This isn't exactly about Bush's state dinner with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, but about Bush's welcome speech:
The Philippines was the first democracy in Asia and has a proud tradition of democratic values, love of family and faith in God. President Arroyo, you are carrying this tradition forward, and I`m proud to call you friend… Mabuhay!Dean Jorge Bocobo, whose blog I really enjoy reading but with whom I mostly disagree, rightly points out the change in Bush's rhetoric:
I was dumbstruck reading the transcript. These bold words, are history being revised... No U.S. president since William McKinley -- not Roosevelt or Kennedy or Reagan or Clinton -- has ever proclaimed the simple truth in those 8 words: “The Philippines was the first democracy in Asia…” Pres. Bush's words contradict the history of Philippine-American relations as taught in America (except in hundreds of Asian studies departments) and written up in history books (unless they've read the words of Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, or U.P.'s Dean Armando Malay).He writes further:
[The Treaty of Paris] made inevitable America's first and only colonial war of conquest against an insurrection that was also our war to defend the infant Philippine republic...I suppose I'm one of those "seething pundits" then -- who, as Bocobo eloquently writes, "never emerged from the black hole of resentment." (Do I qualify as a "seething intellectual?")The Filipinos would lose that war, but America would give the Philippines everything Spain never did: schools, government, science, Hollywood. Still a century of nationalist resentment seethes in many intellectuals, pundits and local elites. Now, for the first time an American President seems to agree with them. I see the end of a great untruth because George W. Bush is a straight talking Texas cowboy.
Yes, I'm seething: the joys of schools and Hollywood aside (for which we should be eternally grateful to the United States of America, forever and ever, Amen), Bush's statement reads to me as precisely signaling the very elision of that same war (not an "insurrection," by the way) the Filipino-American war that sought to destroy that same "first democracy in Asia." The simplistic recognition of a change in date -- finally, an American President realizes our independence day is not on July 4! -- is little reason to applaud. This is only hypocrisy of the basest sort, especially since Bush is financing -- no, wait: directly plunging into -- yet another war against those crazy Moros.
There's more (the permalink might be broken, but it's from May 29, with a mirror here) adulation concerning the "partnership" between the U.S. and its major non-NATO ally, but you can read that for yourself. (And you can read my earlier entries if you click on the "this damned war" category in the boxes on the right.)