I liked Linn's book on the Philippine War, but the alleged similarities to Iraq leave me unmoved. The parallels do seem superficially compelling, especially to an audience with little knowledge of the Philippine conflict, but each is slightly stretched, and the cumulative stretch approaches the breaking point. The lessons to be deduced, IMO, go rather beyond the breaking point, and the rather more compelling differences between the conflicts don't seem to get much attention.
For example, there's a huge difference in the fundamental objective of the wars being looked at. The Philippine War was an outright war of conquest; the objective was to annex the Philippines and govern it directly as a colony. The objective in Iraq and Afghanistan is quite different: we're trying to develop an indigenous governing capacity, not to govern these states ourselves. This policies Linn cites as things the Americans did right in the Philippines generally involved the effective exercise of direct governance functions by Americans. This makes perfect sense in an environment we propose to directly govern. If the objective is to develop indigenous government, it makes no sense at all: if Americans directly exercise governance functions they are competing with and undermining the governance structure we are trying to create. Experience with imposing direct governance simply doesn't translate to an effort to cultivate independent governance.
There are other differences as well, many of them: the political and social context, the capacities and constraints of American forces, the capacities and constraints of opposing forces, and many others. In the context of the differences, the parallels, and the lessons deduced from them, grow rather pale.
I realize that academics with niche expertise have excellent reasons for drawing parallels between their niche and current conditions, but the rest of us would be well advised to crank up the skepticism before accepting the conclusions emerging from the process.
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