by Patrick J. Buchanan – April 23, 2003

“Take Up the White Man’s burden,” Britain’s poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, admonished Teddy Roosevelt’s America in 1899. The United States had just triumphed in the Spanish-American War to liberate Cuba and, as war booty, had annexed the Philippine Islands.

We must “Christianize” them, President McKinley explained.

Defeating Spain had been as easy as crushing Iraq. But holding the Philippines would require three years of Vietnam-style fighting against the guerrillas of Aquinaldo, which cost tens of thousands of Filipino lives. And many more Americans died fighting the Filipinos to keep the islands than had died fighting Spain to take them.