Introduction At noon, October 18, 2003, President George W. Bush landed in Manila as part of a six-nation Asian tour. Because officials were concerned about a terrorist attack on the embattled islands, the presidential airplane, Air Force One, was shepherded into Philippine air space by F-15s. Bush's speech to the Philippine Congress was delayed by what one reporter described as "undulating throngs of demonstrators who lined his motorcade route past rows of shacks." Outside the Philippine House of Representatives, several thousand more demonstrators greeted Bush, and several Philippine legislators staged a walkout during his twenty-minute speech.In his speech, Bush took credit for America transforming the Philippines into "the first democratic nation in Asia." Said Bush, "America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.

Together we rescued the islands from invasion and occupation." And he drew an analogy between America's attempt to create democracy in the Philippines and its attempt to create a democratic Middle East through invading and occupying Iraq in the spring of 2003: "Democracy always has skeptics. Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia."After a state dinner, Bush and his party were bundled back onto Air Force One and shunted off to the president's next stop, Thailand. The Secret Service had warned Bush that it was not safe for him to remain overnight in the "first Democratic nation in Asia."As many Philippine commentators remarked afterward, Bush's rendition of Philippine-American history bore very little relation to fact.

True, the United States Navy under Admiral George Dewey had ousted Spain from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But instead of creating a Philippine democracy, President William McKinley annexed the country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then fought a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it had encouraged to fight Spain. The war dragged on for fourteen years. Before it was over, about 120,000 American troops were deployed and more than 4,000 died; more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. And the resentment against American policy was still evident a century later during George W. Bush's visit.The Filipinos were not the only ones to rue the American occupation.

Before he was assassinated in September 1901, McKinley himself had come to have doubts about it. He told a friend, "If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us." By 1907, Theodore Roosevelt, who had earlier championed the war and occupation, recognized the United States had made a mistake in annexing the Philippines. After Woodrow Wilson became president, he and the Democrats backed Philippine independence, but were thwarted by Republicans who still nurtured dreams of American empire. Only in 1946, after reconquering the Philippines from Japan, did the United States finally grant independence -- and even then it retained military bases and special privileges for American corporations.As for the Philippines' democracy, the United States can take little credit for what exists, and some blame for what doesn't. The Philippines were not the first Asian country to hold elections. And the electoral machinery the U.

S. designed in 1946 provided a veneer of democratic process beneath which a handful of families, allied to American investors and addicted to payoffs and kickbacks, controlled Philippine land, economy, and society. The tenuous system broke down in 1973 when Ferdinand Marcos had himsel.