Friday, January 9, 2009

The Pilgrim's War on Terror

I have been reading Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick and have been struck by deja vu. The book is about the Plymouth Colony and its encounters and relationships with the native Americans in the new world. The second half of the book concerns King Phillip's War. King Phillip was the son and heir of Massasoit, the sachem from a local Wampanoags tribe that initially befriended the Pilgrims and helped them survive their fearful first years in America. For a time the relationship between colonist and native American was mutually beneficial, but by the 1670s the native New England tribes were increasingly impoverished and the whites increasingly covetous of native land.

King Phillip's War was a small local dispute that got out of hand and exploded into a regional war with devastating consequences to natives and colonists. The blunders and misunderstandings that caused this bear an eerie resemblance to the modern day "War on Terror". I don't know if there is a tragic defect in the American psyche, but the story seems uniquely American, and there from the start.

King Phillips bears some resemblance to Osama bin Laden. More a financier and facilitator of the war than a participant. King Phillips provoked the war initially by a series of terror attacks on outlying colonial towns. Rather than just dealing with the one unhappy group either militarily or by negotiation, the colonists responded by attacking neutral tribes, bringing them all into the war. To me, there seems to be a obstinate refusal to understand the differences among native American tribes and the political interrelationships that closely resembles the modern American, seemingly willful blindness to tribal, ethnic, and sectarian differences among the peoples of the Middle East. The colonist's response was a traditional military response involving massive displays of power. These strategies seemed over and over to lead them into ambush. Soon all of New England was embroiled in the conflict. All native Americans were treated with suspicion, whether they were hostile or manifestly friendly.

The colonists personalized the conflict. Whenever and where ever the natives attacked European settlements, the colonists were sure that Phillip was there. In reality, King Phillip, like bin Laden, avoided direct conflict. He spent most of the war hiding out in caves in the borderlands between Massachusetts and Vermont.

King Phillip's War even had its own General Petreus figure in the person of Benjamin Church. Church realized the colonists could only prevail by understanding the native American style of warfare. He abandoned set piece battles. He showed a willingness to work with friendly natives and to work to turn unfriendly natives to his side. His approach turned the tide of the war.

By the end of the war a huge proportion of the native population of New England was either dead or had been shipped off the the Caribbean as slaves. The colonists, too, were impoverished, and newly dependent on the English crown for protection. Soon, the Plymouth Bay Colony could no longer sustain itself and was merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

All wars, of course, have elements of this same plot, of course, but it seems to me that the extent to which Americans personalize our enemies and the tendency of Americans to pull bystanders into the conflict are, sadly, characteristic of our approach to the world. It started with the Puritans.