 insurrection - all the stuff Max Boot actually likes.
Curiously, Bush’s speech amounts to a claim that the Philippines became a democracy “nearly six decades ago.” This is true as far as it goes, which is from the mid-forties through the late 1960s, when the Philippines was merely an ordinarily corrupt client state. Then almost two decades of Ferdinand and Imelda. But we eventually let Marcos fall to the People Power rebellion, which was wise of us, though many hawks at the time considered it feckless and likely to embolden our enemies.
Posted by Zack at October 20, 2003 2:09 AM in International Affairs
Advertisements
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.zackvision.com/mt/zv-trbk.cgi/489
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Iraq and Philippines:
» Auto-trackback from memigo.com from memigo
New York Times article found in memigo. It was referred to by 2 source(s).
Follow trackback to find related articles... [Read More]
Tracked on October 20, 2003 12:17 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Note: Disagreements are welcome, but please keep it civil. Any comments full of hatred, bigotry, trolling or spam will be deleted and the commenter banned. Do read the commenting policy.
Valid XHTML: You have to preview your comment to make sure that it is valid XHTML 1.1. You will see the "Post" button on the preview page.
Urdu: To comment in Urdu, include "p[ur](urdu). " (with a space at the end and without the quotes) at the start of every Urdu paragraph. If you want to write an Urdu word(s) in an English paragraph, do it like this: %[ur](urdu)اردو%. If you want to put an English word(s) in an Urdu paragraph, write it like this: %[en](en)English words%.
PGP Signing: PGP-signed comments are encouraged. However, clearsigning Urdu text with GPGshell produces garbage.
MathML: Select the Textile with itex to MathML text filter. What you'll use is itex, which is a superset of WebTeX and differs somewhat from standard LaTeX.
Text Filters: For regular comments, whether in English or Urdu, keep the text filter setting to its default of Textile 2. Change it to Textile with itex to MathML when writing MathML.