The Casualties Game

You can tell that the right is starting to feel confident, because some old arguments are coming to the fore. After the NYT, of all places, posted a graph comparing civilian casualties in Iraq with other recent troublespots, GatewayPundit created a graph of his own, comparing Iraq War casualties with those of previous American Wars. Students of History will note that a war is missing, the 1898 Spanish-American War. I said so in a comment, and suggested that as the Spanish-American War led to a long counter-guerrilla campaign for mastery of the Phillipines, such a comparison would be far more apt.

I then decided to look the numbers up myself.

According to Wikipedia, The Unites States suffered 2,446 killed and wounded in the five months of the 1898 war, and another 4,324 killed and 2,818 wounded putting down the Phillippine insurgency. However, there seems to be a dispute on the time frame. Theodore Roosevelt declared victory over the insurgents in 1902, Wikipedia ignores this event and rather baldly declares that the insurgency went on until Woodrow Wilson's 1913 offer of eventual independence (indeed, the article seems to focus entirely on the negative aspects of the campaign, not only ignoring the American successes but placing all blame on the Americans for the outbreak of the conflict, and even going so far as to attribute miserliness with veteran's benefits to the American government as a reason for naming the conflict an insurgency rather than a war). While it is true that guerrilla activity continued on outlying islands, especially in the south, by 1902 Aguinaldo's army on the main island of Luzon had been defeated. This entry from the 20th Century Atlas suggests that the 4,000 number is taken exclusively from the years 1899-1902, but I could be wrong on that.

At any rate, the Phillippine Insurrection appears to be in all ways worse than the Iraq War. Especially different is the scale of civilian casuatlies: approximately 30,000 in Iraq, approximately 250,000 to 1 million in the Phillippines. The political fallout was worse as well: although they enjoyed a degree of self-government, the Phillippines did not become independent until 1946 and have had limited success as a nation-state.

Yet, despite all this, despite the bloodshed and the fury and a level of anti-civilian action well in excess of what we would consider just or desirable, the Americans won in the Phillipines. Aguinaldo was defeated, so eventually were the Moros. Nor did this happen in the absence of domestic political opposition. William Jennings Bryan, after convincing the Democratic Senate to vote for the Treaty that set American rule over the Phillipines, ran against President McKinley on an "anti-imperialist" platform. Somehow, the will was found, despite errors and cruelties which are typical to war, to carry on. It would be a poor commentary indeed if we were no longer capable of such today.