The Mindanao enigma / Remembering Edsa

It’s simply amazing that on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, no top government personage worthy of his high office can say the truth about what will soon happen in Mindanao. In Washington, White House spokesperson Art Fleischer insists American combat troops will soon join – or is the word assist – Philippine troops in engaging the Abu Sayyaf rebels for the purpose of exterminating them – physically. In Manila, presidential spokesperson Ignacio Bunye just as adamantly denies his American counterpart, says "there will be no combat role for US troops, period, period, period."

Neither President George W. Bush will speak nor President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. This is dangerous. In the end, it will be the shark confronting the sardine, and almost always the shark devours the sardine.

And so I wonder. How far has GMA and her saber-rattling Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes committed the Philippines to taking up America’s "total war" against international terrorism? There is every insinuation in Fleisher’s statement and the Pentagon position that this matter of US combat troops fighting in Mindanao had been substantially discussed at the highest levels. Fleischer himself said, "the Philippine government had requested the US troops." Why is all that in the dark, behind the curtains?

Now we ask the question: If there should be a widespread outcry against US combat involvement in Mindanao, will the GMA regime heed her fellow Filipinos? Or will she, like a female Gunga Din, rush Filipino troops to the side of about 1,700 US combat troops to slay the Muslim enemy in Mindanao? Maybe another question to be asked is: "How much?" As far as the public knows, the Philippines is only getting $37 million from America for this exhibition of extraordinary fealty and loyalty to Uncle Sam.

This is chickenfeed. Turkey right now continues to demand the amount of $32 billion, repeat $32 billion, from the US for agreeing to play the role of northern prong in the planned American attack on Iraq. Turkey is adjacent to Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm), Turkey was a main catapult for the rapid projection of US troops to the northern region of Iraq.

I agree. The Philippines does not come up to the importance and significance of Turkey in the "imminent" invasion of Iraq. But the Philippines does play a crucial role in Asia in America’s war on international terrorism. Our nation occupies "second front" in this war after Afghanistan, and our archipelago is ideal for projecting America’s military might in the Asia-Pacific region. I also think the Abu Sayyaf is just an excuse. America’s real target in Mindanao is the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), suspected by US intelligence of harboring "forward elements" of Jemaah Islamiyah, again a suspected adjunct of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

After Iraq, believe you me, the battering ram of America’s military force will switch to East and Southeast Asia.

It is in this continent where, in the view of America, terror is spread like a cluster of slithering snakes. And the terror is compounded because North Korea, in defiance of Washington and international nuclear treaties, now builds a nuclear arsenal. If North Korea cannot be stopped, immediately endangered South Korea and Japan will also proceed to manufacture nuclear missiles. When they do, American troops in the two allied countries estimated at about 80,000 will likely move out. When and if they move out, the Philippines looms large as America’s main support base in the Far East.

I have deliberately drawn up this geostrategic canvas to understand why America not only seeks to return en masse to the Philippines but to stay indefinitely.

Wittingly or unwittingly, the Philippines is being drawn into the belly of America’s war against terror. The looming war in Mindanao can also be an excuse for US combat troops to strike at communist guerrillas in Luzon. After all, with the Philippine government’s enthusiastic approval, the US designated the CPP-NPA (Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army) as a "foreign terrorist organization". I believe it is just a matter of time before the MILF is similarly designated. In such a scenario, lines can easily blur and many innocent Filipinos will die under the heading of "collateral damage".

This is the danger.

It all goes back to George W. Bush’s post 9/11 battlecry of "If you are not with us, then you are against us". He said the US military would root out terror anywhere in the world. And so, national sovereignties would have to give way or crumble if they stood in the way of the American juggernaut. And this is where the Philippines finds itself today. America says it is coming with a formidable military force to crush the Muslim insurgent in Mindanao. America insinuates this has been agreed upon by the GMA government. If true, GMA is in for the kind of social turmoil not seen here since the Senate mounted the political torpedoes that ended the stay of America’s military bases in Subic and Clark Field.

It could be worse. Virtually the entire world has risen against America’s impending war in Iraq. If the Philippines’ citizenry catches this mood, and the Yankees persist in fighting in Sulu, and hundreds if not thousands die, then the demons of war will consume the Philippines.

The Americans will be well-advised to heed Martin van Creveld, successor to Karl von Clausewitz as the world’s outstanding military thinker. And he said long before 9/11: "Future wars will be waged overwhelmingly by, and against, organizations that are not states. And since they do not own sovereign territory and consequently cannot be threatened by nuclear annihilation, they will be able to fight each other, and the state, to their heart’s content."

This is like saying that future wars will be futile and endless. How then does the US propose to exterminate the MILF and the communist insurgency by the ways of war? And in the jungles of the Philippines at that?

* * *

We are commemorating the 17th anniversary of EDSA, an event we normally raise to the high heavens as a singular achievement of Filipinos. Somehow the commemoration has dulled. The drums of memory do not pound anymore. Here and there a word is mentioned, a superlative, a posy offered, but the lights flicker and the shadows hover. Maybe we celebrated too much in the wake of two EDSAs. Maybe we expected too much. Maybe major reforms were propounded. In the end, both EDSAs did not deliver on their promise. And what was worse, the Philippines found itself a straggler in Asia, a marauder in the world’s fastest growing, developing and progressing continent.

We found out easily what went wrong.

People Power toppled two corrupt presidents, but that was all. There was no follow-up, no serious attempts to clean up a rotten political system, no settling of scores with notorious crooks and criminals, no doors slammed on grafters, no purge of government Augean stables like the BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue) and Customs. In the end, it showed all of us up. Our easy-going culture never provided a tripwire for the kind of popular outrage that normally leads to change. We took everything in stride. Our culture resorted more to prayer and patience, to the possibility of miracles, to Divine Providence showing the way.

Our anger, when it showed, was more of rhetoric and the fashionable flicker of occasional media protest, never the massive rage that could pour into the streets and shock and stagger our national leadership. The Filipino smile was our most powerful weapon against adversity. The nation is fast cracking up and we still smile, leaving protest demonstrations to the mini-factions of the Left, specially the communist left. We Filipinos have a fetish for prayers and so every now and then we have national days of prayer.

Maybe it is just as well. After the two EDSAs, we are in a hollow. We are bottoming out as civilizations and cultures bottom out when they have spent themselves. Many months ago, I propagated the concept of Freedom Force. I had anticipated that one day that the social volcano prophesied by some insightful Filipinos would erupt. And Freedom Force would get into the act, incite civil society to create or organize the critical mass that would prevent the communist left and the military right from taking over power.

What I did not foresee was the Filipino propensity for elections. This early, the electoral cauldron begins to simmer and soon it will boil to a froth. So despite the failure of two EDSAs to straighten the nation up, the hope still remains strong, very strong in fact, that the 2004 elections would be able to provide new men, new faces, new leadership. And presumably break the back of traditional politics that has held sway for generations. Okay, I will admit that assumption.

Hope. Let us then hope the elections will not misfire, that they will indeed light the bonfires of tomorrow. Failing that, cry the beloved country.