The amazing similarities between Spanish-American war in Cuba and Iraq:

[1932]

I am reading Richard Gott's Cuba. I am up to about 1920 (a sub-chapter titled, A Republic for gamblers: Mario Menocal and Bert Crowder). I've just finished the part which covers the Spanish American War and the first (four year) occupation of Cuba by the US military.

Some of the striking similarities between Cuba and Iraq:

Before the Spanish-American War Cuba was governed by a dying Spanish imperial government. Madrid sent General Valeriano Weyler to Cuba to repress political efforts to end Spanish colonial rule. Weyler was brutal. Hearst's newspapers accurately called him the "Butcher of Havana." To prevent people in the country from convincing people in the city to rebel, he turned the cities into concentration camps, which cut people off from farmland, and he had little regard for whether people starved.

Much like Saddam Hussein, the US government and the press had a genuinely bad person (and bad system of government) around whom they built a human rights argument for intervention (and they even gave Hussein the same nickname -- "the Butcher of Baghdad"!).

To get Americans excited about intervening, the press used The Maine incident -- a ship exploded, probably accidentally when a spark from the boiler ignited a nearby magazine (which had happened on other American ships, but without such catastrophic results). Gott describes the reaction in the streets of NY -- flags and ribbons everywhere and a national obsession with revenge.

The US invades Cuba and makes very quick work of it. Part of the reason is because even anti-American pro-Independence Cubans are happy to see the Americans remove the Spanish. Much like today, The US used the Maine incident not only to invade Cuba, but to take the Philippines and Puerto Rico too. Spain's army is too dispersed to protect any one possession, so that's the end of the Spanish Empire, which is a good thing.

But, as Gott points out, America's intentions are never so unambiguous as to only be about protecting human rights and promoting Democracy. Initially, everyone in the US government expects to occupy Cuba for a long time (notwithstanding a clause in the War Resolution that requires the US to leave as soon as possible -- when has anyone ever treated a war resolution as a restrictive document?). Cuba is located very close to the shipping route that will lead to the Panama Canal and it can become an economic powerhouse because of agriculture. (Iraq, unlike Sudan or Rwanda, but similar to Cuba, has immense oil wealth and is strategically located, thus nobody believes the US will just pull out, right?)

However, the problem is that the people in Cuba who would support occupation/annexation -- the people who were enriched by Spanish colonialism -- were economically destroyed by the end of colonialism. Left behind, instead, is a population asking for independence.

In the local and national elections the American run (which they try to fix by restricting the people who are eligible to vote and ensuring that people sympathetic to pro-US candidates sit on the election boards) pro-independence parties win a large number of votes. So the US knows they need to get the military out soon, which wasn't the original plan.

The US has few models for the sort of colonial relationship they think they can get away with if they cannot have a military occupation. They use the British relationship with Egypt as the model: the British, after invading Egypt in 1882 (or 81) left behind an army that was only there to defend Egypt from foreign invaders (not to act as a police force). Instead, colonial control came from the debt obligations imposed on Egypt. Britain loaned money to Egypt and built into the contracts were control mechanisms. Rather than guns, they used clauses and warranties to ensure that London would get rich off of Egypt's people and resources.

So, convinced that they have only two choices, occupation or independence with a constitution that entrenches Cuban dependence on the US, the Cubans write up a constitution which incorporates the Platt Amendment. The Cuban constitution gives the US oversight of Cuban finances, the right to permanent military bases on the island, and controls Cuba's ability to enter into treaties with foreign governments. Gott calls this "mortgaged independence."

The Republic that results reflects American racism -- it gives a great deal of power to Spanish immigrants, many of whom arrive after independence, and very little to the large black population which fought for independence, but was denied the fruits of liberty -- which is destabilizing. Similarly, in Iraq, the US is setting up a government which prefers the Sunnis (who had a great deal of power under Hussein) over the Shiites (who did a great deal to resist Hussein). One obsession at the time is that true democracy in Cuba will result in a black-controlled dictatorship similar to Haiti's. The NY Times headlines remind people of this danger. Sound familiar? Today's Haiti is Iran.

Now that it's a client state of the US, the Cuban economy booms (giving conservatives the argument, "see, it was all good") while inequality and injustice grow.

Also, in Cuba, there was an American obsession about creating a Cuban police force (the Rural Guard) to police the island (and repress dissent and the sort of criminality that results from inequality). The US didn't want to create an army because and army might challenge US occupation.

A progressive US General, James Wilson, foresaw the rural guard as leading to military dictatorship and criticized the plan. He said "give me the money to spend on oxen and tools and the reconstruction of the peasants' bohíos, and I will guarantee peace and order." The US didn't listen to him.

So there's the one parallel that's probably missing: there's no US General today who's pointing out that peace and order in Iraq requires spreading the wealth of Iraq down to the people -- or, to paraphrase Jim Wallis on the same subject, until everyone has their own piece of land and economic security, our foreign policy is going to create more instability. In fact, the only person I've heard make this argument is Naomi Klein. It would be interesting if more Democrats felt the solution for Iraq wasn't to build up an Iraqi police force (that isn't an army) and focussed instead on building up the wealth of the people of Iraq.

[PurityOfEssence]

1. It won't be long 'til we pass the number of soldiers killed, either

Not to mention the numbers for the War of 1812.

[moodforaday]

2. Thank you for posting this

I got the same impression from Howard Zinn's the first chapter of his "People's History of the United States" (20th Century).

[1932]

3. thank you for reading it. A little long, but I hope people read to end.

[alfredo]

4. Same with Italy's occupation of Eritrea.

Read "We didn't do it for You." Michela Wrong.


The second chapter spells it out.

[1932]

5. kick

because it took time to write this

[PurityOfEssence]

6. Hearst: "You give me the pictures and I'll give you the war."

The parallels are endless. We were hoodwinked into this by a lucky lingering fire in a coal bunker on the Maine that heated up a bulkhead next to a magazine. Why else was the ship was raised and towed to deep water many years later?

Truly, the United States has been a modern state in many ways, chief among them is dispensing with overt colonialism to achieve the same ends without the pesky infrastructure costs of taking care of the wogs. The military has always been there to secure the endeavors of private industry, and it's a much more cost-effective system than actually having to administer a colonial government. Not only that, we can claim some kind of goody two-shoes decency as we fleece on the cheap.

Thanks for the post. Our various other colonial quasi-excursions of the last century are ripe to be exposed.