A Sad Excuse for an Empire : IN OUR IMAGE : America’s Empire in the Philippines <i> by Stanley Karnow (Random House: $24.95; 494 pp., illustrated; 0-394-54975-9)</i>

In 1899, as American troops fought to conquer the Philippines, President William McKinley 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.”

Ninety years later, as Stanley Karnow makes abundantly clear in this compelling account, America is still hostage to the place where its imperial adventure began. “History is often a series of expedients that grow into dogmas--today’s pragmatism becoming tomorrow’s doctrines; thus the American presence in Asia evolved,” from the Philippines to China to Korea to Vietnam.

Karnow, a veteran reporter on Asia (his admirable “Vietnam: A History,” was companion to a PBS television series, as was “In Our Image,” starting May 8 on KCET and other stations), traces foreign involvement in the Philippines from the time of Ferdinand Magellan’s ill-fated 16th-Century journey to the islands to Ferdinand Marcos’ U.S.-aided escape from them three years ago, and the rise of Corazon Aquino. On the whole, it is a well-told but not encouraging tale.

America’s efforts to instill its values and institutions in a disparate place was “spurred by a belief still ingrained in Americans,” Karnow observes. But the idea that the United States can remold other lands in its own image “proved in later years to be largely an exercise in self-deception.”

The first U.S. civilian governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft (all 325 pounds of him--among the book’s plates is a classic shot of the massive Taft astride a carabao), talked about “little brown brothers” in his hopes of Americanizing the natives. This was just after a brutal war in which U.S. troops killed more than 20,000 Filipinos while losing 4,234 of their own (more than 200,000 civilians may have perished from the war and its effects) as Spain was relieved of its colonial possession.

Taft was the first in a string of benevolent American administrators, and the United States was indeed an uncommon colonial master, moving quickly to bring Filipinos into governing ranks and promising, in 1916, sovereignty and eventual independence. U.S. troops spread through the islands, opening the first public schools; the soldiers were followed by waves of American civilian teachers.

But while the Filipinos proved adept at learning English and adopting American fashions, they retained their cultural roots, with basic loyalties to kith and kin, not people and nation. Taft in private railed against Filipinos’ “Oriental duplicity,” failing to see what is true to this day: that authority in America, as Karnow observes, reposes on impersonal institutions, while power in the Philippines revolves around the complex kinship networks of the compradrazgo (from compadre, or ritual relative) system.

Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino Jr. once called the Philippine social structure “an entrenched plutocracy.” Karnow makes clear that throughout the history of U.S. involvement with the Philippines, Americans have reinforced oligarchic rule. In the early years, ilustrados, or rich intelligentsia, were vested in power. After World War II took a terrible toll on the Philippines, Gen. Douglas MacArthur had a chance to do there what he later did in Japan by promoting liberal programs, including land reform and dismantling of monopolies. But he reinstalled his prewar friends of the old Philippine dynasties, “whose primary aim was to protect their vested interests.”

As for the war itself, Karnow’s view concurs with others who trace the country’s moral malaise to those desperate days: “The endemic venality and corruption that nags the Philippines today is largely a legacy of the ethical degradation of that period.”

When Karnow gets to the depredations of the Marcos years, his account is less full than Raymond Bonner’s 1987 book, “Waltzing With a Dictator,” but it is also more firsthand, drawing on his years of experience as an Asia correspondent and his friendship with Ninoy Aquino. Karnow speculates on what a Ninoy Aquino presidency might have been like (pointing out that Aquino and Marcos shared similar concepts), then addresses Filipino critics of his widow’s performance in the job as showing “an Asian reverance for authority and a Latin penchant for hypercriticism.”

The bottom line to Karnow’s engaging, well-researched and amply documented work, however, is a feeling of pessimism about the future of this island nation, so appealing in many ways, in others so appalling.

As counterpoint, Amando Doronila, former editor of the Manila Chronicle, wrote recently that “the standards of judgment are harsher on the Philippines. . . . Corruption is endemic in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and China, and yet the governments there are not in danger of being overthrown. . . . What is being ignored about the Philippines is that, despite the failure of the Aquino government to live up to extravagant expectations for change and reform . . . it has survived the elemental tests of political stability.”