Southeast where?

The other day, Bush referred to our adventures in Asia, mentioning Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as appropriate analogies for his ruinous war in Iraq. It’s only the latest excuse, of course, the potted history of a rat in a corner bullshitting to a loyal audience. But it must be noted that he left out the Philippines. Curious. 1898: after the quick defeat of the Spanish, the U.S. “bought” the islands, and suppressed the newly born Filipino Republic. A couple of years were needed to batter the Filipino army into submission. However, guerilla war, complete with its usual horrors of torture and concentration camps, lasted until 1913. The Philippines would remain an American colony, by God! (McKinley was another Republican who claimed to have discussed war with God.) The white man’s burden was accepted: 126,000 troops, many of them fresh from killing Indians, were sent in.

One of our great instinctive anti-imperialists, Mark Twain, wrote: “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.”