Latham Should Stick to Selling Seeds
By Sam Garchik

How many Iowans have to die for Tom Latham to stay in office?

No, this isn't a riddle, just a shout out to the Daily Kos for giving us a list of the Reps who voted against more equipment, more rest, and more manpower for our servicemen and women in Iraq.  It's nice to see them celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the Philippine American War is such spectacular fashion.

Wait. Did we really go to war against the Philippines? Sure did. Soon after the Spanish - American War ended (Remember the Maine?), we set off on a 10+ year crusade to pacify the Philippines. And we wound up with over 4,000 American dead (not counting the Moro insurgency which lasted until 1913).

And in that war, as well as this one, combat deaths were light relative to injuries, disease, and other hardships. And by the way - our adventure in the Philippines was the first war in which Americans were accused of committing atrocities.

This is what brings me to my point. It's too bad we don't remember our history, Rep Latham. We might have won the war, but there are still Muslim fundamentalists in the Philippines who remember what we did, and they are still capturing American tourists.

In fact, no less a luminary than Mark Twain said,

"I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it – perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands – but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector – not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now – why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation."

Sounds like Twain could just as well be talking about Iraq.

So the question we have now is, do we send out troops to an unjust war with what they need to survive, or get out of an unjust war because we can't give them what they want.

By the way, for those keeping score - when we talk about keeping our troops well supplied, the Army had to invent a new gun to kill the insurgents in the Philippines.  Enter John Browning and the M1911 Colt .45 ACP. 

The old technology of the Long Colt .38 wasn't doing the trick.  Come to think of it, this was is a lot more like the one 100 years ago than I thought.