Referring to the Bush administration's "war on terror," which provides the pretext for threats of intervention in Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, and other countries, the Times said the mobilization is a "sign that the Philippines may well become the site of the war's next phase."

While the administration has called the troops "advisers," the real aim of U.S. imperialism was more clearly revealed by Philippine defense minister Angelo Reyes. Reyes publicly disclosed January 17 in Manila that in a meeting between Bush and Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the U.S. president told her, "'We are offering American forces to fight in the Philippines.' He said that in the White House. I was there."

Arroyo, mindful of potential mass opposition to the presence of U.S. troops engaged in combat with her countrymen, turned down the offer, saying, "We don't need American forces because our soldiers are good."

The Philippine president has pressed ahead with the invitation to the U.S. military in spite of initial divisions in her government and opposition threats to impeach her for violating the national constitution. The document includes an amendment, passed after the country's Senate voted in 1992 to close the U.S. military bases at Clark and Subic Bay, that bars the stationing of foreign troops in the country without the Senate's approval.

Arroyo has made collaboration with the U.S. military brass a hallmark of her 12-month-old administration. In November she visited Washington to accept a $100 million package of military equipment and training from the Pentagon.

"In one deceptive and treasonous move, she has succeeded in making the Philippines a virtual extension of Afghanistan," said Francisco Tatad, a former senator, in reference to the coming troops. In spite of such statements, however, government officials announced on January 24 that the opposition had agreed to the exercises at a National Security Council meeting attended by Arroyo, cabinet members, former president Corazon Aquino, and selected members of Congress. Roilo Golez, the council's adviser, claimed the government would conduct the exercises with the "utmost transparency," limit the U.S. forces to a noncombat role, and launch a public information campaign "to address misconceptions."  
 
'Nothing like Vietnam,' says Powell
Given the controversial character of its intervention, capitalist politicians in the United States have treaded carefully in their public statements. "We are not butting into their sovereignty," said Porter Goss, a Republican Congressman from Florida. Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted on January 17 that the operation "is nothing like Vietnam.... There is no intention for [the troops] to become active combatants. They are trainers."

The U.S. soldiers will be authorized to shoot if they are fired upon, however, and 200 will be allowed into the combat zone. They will be split into groups of 12 for every 400 Filipino troops, said officials in Manila.

The U.S. so-called trainers will join Filipino soldiers in the south of the country. The incursions by government forces into the area are presented as an offensive against the guerrillas of Abu Sayyaf. Although it originated as a split-off from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and identifies itself as Muslim, Abu Sayyaf does not seek to provide political leadership to the peasants and workers of the region. Its best-known activity is that of holding local people and foreign nationals for ransom.

U.S. officials have claimed that the MILF, an armed organization calling for an independent state incorporating regions where the majority of the population is Muslim, has ties with "international terrorist organizations." MILF leaders, who are officially in peace negotiations with the government, have expressed unease about the offensive. "If there's fighting in the area, we have a base on Basilan that could be attacked," said a spokesperson, referring to an island stronghold of Abu Sayyaf.

Wealthy landlords on Basilan also maintain private armies of the type that collaborated with U.S.-backed government forces in the brutal repression of peasants and the New People's Army throughout the Philippines under the 1965-86 dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

While applauding the intervention, big-business newspapers in the United States have warned of the long-standing suspicion towards government and U.S. forces throughout the Philippines, and especially in Mindanao and other southern islands. "Former military commanders and guerrillas who have fought in the southern Philippines say the U.S. troops shouldn't underestimate the danger they face in Mindanao and Basilan," reported the January 17 Wall Street Journal. "While Abu Sayyaf troops are thought to number only in the hundreds, many residents of the Muslim south are seen as hostile to the Philippine armed forces."

A series of incidents during mid-January in Jolo, the largest town in the southern Island of Sulu, indicated the explosive tensions that are bubbling in the region. When police officers drawn from the ranks of former Muslim rebels killed three Philippine soldiers, local people celebrated the deaths. They explained that on the previous day the military had attacked a protest rally called to demand the release from custody of Muslim leader Nur Misuari, who has been charged with starting a rebellion.  
 
A history of national resistance
The U.S. forces are accompanying Philippine troops into a region that has long rebelled against the boot of colonial and imperialist oppression. Starting in the 16th century, the Spanish conquerors drove the Muslim Sultans and the people they ruled into the south of the country. They built forts on Mindanao to further their effort to subjugate the local people. Many neighborhoods in Zamboanga bear Catholic names imposed by the Spanish.

When the rising U.S. imperialists defeated their Spanish rivals in the war of 1898, the Philippines "dropped into our laps," in the words of President William McKinley.

The U.S. victory was followed by a brutal war, beginning in 1899, to crush the Philippine independence struggle. In two years of fighting and three years of guerrilla warfare, the U.S. deployed 60,000 troops, of whom 4,300 were killed. By comparison, 379 were lost in the war with Spain. In pacifying the island of Luzon, said one U.S. general, 600,000 Filipinos were killed. Fighting was particularly bloody in the Muslim south.

U.S. domination was sealed with a 1905 treaty with Japan that acknowledged Tokyo's mastery over Korea and U.S. authority in the Philippines.

Up until World War II, when the country became a major battleground in the Pacific War, the Philippines remained a U.S. colony, in spite of near-unanimous calls for independence. During the war, peasants and workers organized a powerful local army, the Hukbalahaps, or "Huks" that fought both the Japanese invaders and local exploiters. The formal independence that was granted in the 1940s allowed for a "permanent" U.S. military presence, and involved U.S. military and economic backing for a series of semicolonial regimes. The local capitalists and landlords profited from the relationship, and acted in fear of both the peasants, who have never ceased to demand land reform and the breakup of the massive latifundias or landed estates, and the growing working class.  
 
The martial law regime
Ferdinand Marcos, elected in 1965 on a "Philippines First" program of land reform and economic nationalism, reacted to swelling popular discontent by declaring martial law in 1972. Peasants and workers' leaders were hunted down by landlord armies and the Philippine military. An indication of the potential for revolutionary struggle by workers and peasants during this time was the fact that many were attracted to the Communist Party of the Philippines, an organization that took its political lead from the Maoist regime in China. The Stalinist organization was able to build up a substantial guerrilla army, and an influential role in the unions and among peasants in the countryside.

The CP's Stalinist methods and petty-bourgeois politics included seeking an alliance with a "progressive" wing of the bourgeoisie in the anti-Marcos struggle instead of organizing to lead workers and peasants to fight for political power. This left working people politically disoriented when, under the impact of massive street mobilizations, the imperialists and the capitalists in the Philippines decided that Marcos had become a liability and shipped him off to the United States.

The capitalist presidents who have followed, from Corazon Aquino to Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, have succeeded, with U.S. backing, in stabilizing the situation, however temporarily. A degree of imperialist investment and industrial development has occurred, although the Philippines remains a poor semicolonial nation dependent upon imperialism and saddled with an unpayable foreign debt.

Washington is now collaborating with the Philippine rulers to try to take back some of this lost ground. A glimpse of the destabilizing effect of its initiative could be gained at a January protest led by students, opposing the U.S. intervention. The several dozen students, who gathered outside the presidential palace, were charged by police wielding batons.  
 
 
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