Critics of the U.S. occupation of Iraq usually trace its origins to Viet Nam and the baleful efforts of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to sustain public support for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in southeast Asia, took 60,000 American lives and deeply divided the country.

To cloud its massive bombings and blunders, the Viet Nam era White House talked of fighting communist tyranny and advancing freedom in Southeast Asia. U.S. weaponry and tactics -- napalm, carpet-bombing, and Agent Orange - drove a country back to the Stone Age and prevented its ability to challenge U.S. hegemony in Asia. But it ended with people on the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon desperately scrambling onto helicopters.

Though Viet Nam resonates ominously in 2006, the trajectory that landed U.S. troops in Iraq began much earlier. A century ago the United States launched its first overseas occupation in the Philippines, and planted the seeds of Iraq, Viet Nam and much more.

The 7,100 islands of the Philippine archipelago were rich in natural resources and strategically located only 600 miles from the markets of Asia. Businessmen still climbing out of the deep depression of 1893 feared war would sharply increase economic instability. But leading bankers, industrialists, and their politicians, warned that unless the United States seized Asia's markets it faced stagnation, unemployment and a possible revolution. In 1893 U.S. businessmen overthrew the government of Hawaii and brought it into the U.S. trade orbit. In 1898 imperialism's leading spokesmen, Senator Albert Beveridge, asked “God's chosen people” to face a desperate plight and to adopt his simple solution:

American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us . . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East . . . . The power that rules the Pacific . . . is the power that rules the world. 

Beveridge insisted that “the mission of our race” was to control “the trade of the world,” and in his grand plan the Philippines “logically are our first target.”

America's pioneer overseas adventure only needed a spark, an incident, and a “weapon of mass destruction.” Armed liberation forces began to challenge Spanish tyranny in Cuba and the Philippines, and many Americans cheered them on. Newspaper moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst boosted their circulations by featuring lurid tales of Spain's cruelty toward Cuban men and women. Then in January 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sailed into Havana Harbor on a good will visit, and on February 15th, the Maine mysteriously exploded and sank with 258 officers and men. Hearst and Pulitzer charged that Spain had used a “diabolical weapon,” a torpedo, to sink the Maine, and stoked the public thirst for revenge and loudly beat the drums of war. “Blood on the roadsides, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood,” wrote Pulitzer's New York World. “The whole country thrills with war fever,” said Hearst's New York Journal.

Before U.S. investigators could discover that it was not an enemy missile but an internal boiler explosion that sank the Maine, war hysteria gripped the country. On April 19th and at the urging of President William McKinley, Congress declared war on Spain, and added a promise to free Cuba. Privately, President McKinley admitted to broader goals: “We must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep all we want.”

Leading the administration hawks was young, dynamic Teddy Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the Navy, a man who believed that war stimulated “spiritual renewal” and the “clear instinct for racial selfishness.” “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one,” TR wrote to a friend, and carried his list of targets -- Mexico, Chile, Spain, Germany, England and Canada. Not a man to hide in the National Guard once war was declared, TR rushed to Cuba where he led his Rough Riders in a charge at San Juan Hill and returned with a reputation for fearless belligerence, and one regret, “there was not enough war to go around.”

In 1898 the slogans “Cuba Libra!” and “Remember the Maine!” persuaded young men to fight against a distant tyranny. Victory came in ten weeks with only 379 US combat deaths, and Secretary of State John Hay called the conflict a “splendid little war.” The fate of 13 million colonial people and 165,000 square miles of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Samoa and the Philippines fell to the United States.

U.S. military and civilian leaders of the 1890s were guided by an intense and bellicose patriotism under girded by a blatant and stern racism. Independence and voting rights were only appropriate for fellow whites. In 1896 in the Plessy case an eight to one Supreme Court decision sanctioned segregation nationwide. Urged on by Governors, Senators, local sheriffs and politicians, southern lynch mobs took the lives of three or four Black men, women and children a week. TR called people of African descent “a perfectly stupid race” and warned Black audiences that the rapists among them did their people more harm than any lynch mob. And he was considered among the least bigoted leaders. The day that Congress declared war on Spain Missouri Congressman David A. De Armond called African Americans “almost too ignorant to eat, scarcely wise enough to breath, mere existing human machines.”

Racial rhetoric and violence at home proved vital in promoting war and imperialism. “Self-government,” Senator Beveridge said, “applies only to those who are capable of self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent.” Beveridge called colonial people “children . . . not capable of self-government.” Beveridge and McKinley would offer these child-like inferiors “Christianity” and “civilization” much as slaveholders did for enslaved Africans. “The conflicts of the future are to be conflicts of trade—struggles for markets—commercial wars for existence,” Beveridge admitted. But that victory would plant the flag of white supremacy in new soil.

Though imperialism was built on white superiority, initially some African Americans were swept along by war fever. To escape poverty or gain recognition and opportunities through patriotic sacrifice, they volunteered to serve their country. But as links between injustice and oppression at home and imperialism abroad became sharper, more African Americans began to view imperialism through their own experience. In Tampa, Florida when sheriffs attacked Black soldiers waiting to leave for Cuba, the Black Richmond Planet wrote, “If colored men cannot live for their country, let white men die for it.” George W. Prioleau, a Black Chaplain of the 9th Cavalry regiment, angrily wrote from Tampa: “Talk about fighting and freeing poor Cuba, and Spain's brutality . . .  Is America Any Better Than Spain?”

African Americans sounded new alarms. African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry M. Turner called “too ridiculous” U.S. claims that its overseas ventures were motivated by humanitarianism, and he predicted “all the deviltry of this country would be carried into Cuba the moment the United States got there.” U.S. troops arrived in Cuba, Puerto Rico and other former colonies with orders to break strikes, suppress unions and undermine national liberation movements.

The most painful and longest part of the Spanish American war unfolded in the Philippines. Before he left for Cuba, TR ordered Commodore George Dewey and his fleet to Manila Bay in the Philippines and on May first they defeated Spain's fleet. General Emilio Aguinaldo's guerrilla army of 40,000 that spent two years battling Spain and expected to rule the islands welcomed Dewey. U.S. Secretary of State William R. Day said the “ultimate object of our action is . . . independence for the Philippines.” Dewey told Aguinaldo that the U.S. “had come to . . . free the Filipinos from the yoke of Spain,” and his report home called Filipino soldiers intelligent and “capable of self-government.”

But in February 1899 the U.S. Army concocted a “Gulf of Tonkin” incident, and attacked Aguinaldo's forces. This forced the U.S. Senate two days later to approve the peace treaty surrendering all of Spain's possessions. President McKinley ordered Dewey and General Wesley Merritt to prevent Aguinaldo's troops from making a triumphal march into Manila, and appointed a puppet government. What began as a virtually painless incursion that quickly freed Cuba, slipped into protracted battles in the Philippines. A slam-dunk war became a no-end-in-sight occupation.

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