U.S. tired misunderstanding of SE Asia

U.S. tired misunderstanding of SE Asia

Michael J. Montesano, Assistant Professor, Southeast Asian Studies Program,
The National University of Singapore

For all its glitter and buzz, Monday's White House state
dinner in honor of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
could not conceal the tired, misconceived nature of America's
approach to Southeast Asia. Now, just as for most of the past
half-century, Washington views the region's problems merely as
local variations on its own global preoccupations. Its distorted
understanding has led to a long series of bad choices -- bad both
for Southeast Asia and for the United States.

Arroyo enjoyed a hero's welcome in Washington. In noting that
hers was the first state visit by an Asian leader during his
administration, President George W. Bush toasted her as a woman
of strength and courage, "a friend of America, and a friend of
freedom". The United States used the occasion of Arroyo's visit
to the United States to announce its designation of the
Philippines as a "major non-NATO ally". It will now share that
status with such neighboring states as South Korea, Japan, and
Australia.

Washington also pledged help to the Philippines with a variety
of other measures: Military and security assistance, trade
preferences, expanded benefits for Filipino veterans of the
United States armed forces, and development funds for the island
of Mindanao.

And Bush reaffirmed, in terms that left the question of a
combat role ambiguous, his determination to send American troops
to the southern Philippines, where Manila confronts a long-
running separatist rebellion.

Just how did President Arroyo earn the esteem and assistance
of the Bush administration? Her successes and failures in
national or regional affairs had nothing to do with it. Rather,
she shrewdly went along with her country's former colonial master
as it played its favorite game: Taking interest in local
situations only when official Washington believes that those
situations relate to American global priorities.

First, Arroyo complied in the recasting of separatist violence
and endemic banditry on Mindanao as the stuff of a key theater in
Washington's world-wide war on terror.

Second, though without committing a single soldier to the
American invasion of Iraq, she enlisted the Philippines in
President Bush's embarrassingly hollow "coalition of the
willing".

As Arroyo traveled to the U.S., the Armed Forces of the
Philippines began the aerial bombardment of guerrilla elements of
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on Mindanao. As she and her
husband sat down with George and Laura Bush for the lavish White
House dinner put on in her honor, up to 300,000 of her countrymen
had fled their homes to escape the violence of that renewed
offensive.

This conflict has long resisted military solution. Manila's
recent decision to abandon the route of negotiation in favor of a
return to warfare is one of the unrecognized tragedies of
Southeast Asian today.

American support for war in the southern Philippines is a
sorry mistake. And the Pentagon and White house are naove to
discount the risk that American military "trainers" will be
sucked into the conflict.

But this is hardly the first time in recent memory that
Washington has misread events in the Philippines. American Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has proven fond of referring
to the February 1986 "People Power" uprising that toppled
Ferdinand Marcos as the first in a series of peaceful transitions
to democracy that would sweep the globe.

Wolfowitz served as Assistant Secretary of State for East
Asian and Pacific Affairs -- his last post before becoming
America's ambassador to Indonesia -- at the time of that
uprising. He thus takes clear pride in what he supposes was his
own role in launching the wave of democratizations that he
describes.

He makes, however, scant reference to more local aspects of
"People Power", such as Washington's long-term support for the
Marcos dictatorship. This support included its wanton failure to
break with Marcos even after his cynical declaration of martial
law in 1972.

Other parts of the region have also suffered for Washington's
compulsion for missing real trees for the imaginary forest in
Southeast Asia. In Thailand, unfocused global anti-Communism led
America to underwrite military domination of Bangkok's politics
from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.

Similar fears led arch-Cold Warrior John Foster Dulles to abet
the regional rebellions that challenged the Indonesian state in
the late 1950s. And this is to say nothing either of America's
embrace of Jakarta's New Order regime after 1965 or of its
failure to appreciate the appeal of Vietnamese nationalism, in
either Communist or non-Communist variant, from the 1950s to the
1970s.

In each of these instances, just as today, Washington showed
the same bad habit: Underrating regionally significant,
autonomous forces and instead regarding events in an ostensibly
passive Southeast Asia as nothing but local manifestations of
America's own broad concern of the moment.