Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died.

The life of Werner Herzog is filled with such stories — tales of deep spiritualism that continually invite a resolutely non-dogmatic but nevertheless palpably Christian interpretation. The Left habitually ignores this, preferring to revel in their shallow image of Herzog as a reckless, half-mad darling of the godless art-house circuit, a sort of Colonel Kurtz with a camera. The truth is that he’s more akin to a Bavarian Flannery O’Connor, deeply devout and honest even while telling stories featuring characters who are anything but. Like the monks and prophets of old, Herzog is that rare man who implicitly trusts his own soul-stirring religious impulses and allows them to take him where they may. Viewed with this in mind, his fascination with stories of chaos and darkness — stories like Grizzly Man — become not celebrations of madness, but a sane and noble search for God in a fallen world.

The man who would one day become fascinated with the story of Timothy Treadwell seemed to attract dark Fate from the very beginning: days after his birth in Munich in 1942, an Allied bomb fell on the neighbor’s house, the shockwave shattering windows and spraying his cradle with glass. Divorce ensured his father was largely absent from his life, but his mother moved the family to the country and kept Herzog and his two brothers fed and clothed by smuggling essentials over the border from Austria. He grew affectionately close to both mother and brothers during an idyllic childhood played out amongst the ruins and poverty of postwar Bavaria:

I did not know what a banana was until I was twelve and I did not make my first telephone call until I was seventeen. Our house had no water-flushed toilet, in fact no running water at all. We had no mattresses; my mother would stuff dried ferns into a linen bag, and in winter it was so cold I would wake up in the morning to find a layer of ice on my blanket from frozen breath. But it was wonderful to grow up like that. We had to invent our own toys, we were full of imagination. . . kids in the cities took over whole bombed-out blocks and would declare the remnants of buildings their own to play in where great adventures were acted out. . . It was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow.

From an early age, Herzog was a child of solitude and daydreams. “I was very much a loner. . . I would lie back on the floor with a book and read for hours no matter how much talking and activity was going on. Often I would read all day long, and when I finished, I would look up to discover that everyone else had left hours ago.” When he was eleven, a traveling projectionist came to his rural school and screened a pair of 16mm films for the kids. The magic and illusion of the medium captivated the quiet boy. “From the moment I could think independently I knew I was going to make films. I never had a choice about becoming a director.”

At fourteen, in a sudden titanic burst of religious passion, Herzog converted to Catholicism, immersing himself in the intricacies of the Holy Mass and the Catechism. Over time he was increasingly unable to reconcile the dogma with the reality of life around him, and he eventually fell out of the Church. Yet his films have never escaped this early, quixotic preoccupation with God, creation, and the meaning of existence. “To this day,” he says, “there seems to be something of a distant religious echo in some of my work. . . I am good with religious subjects and feel I understand them.”

Culture was the other great force shaping his early life and thought. He yearned for Germany to return to the “the bosom of the civilized world” after the privations its people suffered first at the hands of the Nazis and then of the country-splitting Communists. “I had the increasingly strong feeling that Germany was an extremely godforsaken country,” he remembers. “What, I asked myself, was actually holding it together? What was capable of binding the country together again until it was reunited in the distant future? I felt that the only things we Germans were held together by were our culture and language, and for this reason I truly felt that it was only the poets who could hold Germany together.”

As a young teen he wrote several movie scripts and “submitted various proposals to producers and TV stations,” but when he took a meeting with a producer at seventeen and got laughed out of the room with, “Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!”, he realized that if he was going to be a director, he would have to make it happen himself. He immediately established “Werner Herzog Filmproduktion,” and for the next fifteen years ran his entire moviemaking business out of a one-bedroom apartment in Munich, armed with a camera stolen from the local university. “There was no clear division between private life and work,” he says.

Instead of a living room we had an editing room, and I would sleep there too. I had no secretary, no one to help me with taxes, bookkeeping, contracts, screenplay writing, organization. I did absolutely everything myself; it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could. . . It dawned on me that organization and commitment were the only things that finished films, not money.

An article of faith. . . A matter of simple human decency. Critics who fancy Herzog as a postmodern Euro-artiste far too hip and cool to give credence to such notions understand very little about the man or his passions.

From the beginning, Herzog determined that he would only work using 35mm “feature film” stock, the only format with enough breadth and depth to capture the transcendent imagery coursing through his fertile, cosmic mind. He raised the money to do this by taking odd jobs and winning small monetary prizes at film festivals for his shorts and scripts. Somehow, attending film school and “learning” how to make a movie never entered his consciousness. “I just felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school,” he says. “It is not technicians that film schools should be producing, but people with a real agitation of mind. People with spirit, with a burning flame within them.”

Sensing instinctively that Germany was too small a backdrop for his filmic visions, Herzog developed the notion that traveling, and specifically walking long distances on foot, carried with it a profound spiritual quality. “The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience,” he thought, and so he began to travel whenever possible, not as a tourist but as an adventurer in the classic sense, treading fearlessly wherever his heart and soul led.

He learned English while on scholarship in Great Britain, then went to Greece, Crete, and Egypt, eventually journeying along the Nile into Sudan. At twenty-two he accepted a scholarship that brought him to the U.S., a country whose self-reliant, God-fearing, Blind Side citizenry impressed him deeply. After spending time in the States he made his way down to Mexico, where he learned Spanish and worked as a two-bit border smuggler and rodeo rider. (He was so terrible at the latter job that the Mexicans nicknamed him “El Alamein,” after one of the greatest German defeats of WWII). “My time down there was quite banal and partially miserable too,” Herzog admits, but “it was ‘pura vida,’ as the Mexicans say, ‘pure life’. . . I thank God on my knees that after America I did not go straight back to Germany.”

The later career of Herzog is now the stuff of legend. He shot film in the Sahara, the Ivory Coast, Uganda, Cameroon, the Congo, and the Canary Islands, surviving African rainstorms, sandstorms, civil war, prisons, rat-bites, malaria, and blood parasites. Herzog’s early pictures were not particularly popular in Germany, and so he embarked on a conscious attempt to achieve international success with an English-speaking film. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) was a tragic, haunting, delirious conquistador adventure tale set in the deepest jungles of South America, and in addition to making Herzog a name to remember among foreign audiences, it began his fruitful yet often infuriating partnership with the gifted (and genuinely half-mad) actor Klaus Kinski.

A seminal figure in what was called the German New Wave, Herzog became known for fiction films and documentaries featuring “ruined people in ruined places” — strange protagonists poised far out on the razor’s edge of life. “I never look for stories to tell,” he says, “rather they assail me.” Cinematic ideas often come to Herzog in feverish daydreams fraught with meaning, though he can’t begin to explain why or to what purpose. “What constitutes poetry, depth, vision and illumination in cinema I can’t name,” he once said. “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

To discover and share these epochal moments of humanity, to tease them out of ordinary reality and onto a movie screen, to illuminate the faded fingerprints of God found on even the strangest and most forsaken parts of his creation — that is the mission of Werner Herzog.

One experiences, maybe only five or six times during a lifetime, the incredible feeling that illuminates and enlightens your own existence. It might happen while reading a text, listening to a piece of music, watching a film or looking at a painting. And sometimes — even if centuries are being bridged — you find a brother and instantly know that you are no longer alone. . .

If I find one person who walks out of a cinema of 300 people after watching one of my films and does not feel alone anymore, then I have achieved everything I have set out to achieve.

Conservative movie lovers have in Herzog a filmmaker who is neither a pretentious “artist” (a word he despises) nor a reckless madman, but a solid, sane craftsman who’s spent a lifetime painfully painting a bizarre Sistine Chapel filled with passionate and transcendent images that remind us of what it means to be human.

Of course, being a director who respects the fiery “agitation of mind” which lies at the heart of religious faith brings him into inevitable conflict with the lemmings of collectivism, atheism, and political correctness who dominate not only modern Hollywood but the Arts in general. Unlike many of us conservatives, though, the non-political and non-dogmatic Herzog has never shirked from a fight with that insidious worldview.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers: Werner Herzog’s defiant stands against the ideological bullies of the Left, and how those experiences prepared him to take on the multi-faceted story of Grizzly Man.

Previous posts in the series “Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and Grizzly Man“

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Herzog on Herzog by Paul Cronin: A fascinating, book-length interview with the master director that goes into depth about his films, life, philosophy, and craft. There’s no better single book on Herzog than this.

On Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog: Herzog’s account of his epic long walk from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit the dying Lotte Eisner, told through the diary he kept during the trip. Often drifting into prose poetry and what I called above “feverish daydreams,” it offers a strange and wonderful peek into the mind of a lonely pilgrim filled with “fervor, woe, prayers, and hopes.”

Herzog video interview with Charlie Rose: filmed a year ago during his press tour for his new book of diaries Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of ‘Fitzcarraldo’, this is a potent twenty-minute introduction to Herzog’s personality.

Herzog audio interview with Elvis Mitchell: Herzog talks to the former New York Times film critic about his life and career, with an especial focus on his newest film Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans (2009) starring Nicholas Cage. Contains some discussion of Timothy Treadwell and Grizzly Man.

“It’s a liberal, socialist film. It’s about poor people in Africa and America,” McAleer says. “We’re not interested in insulting anyone or winning political points,” McAleer continues. “I don’t care about your politics and I’m not going to demonize you.”

But what McAleer and McElhinney won’t stand for is watching people suffer while serious, glaring misinformation guides public policy.

That happened during the misinformation campaign surrounding the use of DDT years ago to stop the spread of malaria, they say, and it could happen soon if the U.S. adopts cap and trade legislation which will hamper industry – and curtail American prosperity.

The film sprung in part from their last film, “Mine Your Own Business.“ The documentary slammed environmentalists for holding back progress in impoverished communities.

McAleer recalls working as a liberal journalist assigned to cover “an evil capitalist mining company” for the Financial Times.

When he arrived on the scene, “I discovered everything the environmentalists were saying was exaggerated or untrue,” he says, adding the locals wanted the new mines to improve their standard of living.

“Mining gives jobs to some of the most impoverished people in the world,” he adds.

While touring to promote “Mine Your Own Business,” the filmmakers were implored to investigate DDT, the insecticide which could have prevented millions of Africans from getting Malaria had it not been unfairly assaulted by environmentalists the world over.

That lead to their interest in the fractious global warming debate.

“Co2 is the new DDT. They‘re demonizing it the same way,” McAleer says.

“Not Evil Just Wrong” doesn’t just feature experts who agree with the filmmakers’ views. Some sequences include those who fear the earth is warming at an alarming rate.

–

“Climate people always believe journalists are on their side … they assume the journalist will not ask difficult questions,” McAleer says.

McElhinney says when they challenged some of the environmentalists featured in the film, “…they take it very badly. It’s unfamiliar territory to them.”

“Not Evil Just Wrong” is set to debut Oct. 18, a date they hope will become the largest ever simultaneous film premiere. Consumers can buy DVDs of the film beforehand in the hopes they’ll wait to hit the play button until 8 p.m. EST Oct. 18 to take part in the historical attempt.

The DVD screenings will be accompanied by theatrical screenings across the U.S., and those who see the film can Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or Skype questions to a panel gathered at a D.C. screening of the film after it debuts.

The filmmakers have shown their movie to a limited number of audiences already. McElhinney says audiences are shocked by the information in the film, particularly the British court case which ruled much of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was either misleading or outright wrong. The court debunked key information in the film, like the claim that sea waters would rise 20 feet in the near future.

Major media outlets couldn’t be bothered to report on that truth, McElhinney says.

“That’s a story worth reporting, and it‘s worth asking Al Gore about,” she says.

McElhinney compares global warming activists to undergraduates = well intentioned souls trafficking in dangerous material.

“They’re hopped up on testosterone and good intentions with little knowledge to back it up,” she says.

Watch Lemon’s response around thirty seconds in. It looks like someone gently pokes him with a stun gun.

Can we go back to that moment again? But this time, producers, let’s slow-mo it.

Joy! In that instant, you learn a couple of valuable things:

-Lemon is adorable when he’s miffed

-It’s always hilarious when a reporter’s assumptions aren’t met. Blinded by ObamaLove, Lemon overlooks the fact that Bush is pretty much a hero in Africa – ending brutal wars, giving tons of humanitarian aid, and most important saving millions of lives fighting AIDS and malaria (a disease brought to you not just by mosquitoes, but by your average environmentalist and his misguided hatred toward DDT).

-In sum, when it comes to Africa, Obama has some pretty big shoes to fill. How disturbing it must be for Lemon, that they belong to Bush.

Tonight, the delightful John Gibson, the hilarious Frangela, and the delectable Anna Gilligan. And finally, our softball game. It’s worth the wait.

Overview

Until recently, Afghanistan was called “The Forgotten War.” The dramatic domestic, regional, and international politics of the Iraq war largely eclipsed the fact that our people were fighting just as hard in Afghanistan. Although we’re paying attention to AfPak now, off the radar screen an important and related fight has been unfolding in the Philippines.

At the invitation of the Philippine government, the U.S. maintains about 600 troops, including Army Green Berets, Civil Affairs, and Military Information Support teams, Navy SEALS and Seabees, along with Air Force personnel and Marines.  Our military forces are deployed in six locations: Zamboanga, Mindanao, Jolo, Basilan, Tawi Tawi, and a small number of liaison staff on Luzon. Their mission is to help the Armed Forces of the Philippines eliminate terrorist groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf Group and to prevent them from establishing safe havens from which to train other terrorists, both internal and external.

The small airport at Jolo is being expanded to accommodate civilian traffic. The U.S. contingent uses contracted aircraft to island hop.

The importance of the Philippines to American Pacific interests in defense and trade becomes clear when you spin a globe and note its location: The Philippine Archipelago is a geographic bottleneck that allows the holder a significant political and military advantage throughout the area and far beyond.

In the last century, the dominant insurgencies that jousted with the Philippine governments—and us—were linked to communism. The Chinese and the Soviets were happy to instigate rebellion in impoverished places such as Luzon and Mindanao, and to back the indigenous New People’s Army against the U.S.-backed Philippine government.  Russian and Chinese interest in limiting American hegemony in the Philippines (a former U.S. colony), and surrounding areas, has been a constant.

Mindanao: Fighters from this village surrendered on 20 April 2009. Instead of incarceration, the villagers are being welcomed back by aid projects from the Philippine and U.S. governments. This is causing defections among the enemy. The guerrilla leader told me he had been fighting since 1976.

After the Soviet Union fizzled and the Chinese communists became interested in wealth, the armed insurgencies of the Philippines gained new vitality from association with rising Islamic fundamentalist ideology and organizations.  There are direct links between Philippine domestic insurgents and Indonesian and Malaysian terrorists.  Foreign Islamic terrorists also have been captured in the Philippines.  The U.S. Government regards this as a key front in the global war on terror.

With the large, poor Muslim population (called Moros) on Mindanao and other islands, it is no surprise that Islamic nationalist movements have found a home among the Moros.  The Moros have been fighting nearly all comers for centuries.  That said, this does appear to be a war that “we” are winning.  “We” means that probably 98% of the hard work is being done by the Philippines, but the 2% the United States brings to the table is crucial.

The term Moros was coined by the Spanish who described any of the Muslim peoples as “Moros” (Moors), but in the context of the Philippines, the term itself is as ethnologically vague as calling modern Europeans “Christians.”  While Islamic nationalism is a force in Mindanao, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter what jersey it wears, much of the Philippine fighting is not religiously grounded.  For example, the relatively isolated people have a long memory for past political feuds and are mired in a revenge culture.  The population is fragmented into clans and other affinity groups.  The very idea of a Moro is politically subjective, as the “Moros” themselves are an amalgam of peoples forming anthropological sediment that predates Christianity itself, while Islam reached Mindanao approximately 600 years ago.  Jihadists and Crusaders collided here centuries ago.

Mindanao: We drove two hours, often through ambush country rivaling any I’ve seen in Afghanistan, to get to this remote village. The jungle and terrain favor the enemy. This Moro fighter had a permanent scowl until our troops (Philippine, and U.S. Navy and Army) greeted him, and then he brightened up.

Politically, the southern Philippines is an “over-determined” mess.  Many potent indicators of instability are present. It’s poor. The national government is weak and has a history of atrocities. Political corruption is rampant at all levels of government. The education system is weak. There are overlapping claims of national, tribal, and Sharia law. The culture is deeply fractured.  The borders—in this case beaches—are vast and porous.

The two “M’s” of Mindanao: Malaria and Moros.

These cultural, historical and political dynamics have proven to be a breeding ground for insurgency, lawlessness and terrorism. In terms of the insurgent and terrorist groups operating in Mindanao, it can be instructive to think of the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) as analogous to the Philippine Taliban, and JI/ASG (Jemaah Islamiyah/Abu Sayyaf Group) as the Southeast Asian al Qaeda.  Though the MILF is more culturally advanced than the Taliban, JI/ASG are typical AQ-type scavengers.  Many of the Taliban are more like cavemen with RPGs, while the MILF are more like Filipino Muslims with gripes, grudges and claims.  AQ is always AQ. All of these groups want some form of independent Islamic state. The U.S. military is in the southern Philippines to help the AFP (Armed Forces Philippines) defeat JI and ASG, but they are also concerned about lawless or “rogue” elements of the MILF who collaborate and provide safe haven to JI and ASG.

Central Mindanao and the MILF

I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Central Mindanao where the U.S. military is concerned about the presence of JI and whether or not the rogue elements of the MILF are providing them safe haven. Unlike al Qaeda, which is a non-state organization committed to terror in the name of ideology whose guerillas usually function in small, unidentified groups, MILF fighters—even the grunts—, actually wear uniforms in an attempt to gain international recognition and to gain protections under international law. Their primary struggle is local, and nationalistic.  The MILF is not per se an enemy of the United States, or even the Philippines, other than that it wants sovereignty, and this conflicts with Filipino desires.

Numerous Filipino officers have described the combat prowess of the MILF, noting that they are not good fighters, but that they are smart, very tough, show great heart and their courage is unquestionable.  And they have home field advantage.

Faces of the enemy: Moro children turned out to be just like other kids. The kids were well-mannered, never asked for candy, and loved the camera. (Mindanao)

The Moro fight in the Philippines is largely about ancestral domain which, in that light, could be claimed by someone before them.  The people who happen to be Muslims want land and independence.  Sharia law is the law of the land in some places.  Pitched battles are unfolding on a daily basis.  Up to 300,000 people have been displaced by fighting between the MILF and the AFP.  Journalists, aid workers, missionaries and locals often have been kidnapped, causing the AFP to expend great energy in search and rescue operations. Some officers—U.S. and Filipino—believe at times the KFRs (Kidnappings for Ransom) are about money, but at other times the KFRs are simply strategic diversions; the enemy knows the AFP and the PNP (Philippine National Police) will divert great resources to the hostage crisis.  U.S. officers agree.

While in central Mindanao, I spoke with Philippine Army Colonel Rey Ardo, who explained some dynamics of his area of operations (AO)—which includes a large MILF camp near his AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) camp, across Lake Lanao.  The colonel, who is Commander of the 103rd Brigade, said his fight is less with MILF as an organization and more with lawless elements, a sentiment that various commanders expressed.  We saw this in Iraq and lawless bandits are a great problem in Afghanistan.

We spoke while walking around his gigantic sand-table (a sort of handmade relief map showing terrain features in 3D), where it occurred to me that, using his 105mm guns, he could easily shoot over the lake and destroy the Moro camp.  I asked why he doesn’t unleash on those guys.  Colonel Ardo noted that the MILF lives there with women and children and the AFP doesn’t want to clobber the children. The Philippine Army has not always exercised that kind of restraint in the past, but there is recognition now within the AFP that roads, wells and schools and good governance are going to ultimately end the conflict, not bullets and bombs.

Mindanao: Evil Moros. Muslims one and all. Everything looks different up close. I felt at home in this 'enemy' village. This photo, and many others, was taken by Navy Lt. Lara Bollinger using my camera. The Moro woman, using stuttering English, asked Lt. Bollinger if she has a wife.

As a result of fighting smarter and combining their combat operations with aggressive civil military operations, the AFP is making slow but tangible progress in its struggle to bring the MILF into the fold.  Philippine Army Colonel Rey Ardo echoed the emerging view that some in the MILF are tired of fighting and can be wooed away with sincere promises of prosperity.  In fact, in the month prior to my arrival, more than 100 MILF fighters had surrendered to the AFP, tired of being on the run and hoping for a better life for their families. They are now being provided security and livelihood assistance by the AFP and the government. Identifying fissures and fault-lines in Iraq, and exploiting them, was paramount to the incredible turn of events in 2006-2007.  Each enemy group that agrees to end the fighting brings crucial information, and fighters who will join us, while allowing the good guys to concentrate on the remaining violent actors.

Laundry day; every village we passed through had the laundry on the line.

Our troops call laundry day 'no pants day' because the little kids all run around wearing shirts but no pants. The bigger kid saw us and ran over to lift the baby’s arm to wave. In Iraq he would have ran to us for candy because too many troops make brats out of the kids by playing Santa Claus. It’s dangerous to throw candy to kids, too. They run out and sometimes get run over.

A Potent Mix of Conflicts

If the MILF insurgency were the only thing standing in the way of peace, security and development in Mindanao, then prospects for Mindanao might be rosier. But there is a subtlety here that Filipino commanders are quick to point out:  there are two major layers of violence.  The first layer, which the Philippine military must address in the short term, is the organized violence against the government that has killed thousands over the years and displaced hundreds of thousands.

If the Filipino commanders that I spoke with get their choice—there are other camps within AFP who, I am told, are more prone to use force—the violence will mostly be resolved with civic action, not guns.  They say that 80% of their actual fight is on the civil affairs side, and only 20% is gun-related.  That’s great news and in itself demonstrates much promise.

Filipino officers were open about their combat operations, but in each case tried to put the fighting into an 80-20 context, lest the public lose track that this war is better resolved with patience and thinking rather than bullets.  But make no mistake; fighting happens every day, and if you check the news, there are more war stories coming from here than any person can follow.  This is a no-kidding war.

Sulu Island: Local legend has it that Alexander the Great made it this far, and that some islanders are his descendents. One hears similar stories in Afghanistan. It seems quite odd that Afghanistan and the Philippines would have so many real or imagined connections. Whatever the case, there were many old signs of yesteryear’s initiatives, and an Italian hostage from the International Red Cross is known to be near this area.

Underneath this first layer of anti-government violence, however, is a whole other layer of inter-clan, tribal violence, known in the Philippines as “rido.”  Standing over the sand-table, Col. Ardo talked about the hundreds of these “rido,” or clan feuds, in his area.  As with other Filipino officers, Islam is not his big concern.  Islam is an overlay.  The local culture is the plumbing.  The clans and their infighting cause persistent bloodletting.  The similarities in Afghanistan are remarkable, where the equivalent Dari term for rido is “gangi qabilaui” (for tribal fights within one ethnicity), and “gangi meliaty” (for fights between ethnicities).

Rido sometimes persist for generations, perpetuating a cycle of violence that is not easily broken. Combine that dynamic with one million loose firearms in the Philippines, and you can see how this might create a volatile climate.

Another peculiarity in the southern Philippines fighting is something called pintakasi, which I first heard about from an American Navy SEAL just before a mission was to launch that evening.  He was concerned that a small group of AFP forces, who were going on the mission, might get killed in a pintakasi.  A pintakasi (cockfight) occurs when fighting erupts, and all the fighting-aged males flood out of villages with any weapons they can find (M-16s are plentiful), and try to overwhelm the invader.  One day, ten AFP Marines were beheaded, for example.  Sounds similar to the events that occurred in Mogadishu as depicted in “Blackhawk Down” where our own people were nearly overwhelmed.

Mindanao: Philippine troops see much combat down here.

I asked Colonel Ardo about rido dynamics and he said there were too many feuds even to count.  “Dozens?” I asked.  He shook his head.  “Hundreds?” I asked.  I was aiming too low.  “What causes them?”  It had been a long day out in enemy country (I saw no fighting; we were talking with MILF members and their families who had surrendered) and I didn’t take notes.  But his answer was, effectively, “There are countless rido caused by anything you can imagine.”

Interestingly, Colonel Ardo explained that he sees rido violence between Muslim clans, and between Muslim and Christian clans, but not between Christian and Christian clans.

Both U.S. and Filipino commanders will say that rido and tribal rivalries—over the long haul—are more problematic than religious grievances and cause more violence than anything else. Many of the inhabitants of Mindanao and other islands hail from cultures which have been persistently violent—with or without outside influence—for centuries.  And so the Filipino commanders know that even when they end the major warfare, the basic culture of violence will persist, which, again, sounds like Afghanistan.

Indeed, Colonel Ardo said, almost in passing, that he is not fighting “people”; he’s fighting a culture.  Afghanistan.

Americans think of Filipinos as pleasant, likable and good workers—as indeed they often are. But at home, Filipino culture is, of course, messier.  The nation’s approximately 7,100 islands are home to over 100 tribal groups, which speak at least 70 languages.  One of the most unhelpful internal cultural dynamics is an expression of the tribal rivalries, which takes the form of something widely known in the U.S. and the Philippines as “crab mentality.”

When a fisherman has one crab in a bucket, the crab can escape and so the bucket needs a lid.  But if there are two or more crabs, every time a crab starts to escape, the others—so they say—will pull it back down.

Mindanao. Most of these Moro women were happy to have their photos taken, and only a few were shy, but even when they were shy they laughed. The men of this village had fought for decades and only surrendered with dignity on 20 April 2009.

Mindanao: The villagers served us lunch. I felt no danger in the village and would have been happy to spend the night, but that might be a hard sell to the U.S. and Philippine forces. Philippine forces are guarding this village because other MILF who have not surrendered are threatening them with death. Other fighters, I am told by villagers, wish to surrender too, but they are waiting to see what happens.

A vigorous, economically powerful drug culture is part of the political problem.  In the United States, despite the serious drug problem, cartels do not run our government.  But in places like Afghanistan, or Mexico—and over in Mindanao—drugs are a T-Rex.  If Afghanistan is a poppy farm, Mindanao is a meth-lab, according to the U.S. and Filipino officials.  Methamphetamines serve as an oxidizer for civil chaos and a revenue source for terrorists.  And, predictably, drugs corrupt and de-legitimatize the government.  We see this in Afghanistan where top leaders are implicated in the drug business.  Stories are similarly rife in the Philippines.

Weak, corrupt governance is a sort of civil AIDS.  AIDS is not the direct killer, but it unlocks the doors for all the killers, such as drug dealers, and ideological or religious insurgents, to crawl in and grow.

Besides government law, Sharia “law,” and tribal/clan “laws,” there is Jungle Law.  Jungle Law lurks in the global shadows even in the spotless marbled halls of Europe and the United States, but in most parts of the world Jungle Law is on the surface for all to see.  An American officer said that in the Philippines, if you want to stay poor, go into business.  If you want to get rich, go into government. In Mindanao the people complain that the “government” is just an extortion racket and not part of any solution.  Sounds like Afghanistan, and to a lesser but cripplingly real extent, Iraq.

AFP and U.S. civil affairs brought wood and other building supplies to this village.

Powerless National Government

Philippine commanders explain that government authority ends with the paved roads.  Vice Admiral Alexander Pama showed me maps of his safe areas versus enemy-controlled areas.  Sure enough, the arteries were paved roads.  Where arteries ended, necrosis began.  We see a similar dynamic in Afghanistan.  Paved road ends: Enemy country begins.  But this is not always so.  In some areas there are no paved roads yet I have driven for mile upon mile with no issues, though central government is completely absent in most of Afghanistan and much of the Philippines.  Politics abhors a vacuum. Terror thrives in ungoverned regions, as Donald Rumsfeld used to say, though more accurately he might have said “can” thrive; I frequently travel in ungoverned areas where there is no terror.

Saudi Troublemaking

Whatever its natural shelf-life, the Islamic aspects of rebellion are being supported by inveterate meddlers and fomenters of Islamic fanaticism and terror.  Saudi money is pouring into the southern Philippines just as it did in Afghanistan and Pakistan two decades ago; mosques and madrassas are being built. Some money has been used for projects such as road-building.  The nature of Saudi money inflows is unclear to the various U.S. and AFP officers I’ve spoken with, but concerns about a Pacific Wahhabist haven would seem justified, given what’s happened elsewhere in the last quarter century.  Unfortunately, even if the money were coming straight from hardcore Wahhabist troublemakers in Saudi Arabia, the Republic of the Philippines would be in a weak position to shut it down.  The Philippines is relatively poor, and dependent on the economic largesse of Arab states.  Lack of economic opportunity at home has forced Filipinos abroad as guest workers. The country needs the remittances from the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia.

The Sulu Sea.

Chinese Ambitions

Some officers believe that Chinese proximity, maritime, and territorial ambitions bring the Chinese into the dispute.  The Chinese have vested interests in keeping the U.S. out of the Philippines, while keeping the Philippine government preoccupied. Meanwhile, China continues to hit the economic and military gym in preparation for political and possible military struggles ahead.  Chinese global ambitions are clear.  They have been launching people into space and all over the world.  China is evolving into a considerable force, and to fuel its economy it needs resources.  On the strategic level, the resource-rich area of the Philippines is glinting off China’s hungry eye.  Some Americans believe that at least a portion of anti-American rhetoric in Filipino press is instigated by the Chinese.

Long term approach: As with Afghanistan, solutions will require generations of work.

Some Differences

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, motivations and fighting styles swing widely.  Disgruntlement flows from many wells.  The fight in the Philippines is constructed with all the care and organization as a plate of spaghetti.  The wise use of money can be a great antidote for some of the Philippine ills, but not all.  Between money and justice, the perception of justice is always King.

Thinking about what is possible to actually accomplish in the Philippines requires a long time frame, as in Afghanistan. It will take decades, perhaps a century, to guide and nudge these insurgencies and tendencies to civility, by means of subtle cultural persuasion, and ensuring that groups with grievances share in the benefits of economic prosperity.  Just as the violent cultures of headhunting Iban on nearby Borneo are no longer headhunting, the primitive (yet cell phone-toting) feudal clans of the southern Philippines are clashing between themselves and others.

Insofar as our folks go, morale of American troops appears to be high.  I’ve talked with dozens of them on three islands—Luzon, Mindanao and Sulu.   The soldiers are well cared for, and in some areas they have freedom of movement even on Mindanao.  Attacks on our people are very uncommon compared to Afghanistan.

The U.S. team in the Philippines is in the experienced hands of Colonel Bill Coultrup, who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, including being in the middle of the “Blackhawk Down” fight in Mogadishu.  He was involved in the hunt for bin Laden, and it was actually Coultrup’s folks who captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  Admiral Timothy Keating recently told me in Singapore that Colonel Coultrup is a national treasure.

Lt. Lara Bollinger waved at hundreds of people that day. These women waved back, but the camera missed the moment.

Moros on Mindanao.

Mindanao: No pants day: These kids were in a town near the sea, and apparently were from Christian families. Inland were many mosques, but along the coast were churches.

A hundred years for an American is like an eternity.  Our society dramatically changes in just a few decades. But a century to more stagnant peoples is a mere blink of an eye.  Colonel Bill Coultrup, commander of JSOTF-P (Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines), told me that “The Bud Dajo Massacre,” in which U.S. forces killed hundreds in a volcano crater back in 1906, is still often portrayed daily in local media as “The recent American slaughter.”  Take these interesting words from Sulu Island, where I visited with U.S. and Philippine forces before landing back in Afghanistan:

“My great-grand-father on my mother’s side was massacred. So it is in the blood of the Tausug people to take revenge. And I know even in the hinterlands, they are preparing for the arrival of the Americans,” Samny Adjuh said. “We see it all the time with troops arriving every day and the construction of airfields and harbors for military craft.”

Samny Adjuh said the island’s native Tausug were getting ready to certainly take revenge if Americans come again. Insi Tubjil, from a village known for its rebel activity, had this unwelcoming message.

“Anybody who will come here, any foreigner that will come to invade us… my advice to them is that if there are three Tausug killed, 300 of them will be killed,” he said. “Even if it is to work on these so-called internation[al] development projects that in the end only serve to make the oligarchic families in Manila richer.”

To most people, “The Recent American Massacre” might seem like flagrant propaganda, keeping in mind that since the Moro-American war the United States and much of the world have been radically transformed several times.  We fought World War I; watched the Soviet Union rise; suffered a Great Depression; fought World War II, Korea, Vietnam; put a dozen men on the Moon; then watched the Soviet Union dissolve.  Meanwhile, some Tausugs are singing those same old songs, often apparently in the same old huts without running water.  Like the Afghans, they are waiting for people to build roads for them, and they are their own worst enemies.

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.

This calls to mind The Simpsons‘ Mr. Burns, who shouts “Release the hounds!” whenever he tires of visitors. Gates’ version is somewhat more subtle, but perhaps as effective — especially to mosquito-phobic people like myself.   (I wonder if anybody sued?  Talk about deep pockets!)

What is it about the fabulously wealthy and famous that drives them to sic wild animals on people?  I suppose if I were in their shoes, I’d do the same.  Nothing clears out tedious party guests who overstay their welcome faster than a pack of ravenous Rottweilers.

It got me to thinking, this could start a whole new trend of celebrities releasing dangerous things at press conferences.  Imagine the possibilities:

Madonna, unleashing a horde of starving orphans desperate for adoptive parents.

Sean Penn, releasing a pack of howling Latin American dictators.

Christian Bale, hurling scores of razor-edged Batarangs (at a cinematographers’ conference, of course).

Wanda Sykes, letting loose with an unholy trifecta of black feminist lesbian jokes.

Sheryl Crow, wafting single used sheets of recycled toilet paper.

Ed Begley, Jr., winding up a garage full of tiny electric-powered clown cars.

George Clooney, unleashing the full force of his self-regard.

Rosie O’Donnell, releasing the “unrated” version of her variety show.