"A splendid little war," the secretary of State called the brief, victorious action. "Benevolent assimilation" was the name of the White House policy that guided U.S. occupation forces. "It should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration," the president wrote, "to win the confidence, respect and affection of the inhabitants
Not a bad description of the war and postwar goals of the United States in Iraq. A bit dated, however. The year was 1899. John Hay was secretary of State; the president was William F. McKinley and their subject was America's occupation of the Philippines, after our victory in the Spanish-American War. Hay's and McKinley's current successors should have given their experience some careful study. The strategic confusion, administrative backtracking, mixed signals and mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq bear a striking -- and worrisome -- resemblance to what happened in the Philippines a century ago.
Occupation of Cuba -- An article that ran July 20 stated that the U.S. military did not occupy Cuba after the Spanish-American War. A U.S. military government ran Cuba from 1899 until 1902.
It was not Cuba, however, but Spain's colony in the Philippines that the victorious Americans occupied. McKinley's expansionist advisors -- Theodore Roosevelt and the Navy strategist Alfred T. Mahan -- had long advocated a U.S. strategic presence across the Pacific. It was Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, who ordered Adm. George Dewey to engage the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Victory was swift and complete.
What, then, to do with the Filipinos? Many distinguished Americans, among them Mark Twain, former President Grover Cleveland and Harvard President Charles Eliot, opposed the idea of an anti-colonial country acquiring a colony. Most Filipinos wanted independence. Well-armed local militias had already fought the Spanish governors, and Dewey, for one, wanted to support them. In the end, however, Washington's hawks won the argument: McKinley, who had to search for the Philippines on a map, decided its people needed American guidance to be really free.
