U.S. Troops Fighting Moro Insurgents In The Philippines -- Another Sad Chapter

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://sonnysj.blogspot.com/2008/09/us-troops-fighting-moro-insurgents-in.html

From this place, US military operations against domestic insurgents--whether belonging to the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) or to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), or the New People's Army (NPA)--are launched and directed. In lieu of economic-social reforms, the government's militarist solution to poverty, unemployment, and extra-judicial killings and kidnappings--over 1,000 victims so far--will only create a refugee crisis, more atrocities and "collateral damage" of innocent civilians, loss of national sovereignty, and impunity for criminal violence committed by the military and police.

Re-occupying "Our Possessions"

The Camp Navarro U.S. outpost is only one of many disposable, low-profile "lily-pad" stations of "forward deployment" for the US military in the post-9/11 period. Tom Engelhardt recently counted more than 750 US military facilities in 39 countries. But many more are not officially acknowledged, such as the 106 bases in Iraq or those in Afghanistan; or in countries like Jordan and Pakistan where bases are shared (Tomgram 2008; Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 2003). This applies to US military installations in the Philippines. US troops in the Philippines refer to their Jolo launching-pad as "Advance Operating Base-920" devoted to "unconventional warfare"(Herbert Docena, Focus on the Global South Media Advisory, 8/15/2007). The JSOTF-P started in 2002 in Mindanao, part of the Pentagon's realignment of overseas basing network (Michael Klare, "Imperial Reach," The Nation 4/25/2005). The bases are now called "cooperative security locations" (CSL), a euphemism mentioned in the May 2005 report of the US Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structures, or Overseas Basing Commission. CSLs can be existing military or private facilities available for US military use. These are located in Clark, Subic, Mactan International Airport in the Visayas, in General Santos City airport, in the aforementioned Zamboanga AFP outpost, and in other clandestine areas (Julie Alipala, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Mindanao Bureau, 11/26/2007).

The Arroyo regime readily hands out apologias for the presence of 400-600 US military personnel in the country purportedly serving "mutually beneficial ends," as the US Embassy claims. Retired General Edilberto Adan of the Presidential Commission on the VFA (Visiting Forces Agrement) openly excuses the U.S. embedded military headquarters as a necessary fixture to maintain "control over their units." When Arroyo visited the US in May 2003, she boasted of having obtained from Washington $356 million in security-related assistance, the largest military aid package since the closing of US bases in 1992. She claimed that US military aid had grown to "more than 100 million dollars annually from 1.9 million dollars three years ago" (Inquirer News Service, 5/27/2003). Two million dollars were allocated for "Sulu rehabilitation" while four million was allocated to Basilan, the site of the Balikatan exercise in 2002. As a "major non-Nato ally," Arroyo announced that Bush will continue to give aid to support the Philippines' "war on terrorism," not for economic development or for social services, much less for social justice and equity.
"War on terrorists" ("terrorists", of course, refer to those opposed to US policies; the exploitative neoliberal impositions of the World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund) becomes the Arroyo regime's blanket term to legitimize US infringement and violation of Philippine sovereignty. What results is a war of terror on humanity, a "homeland security imperialism" whose latest symptomatic crisis is the collapse of the US financial system and the erosion of US economic capacity to maintain hegemony (John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, Pox Americana, 2004).

Ghouls of Pacification

A brief historical background may be helpful. When the U.S. granted nominal independence to the Philippines in 1946, one of the conditions for this grant was the retention of 23 military installations all over the pacified colonial territory. It was legitimized by the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty which, under the aegis of Cold War anticommunism, provided for US intervention in case of foreign military invasion by a communist power (Daniel B, Schirmer and Stephen Shalom, The Philippines Reader 1987).

In reviewing the historical record of US colonial subjugation of the islands, William Blum reminds us how the US helped suppress the Huk peasant rebellion in 1940-50. At least one US infantry division collaborated with the Filipino military in killing Huk sympathizers (about 500 peasants, with thousands jailed and tortured) during the months before and after the elections of 1946. In the 1950s, through the Joint US Military Advisory Group and Col. Edward Lansdale (who became notorious for the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam), then President Ramon Magsaysay used US military advisers, weapons and logistics in unconventional types of counterinsurgency schemes against peasant rebels. Among the CIA agents in government, Arroyo's father Diosdado Macapagal "provided the Agency with political information for several years and eventually asked for, and received, what he felt he deserved: heavy financial support for his campaign..." Blum concludes that by the early fifties, "Fortress America" in the Philippines was securely in place: "From the Philippines would be launched American air and sea actions against Korea and China, Vietnam and Indonesia....On the islands' bases, the technology and art of counter-insurgency warfare would be imparted to the troops of America's other allies in the Pacific" (Killing Hope, NY 2004, p. 42)."