It's like the Philippines. After the US ousted the Spanish from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, US troops occupied the country, imposed democracy on our terms, and fought a bloody guerrilla war for fourteen years that resulted in over 9,000 American casualties and at least a quarter of a million Filipino deaths. A spooky parallel can be drawn by the United States declaring the Philippines War over 11 years before it actually ended. Read all about it.

I'll leave you with a quote about the War from Mark Twain,

"There is the case of the Philippines. 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 of those islands -- but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector -- not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish 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 Filipinos, a government according to Filipino 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.

Does this sound familiar?