There is the case of [Country X]. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it – perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives... – but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism... I thought we should act as their protector – not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from... 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 [population], a government according to [their] 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.The answer?
Mark Twain, writing in 1900 regarding the US-Philippines war.
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