One of Many Fronts.....

Belmont Club links to this nice Smithsonian piece on the US troops currently in the Philippines.


This is one of the best articles I've read in a long time regarding any of the 'forgotten fronts' in this long war. Read the whole thing.

The Philippines are, like Viet-Nam, a case of us getting it wrong at both ends, that is, getting in when we shouldn't have and bailing before the job was finished. Our poor stewardship in the interim did not help. They were the only one of our colonies that we really treated like....the Europeans did their colonies and to throw them to the curb after WW2 rather than give them the same deal we offered Alaska and Hawaii (and still offer Puerto-Rico periodically) was rather low and seems to have been based more in racism and a desire to shirk responsibility than anything else.

Our past mistakes there mean we have a special responsibility to the Philippines, on a moral level, at least as great as we do to the other free nations in the area.

The past cannot be undone, but existing wounds can be healed, allowed to fester or reopened. It is nice to see the Army trying to do the former.