No more 90-day boasts, please: Just get them!

Instead of being overwhelmed by all that war talk, I think our government should concentrate this week on getting an effective Anti-Money Laundering Law in place – so it will work, and, naturally, get us off the "blacklist" of the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force.

A group of officials from that FATF was scheduled to have arrived yesterday from abroad (but nobody from Paris, apparently). In any event, the FATF people will hold discussions with Malacañang’s representatives as well as with our senators and the leaders of our House of Representatives.

If everyone concerned approaches these dialogues with an open mind, I’m sure that an "AMLA" that’s acceptable to all – and satisfying to the watchdogs of the FATF – can be hammered out. The deadline to get the measure in place is March 15. Let’s not stand on stiff pride of amor propio here. Matters have to be ironed out for the benefit of our 7.6 million OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) who have to send money home as well as our businessmen, traders, borrowers and investors, who have to deal internationally.

Our government was disgustingly remiss in this affair. The Finance Department under the whiz kid, Secretary Jose Isidro "Lito" Camacho, had two years in which to get the facts and figures, and lobby in the Senate and House for a viable AMLA. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas under Governor Rafael Buenaventura was apparently asleep, too. There’s no excuse for us having been "last-minute Charlies" in this vital, literally life-and-death issue. Nobody, it seems, had the sense of urgency to do his homework.

As for our Senators, they went on orating, perorating, and prattling on about "nationalism", the idea of bank privacy, and the necessity of refusing to be bullied. In this global village and borderless world, alas, this kind of jingoism and pretty chauvinism has an increasingly hollow ring.

Let’s get real – and do a deal.

* * *

If United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who’s got a waspish tongue at all times (and, with such ease, ruffled the feathers of the French and Germans), insists that the entry of 1,700 US troops into Sulu be described as a "combat" role, then it’s just as well that the arrival of any Americans in that hornet’s nest of an irredentist Muslim island be called off.

The Americans are welcome as advisers, instructors, or observers, but combatants they cannot be. But what’s the beef? Under the terms of engagement and terms of reference of previous Balikatans, it used to be perfectably acceptable to everyone here and in the US that the Americans would fire only if fired upon.

In the light of the present snafu, it’s clear that our Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes’ mission to Washington, DC and the Pentagon was fruitless. He got egg all over his face.

It wasn’t just a "communications failure" that provoked all that flak over a contemplated combat role for the Americans in Sulu, the hotbed of Taosug resentment and warlike antagonism. According to John Hendren and Richard Paddock of the Los Angeles Times, the "term ‘exercise’ " (which GMA and Reyes wanted to euphemistically invoke to sugarcoat the operation) "was unacceptable".

The L.A. Timesmen wrote that "Rumsfeld told reporters Friday that American negotiations would be ‘perfectably comfortable from our standpoint’ calling the plan a ‘joint combat operation’."

Rumsfeld added: "Whatever it is we do, we describe in language that is consistent with how we do things. And we do not tend to train people in combat."

C’mon, Donald. The US sent the first military "adviser" to South Vietnam around 1959 – and I was there. Then came the manufaactured August 4, 1964 "Tonkin Gulf" incident which gave Lyndon B. Johnson the excuse to escalate their role.

Having been kicked out of Saigon in 1960 by the late President Ngo Dinh Diem (accused of being a Communist provocateur), I was able to return in 1965 in time to see 3,500 US Marines "storm ashore" in Da Nang, the first "combat troops" to be committed. They came ashore from the USS Mount McKinley, Henrico, Union, and Vancouver.

There were times when half a million Americans at a time were involved in the Vietnam theater. By the time the Vietnam war, the longest conflict of the 20th century, came to an end in April 1975 (Saigon had fallen on the 30th; Phnom Penh, the capital of next-door Cambodia, had fallen 13 days earlier), 58,000 Americans had died.

Rumsfeld wasn’t telling it as it is. Seldom have the Americans described what they do "in language that is consistent with how we do things." There are many occasions when they lied like hell. Just ask Colin Powell, the former chief of the Joints Staff as a general, the supervisor of Operation Desert Storm, and now US Secretary of State. He was wounded in South Vietnam as a lieutenant – when he was sent there as an "adviser".

If the Americans went to Sulu as advisers, not as "combatants", they’d still take casualties, and fatalities, probably. When you go into "harm’s way", that’s what happens. In Vietnam, we journalists and photographers were non-combatants – bao chi, as newsmen are identified in Vietnamese – but many of our number died there, including one of my best friends, NEWSWEEK’s Francois Sully, a Frenchman; and many other friends. Some died with their boots on, others were blown up in such a way you couldn’t even find the boot.

In Cambodia’s killing fields, it was the same way. That’s how Sean Flynn, the handsome and intrepid photographer-son of the screen star of derring-do, Errol Flynn went – he went into the boonies one day and never returned. He and the famous British journalist-photographer Tim Page (who subsequently published several books) were buddy-buddies. Page himself was virtually "dead on arrival" twice, but managed to get patched up almost miraculously.

Americans in Sulu? Why couldn’t they just have been called "advisers" or "trainers"? Instead, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon Gang (the Washington, not the MILF variety) had to brag about their going into combat. Sus, even if they had simply waltzed in as music teachers, combat would have come looking for them anyway. Now it’s too late. The jig is up.

Too bad. For all our Tarzan of the Apes-type chest-thumping, we could have used their help. Perhaps, as I’ve said in a column last week, they can now just "lend-lease" us the weapons, the ammunition, the aircraft, the gadgets and the equipment – and our aging army, navy and air force could do the rest.

I’m in stitches, however, over the President’s grand gesture of ordering the armed forces to get the Abu Sayyaf "in 90 days". When she took over the Presidency in January 2001, she vowed to get the Abu Sayyaf – "isang bala ka lang!" In June 2002, last year, when Gracia Burnham was rescued and the Abus were being chased all over Zamboanga del Norte and adjacent provinces, President GMA ordered the military to crush the Abu Sayyaf.

Now another 90 days? By the way, it’s only 88 days to go by now. Why such silly deadlines?

* * *

The truth is that American assistance helped mightily in kicking the Abu Sayyaf out of Basilan – and, let’s face it, Basilan has become peaceful. Have you seen a "horror headline" out of Basilan in the past two months? Not one. Both the Muslims and the Christians out there, I kid thee not, love the Americans.

I get friends and "correspondents" coming and going from Basilan and Zamboanga every week, the last one only two days ago. It‘s "peacetime" out there, when there used to be an atrocity or murder everyday.

Last Thursday, there was an article in the International Herald Tribune by Thomas Crampton, datelined Basilan Island.

It’s very accurate – and colorfully-written. Narrated Crampton: "The uneasy peace established since US soldiers turned up in the abduction capital of the southern Philippines has Dr. Nilo Barandino thankful: He no longer finds himself sewing heads back on patients and friends."

" ‘One head a day for the funeral is O.K.,’ Barandino said. ‘But when you must suture heads on four people you knew, you really cannot sleep that night.’

"A doctor on Basilan Island, probably the highest per-capita area for kidnapping in the southern Philippines, Barandino has performed that grim task 54 times in the last decade. His four-volume collection of carefully collated medical records for the small tropical island makes for sober reading. In 2001 alone he recorded 82 kidnappings, 32 deaths by gunshot wound and 19 beheadings.

"Ever since a joint military operation between the United States and the Philippines began last year, however, things have changed for the better. Barandino conducted just five autopsies in the last year and there has not been a single kidnapping. ‘Public order has improved, but it is fragile,’ Barandino said. ’Just last night we expected a bombing’."

Of course. Peace can never be guaranteed anywhere. But wasn’t the transformation of Basilan, a former wartorn headline-grabber amazing?

The Joint Special Operations Task Force, engaged in "Enduring Freedom-Philippines", did a crackerjack job. Their civilian and humanitarian projects brought "life" back to the Basilan folk. They constructed 16 school houses. They sank deep wells. They rebuilt Port Holland pier in Maluso and the Fuego Fuego Landing. The Americans put up Bailey bridges. They paved and provided drainage for highways and roads, like the perennially flooded and eroded Upper Mahayahay road. The Basilan airfield was "fixed" and extended, and can now accommodate aircraft as large as a C-130.

They drilled deep wells, through rock, hundreds of feet down, to acquire potable water. They improved the water distribution system. They renovated the local hospital and established clinics. They underwrote and assisted Medcap teams in Basilan and Zamboanga City (including dentists and "eye-doctors").

They sent out medical-civic action "missioners" to Isabela, Lumbang, Banas, Cabcaban, Calang Canas, Bulibuli, Mangal, Tumahubong, Tungbato, Tipo Tipo, Badja, Baas, Buton, Sanulitan, and even Tamuk island.

You never heard of those places? The Americans, with their associated Filipino doctors, nurses, ophthalmologists and dentists, went there. This "helping hand" approach worked wonders.

Perhaps, if given the chance, they might have worked the same thing in Jolo and elsewhere in the Sulu archipelago. I don’t buy the propaganda line of the Moro fire-breathers that Sulu’s Muslims, who compose 97 percent of the local population, hate Americans. In fact, they used to prefer "Americans" to us... well "Filipinos". In the 1930’s, they, in fact, accused the Americans of having "betrayed them" by forcing them to deal with us… "Filipinos" or with "the Tagalogs". They would have preferred dealing with the Americans, no matter what Moro leaders keep on carping about the massacre the Yanks inflicted on thousands in Sulu.

Oh, well. They’ll have to contend with just us, now, their "fellow Filipinos" (for better or poorer, in sickness and in health, etc.).

* * *

As for the Abu Sayyaf, they’ve already lost more leaders than just Abu Sabaya – who was cornered and gunned down by a team of 18 SWAGS (Special Warfare Group "Navy Seals") and four Marine officers – sent there by then Navy Commodore Ernie de Leon – now a Rear-Admiral and incoming Flag Officer in Command (Chief) of the Philippine Navy.

Ernie, who was Commander of Naval Force South, entrapped Sabaya by letting a bugged "Smart" satellite cellular phone fall into the ASG bravo’s hands. Abu Sabaya was then pinpointed through a "strobe light" monitor – with the help of the Americans. When our Navy team pounced on Sabaya, finally, on 21 June 2002, off the waters of Sibuco, Zamboanga del Norte, the Americans even dispatched a helicopter to the vicinity to assist in "monitoring" the operation.

The Filipino military works well with their American counterparts. On the other hand, if Rumsfeld and his brass revert to treating them like Little Brown Brothers, then the honeymoon is off. Can this cooperation be revived? That’s to be seen.

What about Iraq? We’re concerned, mostly, with the soaring price of oil in this period of uncertainty. The plight of Saddam Insane’s captive and long-suffering people touches us in the heart, but the escalating cost of oil owing to the "suspense" hits us where it hurts – in the pocketbook. It affects how little or how much food our poor can put on their table.

Those who snort that Iraq doesn’t concern us, in this light, are dead wrong.