Let’s not get killed by ‘friendly fire’

Of course, 75 percent of Filipinos support the idea of American troops going to combat zones, with 60 percent expressing approval of their staying in such places as Basilan as long as they’re needed. That’s what the latest national survey by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) has confirmed.

Was that ever in doubt? The trouble with some brilliant types who tend to be smug in their assessments and are guided by their prejudices, they think that the Filipino people ought to regard the arrival of US personnel to help in the fight against the Abu Sayyaf and other "terrorists" as an imperialist intrusion. That’s not how the general feeling goes, particularly in kidnap-weary Basilan and Zamboanga. Their attitude towards Yanks is "the more the merrier" and yesterday, the new 340 US Navy Seabees and accompanying US Marines (having secured President GMA’s speedy imprimatur) disembarked to launch "Operation Gentle Wind" in Basilan.

Sus: who can object to the Americans building roads, including the long-delayed "circumferential" road, medical facilities, and an airport in Basilan? As President Macapagal-Arroyo pointed out in her remarks at the Manila Overseas Press Club’s "President’s Night" dinner last Thursday, the Basilaños have the lowest economic index in the nation – meaning that they’re poor and need assistance.

Somebody from there told me months ago: "If you’re a poverty-stricken and jobless Muslim, you become an Abu Sayyaf." That may sound simplistic, but I agree that this is what often happens.

With regards to the growing number of Americans, while I welcome them, may I interpose one very strong reservation? The US Air Force may participate in the ongoing Balikatan exercises in Mindanao, and the forthcoming one in Central Luzon, but we must prohibit these helicopter gunships and jet planes from opening fire on what they may conceive as the "enemy" on the ground. Sad to say, USAF pilots are prone to be trigger-happy, bomb-happy and missile-happy. That’s why so many American and South Vietnamese troops in Vietnam were killed by "friendly fire".

In short, it wasn’t the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese regulars who killed them, but rockets, cannon, and missiles from US aircraft that gunned them down – by mistake, naturally. This is not to denigrate the yeoman efforts of the USAF and the tremendous support given US and ARVN forces caught in hairy situations (we couldn’t have gotten out of many tough fixes without those flyboys). But everytime, surrounded by V.C., we called an "air strike", the call was accompanied by a fervent prayer that the "incoming rounds" wouldn’t hit us instead.

The same problem, I’m informed, was encountered in the Gulf War in 1990-91, where air power was put to maximum use.

* * *

In the early morning darkness last Thursday in Afghanistan, a US F-16 fighter pilot (later claiming that he thought he was under fire) dropped a laser-guided 500-lb. bomb on a Canadian unit participating in "night training exercises" near Kandahar. He had mistaken them for the "enemy". Four Canadian soldiers were killed, and eight other Canadians wounded, several of them seriously. (This was the first time since the Korean War in 1950-53 that Canadian troops had been killed in "action").

What’s disquieting for us is that, according to Dave Moniz, a correspondent of the newspaper USA Today (in yesterday’s issue), "an F-16 pilot who has recently flown missions over Afghanistan told USA Today that the pilot was likely wearing night vision goggles, which can offer a distorted view of the ground. ‘They can make ground fire which is 30 to 40 miles away look like it is only 3 to 4 miles away,’ he said."

My, that’s interesting. Are these the same type of night-vision goggles the Americans have been giving our Air Force pilots and Philippine Army men in Basilan? If you’re a PAF man flying a chopper or a combat fighter (OV-10 or gunship) and your night-vision goggles focus on 30 miles away, why, you’ll overshoot Basilan.

What bothers me, really, is the revelation that the pilot who dropped that fatal bomb was an Air National Guard "reservist" temporarily mobilized to fly in the Afghanistan conflict. In short, he wasn’t a regular, but a "weekend warrior". Perhaps he was intent on racking up "flying time" which is the obsession of all military aviators.

I believe that unless there’s an all-out war on and a general mobilization is required, America should keep "amateurs" out of a war zone. The mistakes they make from inexperience, given the powerful weapons at their finger-tips, can be destructive beyond imagination.

We should remember that last December 5, three American US Special Forces soldiers (the same kind of special ops men as the "Green Berets" now operating in Basilan) were killed, along with five Afghan soldiers, when a B-52 bombed them by mistake. Of the 36 American casualties in Afghanistan thus far, CNN said last Friday, only three were killed by the enemy. The other 33 Americans killed, it appears, died in helicopter crashes or were hit by "friendly fire."

Sanamagan! The Americans here have already lost 12 men – but that’s because their Chinook crashed into the sea. Not one has been killed by either the Abus, the MILF, or any other rebels.

Beware of "friendly fire". And of bullets addressed: "To whom it may concern."

* * *

The United Nations is sending a "fact-finding" team to the West Bank to find out whether a "massacre" really took place in Jenin. That’s well and good, but the question is: When the fact-finding team reports back even if it confirms that many Palestinians were slain in that refugee camp when Israeli troops, tank units and "cobra" gunships attacked, can it prove there was a "massacre"? or where the fatalities and casualties, numbering hundreds, killed as a result of fierce military assault?

If there was a "massacre", let’s say: What then will the UN do? Send a military force to punish the Israelis?

That’s the trouble when the UN pokes its nose into a messy situation. There comes a point, when push comes to shove, that this organization of sanctimonious busy-bodies will have to decide whose "peacekeeping" troops to commit, what is their mandate (to shoot to kill? Or merely dither about and "observe"?), and, most important of all, who’ll foot the bill?) The recent scandal which compelled ranking government officials of Holland, from the Prime Minister on down to resign last week, was precipitated by a report about Dutch inaction in Bosnia some years ago.

In that bizarre incident, which was described as an unforgivable lapse, Serb militia barged into a "UN declared safe zone" in Srebenica, separated thousands of Bosnian Muslim males from their womenfolk, then massacred the men – while Dutch "peacekeeping" troops who had been assigned there under United Nations mandate, stood by without engaging the Serb bullies and protecting the Bosnian Muslim civilians.

The UN dismally failed in Somalia (getting supporting American units bloodied, with two Black Hawks down), it failed to save millions from being massacred in Rwanda, it continues to fail in Lebanon (most people forget there’s a UN "peacekeeping" unit supposed to patrol the border between Lebanon and Israel (yet the UN is ignored completely by the Hezbollah militants and, across the wire, by the Israelis).

The UN intervention in Kosovo "succeeded" only because the Americans and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) smashed in with all-out force, even devastating Belgrade and attacking other targets in Yugoslavia in the process. The UN succeeded in East Timor, because the Australians came in and began battering the out-of-control and murderous pro-Jakarta "militia" and their Indonesian military backers.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan must have become too heady from the lavish praise over his recent "Nobel Peace Prize." It’s ridiculous what he’s proposing. Annan has been calling, since last Thursday, for "a large, robust peacekeeping force" to go stop the Israelis and monitor the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces (LDF) from Palestinian-held areas of the West Bank. In his sketchy plan, Annan has been saying that the force he envisioned might be led by the UN (but would not be, officially, a UN peacekeeping force) and should ultimately be commanded by NATO. C’mon, Kofi – take another sip of reality and stop hallucinating.

The US won’t go for the idea, much less underwrite it logistically or with its own troops. If the Americans interfere, let’s face it, it will be in favor of Israel.

The NATO "powers"? NATO has already ruled out the possibility. "The idea has never come up. It is not on the agenda," a NATO official told the Financial Times of London (as quoted in yesterday’s edition). The NATO spokesman added: "If individual member-states want to offer to send troops, then that’s a different matter."

Most observers will agree that such a prospect is not only very much in doubt, it’s a completely zero option. The NATO member-states are either already "over-committed" in Afghanistan, or else carping about such involvement on the sidelines. Volunteering to put themselves "in the middle" between the aggressive Israelis (with the most pugnacious combat force in the Middle East) and the suicide-bombing, martyr-complexed and resentful Palestinians is simply, at this weary stage, not their cup of tea.

Perhaps Mr. Annan, in his do-gooding mode, could offer troops from his own country.

* * *

After the breakdown of his talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell last weekend, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat went on television. Mr. Arafat complained that he was still penned up in his almost-completely demolished headquarters in Ramallah, and about the "massacre" of Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly in Jenin.

He pointed out that there seemed to be no universal outrage over these atrocities and his being illegally detained by Israeli troops and armor. "Is this acceptable?" He challenged the US and the world.

I can only surmise, as a longtime reporter and observer of Middle Eastern politics (during my several years in academe, those were among the subjects I taught at the Ateneo, St. Theresa’s College, and Far Eastern University) that Arafat may have a point, but there’s a widespread abomination, I’m afraid, of a people who send out "suicide bombers" – or, indeed, any kind of bombers at all – to kill unsuspecting civilians. For no nation wants to feel unsafe: in its homes, its streets, its cafés and restaurants, its markets and shopping malls, or in its buildings.

This is why, I guess, with the exception of Muslim countries who rage against the Israelis for their "state-sponsored terrorism" and the "massacre" of their co-religionists, the Palestinians, sympathy for the battered Palestinians will never go beyond lip-service. In sum, real sympathy is in short supply.

As for the Israelis, no matter how much they are condemned by the outside world, they’ll go on with what they’re doing. Sure, they punched into Jenin with massive force and savaged its 14,000 inhabitants. In its April 15th issue, TIME magazine, totalled up the score. There have been 106 suicide-bombers who penetrated Israeli cities and communities in the past nine years. They killed 339 Israelis, many where least expected, and wounded thousands of others. In the past year, it seems, nine of the suicide-bombers have come from Jenin – and the al-Aqsa brigade leaders and Hamsa militants in Jenin had bragged about it on TV.

What the Israelis obviously intended, and the heck with world opinion, was to make the people of Jenin bleed. They wanted to bring the "horror" they’ve been experiencing in their home communities and cities right back into the heart of a camp that has spawned so many, to use their new appellation, "homicide-bombers".

The belligerent Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in the course of the two-week punitive operation, vowed to leave "no seed of terror behind". (Wow! He was called the other day, by US President George W. Bush, a "man of peace", although a US White House spokesman later rushed to clarify that what Bush had said was that Sharon was "a man in pursuit of peace". Was Bush then "misquoted"? I suppose the White House is like GMA’s Malacañang. The swift reaction is "to blame the media.")

Yesterday’s New York Times reported that "surveying the wreckage in Jenin on Thursday, Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations special envoy to the Middle East, called the scene ‘horrifying beyond belief’."

Gideon Meir, responding from the foreign ministry in Jerusalem, testily asserted: "Larsen is not telling the whole truth. He is totally ignoring what Israel went through. He is ignoring what Jenin was – the capital of Palestinian terror."

Well, that capital is in ruins. But the Israelis are mordant enough not to entertain any illusions that the suicide-bombers will stop coming.

One Israeli colonel, Miri Eisen, remarked that IDF troops in Jenin had caught 10 would-be suicide bombers "who had already videotaped their farewell statements".

There may be, it’s quite possible, a hundred more in the wake of the fierce Jenin battle. But the Israelis are, for this moment, well content. They’ve demonstrated that if Palestinians kill Israelis, they’ll kill more Palestinians. The arithmetic of hatred is beyond calculation.

That’s what, after all, the ancient Hebraic law dictates: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Those two killing cousins and fellow Semites, the Arabs and the Israelis, must know this by now.