Two helicopter gunships to nab a few motorbikes?

No wonder we're having such a hard time winning the "war" in Mindanao (which, if truth be told, is being lost by our politicians). Instead of utilizing our helicopter gunships against the Moro rebels, our armed forces are using them to raid an Ilocano coastal village -- in search of smuggled items.

I hesitated to comment on the issue since the "big raid" staged by Maj. Gen. Jose Calimlim's Task Force Aduana bravos hit Magsingal, Ilocos Sur, which is right next to my own hometown of Sto. Domingo. Don't you think an overland operation should have sufficed, rather than scare the wits out of the poor fishermen and farmers, who must have thought that World War III had begun?

Susmariosep, General. Let that be your first and only raid over there. Because of the brutal way in which it was conducted, the next time the Ilocanos will shoot back. With Ack-Ack, or anti-aircraft weapons, even bazookas of Pacific War vintage. (Having fought and won the Battle of Bessang Pass, the only Filipino military victory of World War II, the Saluyots -- who later also had to fight the Crisologo Wars -- have plenty of spare firepower stashed away.

Nobody argues with the urgent need to curb contraband traffic, but the smuggling "up north" of motorbikes, mountain bicycles and television sets is small-time -- too small-time to justify the use of helicopter gunships. Why the overkill? The haul of 143 motorcycles, 18 racing bikes, and 20 TV sets, video and tape recorders is petty cash. Sure, a crime is a crime. Again, why make the assault on Magsingal (the hometown of Emil Jurado and the Lorenzana clan, by the way) look like some Vietnam War act of interdiction? Reminds me of a US infantry major after a military action, explaining why they had to wipe out a Vietnamese village "suspected" of having been taken by the Communist Viet Cong. "We had to destroy the village," he said, "in order to save it!"

I don't want to scold General Calimlim for prosecuting his Task Force Aduana's assaults with vim and vigor (as John F. Kennedy used to say) but he seems to be taking too many shortcuts and making "warrantless" searches and seizures.

Is this wartime Philippines? Or is this still a law-abiding country, where laws are upheld and not shoved into some dark corner while the military thrashes the "enemy," meaning the alleged smugglers? The anti-smuggling drive is not well-served when its champions grab motorbikes even from individual owners who're using them, if they don't happen to be carrying a deed of sale in their pockets.

As for Poro Pingit, where the 60 raiders struck with military ferocity, it's just a peaceful beach. As kids we used to go swimming there -- for its sands are fine, and there are pretty coral beds (I should know: As a teenager I painfully cut my foot on one of those colorful ones). So, Joe: simmer down. Don't act like a loose cannon. Get a proper warrant -- even if you're bucking for armed forces Chief of Staff.

It's mystifying. I wonder why America and the Europeans are damning the Russians to hell and agonizing over the fate of the "poor" Muslim Chechens trapped in shell-battered Grozny, and the ordeal of 200,000 Chechen refugees, when they're silent about the massacre by Indonesian Muslim fanatics of a thousand (even, by this time, many thousands) of defenseless Indonesian and Indonesian-Chinese Christians who never did the 87 percent Muslim "majority" there any harm.

And what about the Catholic East Timorese, including 15 priests and 18 nuns, who were massacred by the pro-Indon militia?

In Maluku (or the Spice Islands) clashes resulted in entire districts razed and Christian churches destroyed by Muslim militants. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims, marching in Jakarta, have been calling for a jihad or "holy war" against all Christians.

Now, the violence has spread to Lombok, the island next-door to the tourist paradise of Bali, where angry Muslims burned down 12 Christian chapels and churches.

All over the Islamic world, fundamentalist fanatics are preaching a burning gospel of hatred towards Christians. In the Middle East, the battlecry is down with Christians and Israelis (Jews)!

And here we are, still trying to save the Muslims of Chechnya, who attacked the Russians first -- don't forget -- by mounting an armed raid into neighboring Dagestan (to provoke an Islamic revolt against Moscow), then bombed and destroyed three buildings, plus barracks and dormitories, in Moscow, killing hundreds of Russian civilians as they peacefully slept in their beds.

The Chechens kept on protesting their "innocence," but even the hostile capitals of the West don't really believe that. In fact, a few days ago, an Islamic fundamentalist warrior or mujihadeen, calling himself Commander "Khattab" (alias Al Sheweila, of Saudi Arabian origin like Osama bin Laden and his comrades from Afghanistan) bragged that he and his group had planned the bombings.

What we're seeing is a worldwide "awakening" of an Islamic jihad against Christianity -- and soon, the embattled Russians know, the millions of Muslims in the former Soviet Central Asian republics (estimated today at perhaps 70 million Muslims), if the Russians don't "win" and crush the Chechens -- and, possibly, IF they win and crush the Chechens, who knows? -- may be sucked into a larger jihad against Moscow.

When the former Soviet Union existed, it was considered the world's fifth largest Muslim state with 55 million Muslims in the USSR in 1990. Only Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh had larger concentrations. (The Muslims have had millions of babies since, as their track record goes.)

My figures for 1990 are culled from the Global Affairs Journal published by the International Security Council in Washington, D.C. The specific article by Leon Aron was entitled The Soviet Union's Soft Underbelly: Muslim Central Asia.

Writer Ali A. Mazrui insists in Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997, that "while Islam does indeed produce a disproportionate share of mujahideen, (another spelling of the word, MVS), Western culture produces a disproportionate share of muggers."

What sort of argument is that? Is it designed to show the "superiority" of Muslim culture -- in that terrorists and "freedom fighters" (their version) are patriotic killers, as compared to violent, equally murderous, Western street muggers?

Mazrui's article is useful since it points out the difference, as its headline says, between "Islamic and Western Values." (He is director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York in Binghamton, and Ibn Khaldun professor-at-large at the School of Islamic Studies in Leesburg, Virginia).

As you've seen among our own Moros or Muslims in Mindanao, Muslims don't consider themselves part of national sovereign societies, just as the Algerian Islamic fundamentalists are at war with the "Muslim" government in their own state, Algeria (in which 200,000, I believe, have already been killed -- Muslim versus Muslim, but an "amnesty" has just been brokered).

Muslims believe, it appears, that they are part of a worldwide Islamic umma or "community" and an ijma or "consensus." In sum, the only peace that impresses them is a Pax Islamica in a day-to-day life.

And so we come to the crux of the war in Chechnya. It's ironic. And, indeed, the Russians are cruel in war -- as they've been through more than half a millennium. (Except that battles, refugee flights and bloodbaths look more gory when covered by television). The irony lies in the fact that, after 73 or more years (more than two-thirds of a century) of totally atheistic Communism, Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism -- in which almost all the churches were closed or converted into government buildings or warehouses, priests and nuns either executed or sent to gulags, labor camps, or insane asylums, and Christianity persecuted -- the Russians "reborn" now preen themselves as the Defenders of Christianity against the Infidel.

They rebuilt, from bottom up, a large cathedral in the heart of Moscow which had been razed to the ground during Stalin's time and converted into a public swimming pool. Would you believe? The reconstruction cost hundreds of millions of scarce dollars.

In the past two years, a movement has even snowballed in the Orthodox Church to declare Tsar Nicholas II, whom the Communists murdered along with his entire family, a "saint"!

In pre-Bolshevik and Communist times, Moscow regarded itself as the "Third Rome" -- after Rome and Byzantium (at that time the seat of Eastern Christianity).

"Holy Russia" was what they called their Rodina and homeland. Today, they subscribe to the belief that they are "Holy Russia" once again, pledged to protect Christianity's bulwarks against Muslim invasion and destruction. In Afghanistan, their "Vietnam", they fought and humiliatingly lost an "ideological" and imperialist war. These days -- though they don't brag openly about it (in order not to sound silly, I suspect) -- what they're waging in Chechnya is not just a war to retain Moscow's sovereignty in that shell-shocked province, but a "religious" war.

If you'll recall, one of the promises made by Our Lady to the children at Fatima (Portugal) was that "Russia will be converted." Despite the Mafiya and the depredations of the oligarchs, Russia seems to have returned to Christianity "with a vengeance" -- and I mean vengeance.

Acting President Vladimir Putin, of course, looks nothing like a prophet -- much less a saint. But he'll do for the Russians, until the real thing comes along.

It's passing strange. The Americans and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) representing Western "Christian" Europe went into Bosnia-Herzegovina to save the Bosnian Muslims. This writer was among those throughout the world raging against the cruelty of the Serbs (who were, like the Russians, Orthodox Christians) and at times the Croats (who are Roman Catholics).

The Yanks and NATO bombed Belgrade and attacked Serb concentrations in Kosovo in order to save the Muslim Kosovars, who were, it was seen, being subjected to ethnic cleansing pogroms by the Serbs. Wow. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with Yugoslav troops and Serbian militia having been driven out by the Western allies, the armed militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army (which pretended to surrender their arms, but didn't) and the angry Muslim Kosovars are killing Serbs and putting Christian churches and chapels to the torch.

And here's the awful thought which has been, subliminally I'm certain, growing in American and Western minds: The Muslim "freedom fighter" and harassed civilian you save today may blow up your embassy or a building in one of your home cities tomorrow. If they're aroused by some Imam, Mullah, or fundamentalist agitator to "realize" that this is what Allah commands -- God help you.

The Russians will never be "heroes" or even really "friends" in Western eyes. As a former "Cold Warrior" myself, although I may cheer for them now, I may not be able to fully trust them. (Nor, I must add, should we trust the Americans). Old reflexes, born of two-thirds of a century of confrontation and checkmate, obviously die hard. All you've got to do is see and hear the somewhat "biased" reporting in CNN, BBC and European television. Those correspondents seem to be hoping the Chechens will "somehow" defeat the Russians and topple Putin.

That isn't going to happen. This time the Russians intend to win.

Many of the history books and coffee table books on World War II, place, on their dust covers, that dramatic photograph of Soviet soldiers planting a Red Flag, the hammer and sickle, victoriously on the broken tower of the Reichstag (the parliament) in Hitler's Berlin. That's the picture you should look at today. Russia aroused is like America aroused. Tough, ready to sacrifice blood and treasure and absorb heartbreak. But almost invincible. We hope those two leviathans may never really clash -- bloodily. For both are unreliable.

As the old Cambodian proverb says: "When two elephants fight, the ant must stand aside." Fellow ants, get ready to evacuate if ever that happens.