Don’t panic, but let’s brace ourselves for more

Without pushing the panic-button, let’s look reality squarely in the eye. There will be more bombings, grenade-throwing incidents, and other acts of destabilization in the weeks to come. The wonder of it, really, wasn’t that there weren’t more in the past few months.

President Macapagal-Arroyo dropped everything yesterday and flew to General Santos City to view the situation personally and commiserate with the bereaved families of the victims. Among those who accompanied her was Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman who’s emerging as her "Girl Friday" on Mindanao problems. After all, there were four small children among the 14 slain in the Filmart blast, and other kids among the 60 others wounded.

An Abu Sayyaf "spokesman", perhaps only self-anointed, a certain Muslim al-Ghazi (almost rhymes with the name of the Indonesian terrorist al-Ghozi), has been calling up the Radio Mindanao network to crow that the Gensan blasts were the handiwork of the Abus. He chortled that those bombings were only "a warm-up" and threatened more bombings to come. Sanamagan.

Perhaps, on reflection, we need those Israeli counter-terrorist "experts" to teach us a few tricks about counter-striking against bombers of the homicidal or even suicidal variety. (The difference, though, is that the Israelis have tanks, while all we have is talk).

I can believe that the Abus are behind the Gensan bombings. After all, weren’t they trained by the original "World Trade Center Bomber" and Bojinka Plotter, Ramzi Yousef? Another candidate for blame in the Gensan attacks is the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). They’re bomb specialists, too.

As the 106 suicide-bombers who penetrated Israel – where security is tight as a drum – amply demonstrated, there’s no way you can completely stop a determined bomber. (The Irish Republican Army or IRA used to bomb London frequently, and the Basque separatists bomb Madrid and other Spanish cities just as blithely, as witness those bomb blasts in Madrid and Bilbao only the other day.) But this doesn’t mean we can’t minimize bomb incidents and other violent forms of assault by being prepared, not merely to prevent such incursions and outrages, but to pursue and – when we’ve pinpointed the culprits – to retaliate relentlessly.

The trouble with democracies, and our enemies know it, is that we must adhere to the rule of law. After they gun our citizens down, or blow up our communities, when caught, they bring in their battalions of lawyers. (Or, being ransom-cash-rich, if they can’t threaten and cow the prosecutors and judges, they buy their way out. As a last resort, they can buy their way out of jail — and manage to "escape.")

It’s easy to say that the brutality with which the Israelis are handling the situation in the West Bank is wrong. But those embattled Jews, when they act so ruthlessly do so because they’re a nation fighting for its life. In such desperate life-and-death struggles, the kid gloves are off.

So, let’s get mad over what happened in General Santos City. That would be a healthy reaction. Our Lord Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek. Sometimes, the Lord forgive me, I feel it’s more productive, in moments of peril and crisis, to smite your adversaries and sundry back-stabbers on the cheek, instead. Indeed, to invoke the hoary expression, to smite them hip and thigh.

As in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Lord’s "terrible swift sword" gets quicker results than prayer — although prayer’s benefits and blessings, admittedly, are better in the long run for our immortal souls. As for me, being a sinner, I’m one of those short-run guys.

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Friends of mine say that they’re been deluged with phone calls from Washington, DC and New York asking whether the General Santos City bombings, which have been getting a big play-up in their radio networks and newspapers, were directed at US troops and other personnel in Mindanao.

C’mon. Whether the Americans are here or not, we’d be on the receiving end of terrorist attacks. Our government and military have been fighting Islamic separatist movements and Moro rebellions for scores of years, certainly long before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC. We didn’t join George W. Bush in his anti-terrorist struggle – he and the Americans joined us.

Yesterday, New York Times reporter James Dao reported that there are now 1,200 US military personnel in the Philippines. The NYT cited the arrival of the team of 340 US Navy engineers and their Marine Corps "security guards" as swelling the previous total of troops sent here "to help fight the Abu Sayyaf group . . ."

"It is the largest contingent of US forces in President George W. Bush’s anti-terror campaign outside of Afghanistan, Pentagon, officials said," according to the article which was datelined "Washington."

"The engineers, known as Seabees, will pave roads, dig wells, improve a dock for unloading supply ships and construct a landing pad for helicopters, said Lieutenant Commander Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman." (They had arrived on the USS Germantown, an amphibious landing ship, from Okinawa.)

There will soon be 3,000 US military personnel here, including those Marines already landing in Subic. Are the local folk complaining? Their greeting is probably: "Welcome, Joe! Chocolate, Joe?" Oops. That dialogue belongs to World War II. Yet, strangely enough, with minor revisions, it might parody what’s being said today.

What the heck. There’s an old American expression (probably discarded by the computer generation but still apropos): "You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth."

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The stunning victory of the Far Right in France – in which Jean-Marie Le Pen, the perennial presidential candidate of the Front National, garnered 17.2 percent of the vote, knocking Prime Minister Lionel Jospin of the Socialist Party out of the running – is a big blow to the Left. Jospin, 64, who eked out a humiliating 16 percent of the ballots cast, called his being defeated by Le Pan, long considered a figure of fun in French politics and dunned as a neo-Fascist, a "thunderbolt". He announced, glumly, that would retire from politics.

The overall winner of the "first round" balloting, of course, is France’s Gaullist President Jacques Chirac, 69, who only a month ago – plagued by corruption scandals in his party – was fighting a see-saw statistical battle with Jospin. There was a time only two weeks ago that it was feared that he would be edged out by Jospin in his reelection bit.

Last Sunday, however, Chirac won with a comfortable 20 percent of the vote. There will be a run-off election on May 5 (Sunday next week) which will see the two finalists, Chirac and Le Pen, squaring off against each other. But it’s a foregone conclusion that Chirac will overwhelm Le Pen. As Erap used to phrase it, old "Bulldozer" Chirac will win "by a landscape".

Indeed, Le Pen did Chirac a big favor. He cornered the protest vote, and thus prevented most of it from going to the Socialists. The French Left, for its part, deserved to be licked. They were so fragmented (there were 16 candidates in the running) that there were even three Trotskyite candidates who presented themselves although none of them had the ghost of a chance of winning even the first round.

I don’t know how many of France’s 40 million voters cast their ballots last Sunday, and how many stayed away. It’s obvious, on the other hand, that the French are so sick and tired of their old TRAPOS (traditional politicians) that they decided to teach them a lesson – and send them a message of warning. This they accomplished by boosting a "traditional loser", Le Pen (whose estrange wife had once, possibly to spite him, posed as a centerfold model for the French edition of PENTHOUSE Magazine), to within a whisker of the Presidency.

That should be enough to terrify the next generation of French politicians into reforming and behaving themselves. Yet, knowing politicians, both French and Filipinos, I’m afraid they won’t.