The announcement by Pentagon officials that the U.S. troops would play a combat role, however, prompted objections from the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, which faces widespread opposition to U.S. military intervention there. U.S. officials are now trying to smooth out an agreement with the Philippine government on how to label the troops and proceed with the deployment.

Last year Washington sent 1,300 troops on a six-month mission whose official role was to train government soldiers in fighting a guerrilla group known as Abu Sayyaf. U.S. officials justified the deployment by saying the group is tied to Al Qaeda.

On February 20 Pentagon officials reported that combat troops would be sent as early as the end of March--the first official use of U.S. troops in a combat role in the Philippines since World War II. They would include 350 Special Forces troops to the southern island of Jolo and 700 support troops to Zamboanga, on the mainland. Some 1,000 marines, armed with Cobra attack helicopters and Harrier AV-8B attack planes, would provide "medical" and "logistical" support, standing by as a rapid-response force aboard two ships off the coast of Jolo.

The Philippine government reacted to Washington’s declaration by insisting the U.S. troops would be engaged in a "training exercise," not in direct combat, because, as Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes stated, such a role is outlawed by the Philippine constitution.

Washington, initially caught off guard by this reaction, which was not part of the original script, refused to change its original description of the U.S. forces. "The Pentagon does not want to call one thing another thing when it’s not," insisted a U.S. official quoted in the Los Angeles Times. "This is not an exercise. An exercise is a close thing, under controlled circumstances. This is a military operation."

Reyes flew to Washington February 28 to meet with U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the plans. Afterward Rumsfeld reiterated that U.S. troops would be going to the Philippines but that the two sides were in the process of working out the definition of "training."

"They have a variety of things they do in training their people," Rumsfeld asserted, "including exercises that involve combat situations, which is kind of the end point of training.... And what they do is they end up with the end of that process putting their folks into combat--into a circumstance that conceivably could result in combat. You never know when you’re dealing with terrorists."  
 
Strategic location
Many in the Philippines see Washington’s moves today to set up a base of operations in the southern islands as part of its ambitions to reestablish a military foothold in its former colony and in the region.

"A successful U.S. operation in the southern Philippine islands could give the United States a forward presence in the Southeast Asian sea lanes," wrote Rene Ciria-Cruz, a journalist for Pacific News Service and editor of Filipinas magazine. "The passages are critical to the movement of U.S. forces from the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf."

A military presence in the Philippines, she noted, would give U.S. forces a staging point for intervening in other countries in the region such as Indonesia and Malaysia, branded by Washington as havens for "Islamic extremists."

Washington’s announcement of a troop deployment drew an immediate reaction in the Philippines. Among the 15,000 protesters who mobilized in Manila February 28 to protest against the U.S.-backed war on Iraq, a number held signs denouncing Washington’s planned military buildup in the Philippines.

Underlying the dispute over what role the U.S. forces will play in the Philippines is a history of more than eight decades of U.S. colonial and imperialist domination, as well as the resistance to it.  
 
Decades of U.S. domination
"The wounds over the massacre of our forefathers by the American colonialists have not been healed," said Temojin Tulawie, a caller to a Philippine radio show.

Tulawie was referring to U.S. imperialism’s brutality in conquering the Philippines from the Spanish colonial rulers at the end of the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos lost their lives resisting the U.S. occupying troops over the course of several years. Some of the most brutal atrocities by U.S. soldiers were carried out on the same southern islands that Washington plans to send troops today.

After the Philippines won its formal independence in 1946, the U.S. military maintained a large presence in the country for almost five decades. This included the two largest bases outside the U.S. borders--Subic Bay naval base and Clark air base. These played a strategic role during the Korean and Vietnam wars as well as the naval deployments to the Arab-Persian Gulf.

The U.S.-backed dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos was toppled by a mass upsurge in 1986. In face of sustained popular protests, the Philippine Senate voted in 1992 to close the U.S. military bases at Clark and Subic Bay, and the U.S. troops were removed. The Philippines constitution bars the stationing of foreign troops in the country without a Senate treaty approved by a two-thirds majority.  
 
‘War on terror’ pretext
Washington’s stated reason for sending troops is an effort to wipe out Abu Sayyaf, a guerrilla organization, with a few hundred combatants, that has primarily operated on the islands of Jolo and Basilan in the south. U.S. officials claim the group has ties to Al Qaeda.

Abu Sayyaf, a group of an estimated 200 combatants that originated as a split-off from the much larger Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), has largely devoted its activity to kidnapping for ransom. It has not advanced a political program aimed at addressing the national aspirations or broader interests of workers or peasants in the region.

Imperialist oppression and the fight for land have for decades fueled struggles by peasants in the Philippines, including rural guerrilla organizations. More than 12 percent of Filipinos are either subsistence farmers, tenants, sharecroppers, or farm workers. Some 70 percent of rural toilers do not own the land they work.

One of the main guerrilla organizations has been the New People’s Army, which at times has been a large force drawing in thousands of peasants and others; it is historically tied to the Communist Party of the Philippines, a Stalinist organization of Maoist origin.

In the south, struggles have taken on a nationalist character, such as in Mindanao, an island in the south inhabited by the Moros, a national minority whose population is largely Muslim. About 5 percent of the more than 84 million inhabitants of the Philippines--an overwhelmingly Catholic country--are Muslim; the majority live in the southern islands.

In 1996 a guerrilla organization called the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) signed an agreement with the national government granting a degree of self-rule to Mindanao; it is currently abiding by a cease-fire as part of the self-rule agreement. At the high point of the rebellion it led in the early 1970s, the MNLF had tied down some 40 percent of the Philippine military.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a guerrilla force of an estimated 20,000 combatants that originated in a 1977 split from the MNLF, refused to sign the 1996 agreement and has continued to fight the government in the same region that U.S. troops have been stationed during exercises over the past year.

The unresolved social and national conflicts are fueled by the economic catastrophe. Saddled with an enormous debt to foreign banks and a growing world depression, the Philippine economy has been in a slump for several years. Just days after Washington announced its plans to send troops, the Philippine peso plummeted to a two-year low of 54.4 pesos to the dollar.  
 
 
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