That brings back memories... I lived in Mindanao from '79 to around '83, and traveled there now and then through the mid '80s. It was pretty well known that the US was providing funds and transport for Muslim secessionists that wanted to go to Afghanistan to do battle with the evil empire. The general opinion of those in government seemed to be "good riddance", I don't think anybody considered what might happen when they came back.
Of course we had the same sort of talk about "moral clarity" in those days. The Americans in their white hats were doing battle with the evil empire, and neutralism was immoral.
Where I was, of course, that noble struggle took the form of practically unlimited support, at least up until '83 or so, for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. That provided me an object lesson in the limits of moral clarity. In Washington, they knew what they were fighting against, and they knew that their righteous duty according to the Kirkpatrick doctrine was to support the "authoritarian" bulwark against communism (Marcos was actually the best thing that ever happened to the CPP/NPA, but that's another story).
In the Philippines, of course, the moral clarity faded a good deal. People here were less concerned with who we were against and more worried about who we were supporting. I remember all the talk about "low-intensity conflict", and how clean and morally clear it looked in the journals, and how nasty and morally ambiguous it looked in real life. That time left a lot of ugly memories here, as it did in many other places. We forget so fast, and we forget that others remember....
Sorry for the digression... hardly relevant to the matters currently under discussion, but I've often noted that my experiences back in those days have a lot to do with my current perspectives. |
