Will GMA go to Spain despite the winds of war?

It’s not the Vatican and surely not Italy, as newspapers speculated yesterday, which are insisting that President Macapagal-Arroyo keep to her original plan of visiting them – in spite of the coming showdown in Iraq. It’s Spain. His Majesty King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia had cancelled other visits in order to be in Madrid to receive GMA, which is why the Spanish government is asking her to come as promised.

Madrid has conceded, on the other hand, that all plans are off should war erupt in the Gulf – since Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar (as co-sponsor of the Bush & Blair second United Nations Security Council resolution) would have to switch to full battle gear to take his place in the forefront of the "coalition of the willing".

In that case, our Presidenta need not start packing her bags for a March 22 departure. I suspect that after the currently bothersome sandstorms abate – whirling dervishes of sand and wind which have been whipping the stand-by American and British forces on land (in Kuwait and elsewhere surrounding Iraq) as well as the US and Brit naval armada in the Gulf – soiling the HMS Ark Royal, for instance, and its exposed deck aircraft and helicopters with an irksome coating of sand – Field Marshal George W. Bush and his Deputy Field Marshal and Admiral of the Fleet, Tony "Hearts of Oak" Blair will give the order to "go". And damn those French fries, stubborn "frogs", and snail-eaters into the bargain!

Oh, well. This is the zero hour.

Tomorrow, March 17, was supposed to be the Moment of Truth. But US President Bush may give Britain’s Tony Blair another two or three days to try to convince, not the French or the Russians, but the others in the Security Council to vote "yes", and thus save face for America and Britain. Yet, both are already cognizant that this is a forlorn hope. But why guess? Bush, Blair and Aznar, the triumvirate, began crucial, down-to-the-wire "summit" meetings yesterday in the Portuguese islands of the Azores. What they’ll decide today, yes today, will determine what they’ll announce in the United Nations in New York tomorrow.

Abangan.

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What’s significant, really, is that Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and the UK has cancelled a visit to Belgium this coming week on the advice of Whitehall (the Foreign Office) because it was felt it would not be appropriate for her to be out of the country "given the present circumstances".

It’s true that Prime Minister Blair faces revolt even in his own Cabinet. The Labour Party’s feminine firebrand, International Development Secretary Clare Short, has already declared she would resign if Blair breached "international law" (she claimed) by joining Bush in attacking Iraq without a second UN resolution authorizing the war. She bitterly condemned Blair’s behavior as "extraordinarily reckless". Blair patiently kept his temper at Short’s insults, but her outburst has emboldened other dissenting voices in the Cabinet. Robin Cook, the House of Commons leader and former foreign secretary, has also threatened to quit. Last February 26, a total of 121 Labour MPs voted against Blair in the House – and this rebellion could swell to almost half the 410-strong parliamentary membership of the Labour Party to contradict Blair’s initiatives on Iraq. As it is, most of the Conservative MPs or the Tory minority are, ironically, supporting Blair (great shades of Maggie Thatcher!) Yet, how can a Labour Prime Minister be comfortable with the idea that his own partymates might desert him, while the Tory Opposition upholds him?

Will Blair blink? Not on your life. Judging from his body language and the strength of conviction he’s exhibited this far in the most terrible crisis of his political career, he may, in the end, go down – but he’ll do so with all guns firing. As Lord Horatio Nelson, who stands high on his plinthe in London’s Trafalgar Square, declared when he raised his battle pennants to the mast to signal the British fleet to attack the French navy at Trafalgar, Blair’s message is: "England expects every man to do his duty!"

If you’ve been to London recently, by the way, have you noticed? Just exiting Trafalgar Square, before you turn into Regent, there’s a building on whose façade is emblazoned: "The Texas Embassy". Bush’s Texas Rangers have planted the flag of the Lone Star state deep in the heart of England.

And so, for better or worse, the two pardners, Blair and Bush, seem determined to ride off – not into the sunset, but into the sunrise.

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To dissect what makes the redoubtable Tony Blair tick, James Blitz, in the "Man in the News" section of yesterday’s FT (the weekend edition of the Financial Times), penned an article entitled The Faithful Leader of a Rebellious Country. He asserts that the British P.M. "will do what he believes to be right on the issue of Iraq and weapons of mass destruction . . . Mr. Blair knows he is risking his premiership with the stance he is taking on Iraq. Indeed, he has been aware of that risk since the crisis took off last summer. The chances of the UK’s securing a second United Nations resolution appear remote. There is deep unease within the Labour Party and the British public about going to war with Iraq without firm UN backing."

Blitz concludes, however, that ". . . although he faces the biggest crisis of his six-year premiership, Mr. Blair is sticking rigidly to his course."

In fact, FT pointed out, Blair "immediately squashed the suggestion raised by Donald Rumsfeld, US defense secretary, that Britain would back out of military action if it failed to get a second UN resolution." Said Blair: "Rather than debate . . . why do we not just work out what is the right thing to do and do it?"

Blair, who celebrates his 50th birthday this May, often invokes the phrase about doing "the right thing", whether on Iraq or other challenges. The phrase, Blitz notes, "echoes the ‘no turning back’ slogan with which Margaret Thatcher is most closely identified."

You have to remember that it was Blair’s charismatic leadership which propelled the Labour Party back into power after eighteen years of wandering listlessly in he political wilderness. Blair, moreover, scored a thumping, landslide general election victory for Labour in the year 2001, for his second-term as Prime Minister.

In a well-studied book, The Blair Effect, Anthony Seldon (Little, Brown and Company, Great Britain 2001), states – assessing the Blair Government 1997-2001 – that Blair is "a new kind of leader". Seldon argues that Blair "is turning out to be a distinctive Prime Minister. Commentators have already compared him to Thatcher, (Napoleon) Bonaparte and even (Josef) Stalin: the term ‘Presidential’ has become almost a Pavlovian adjective when his leadership is discussed. Having reformed his party and the constitution and embarked on a series of steps to modernize the Whitehall (foreign office) machine, it is not surprising that he has ideas about refashioning the premiership."

These words were written, of course, long before the Saddam crisis and the UN Security Council impasse — but Blair’s articulate advocacy of strong action and his courageous conduct have borne out, rather than disproved, Seldon’s earlier assessment.

Blitz, for his part, points out that Blair "is completely happy with, and convinced of, his core beliefs. He has strong instinctive views. Very rarely does anyone have to tell him what he thinks." In sum, he does not rely on spin doctors. If many in his own Labour Party turn against him, Blitz says, "the prime minister can live with that."

"It is hard to imagine that he will come through unscathed. Even if the Iraq war goes swiftly and well, the current crisis is proving traumatic for Labour MPs and the rank and file. There will be pressure on Mr. Blair to modify other policies to put himself back in favor with the parliamentary Labour Party."

Yet, Blitz says "it is hard to imagine him compromising his beliefs on the core ideas of policy at home and abroad: the reform of hospitals, higher education, asylum policy . . . it will take a lot to turn him aside now."

I wish we had more leaders, if you ask me, like Blair. Unswerving of purpose, strong in his core beliefs, refusing to compromise his convictions to court popularity or to appease "revolt" within his own party – or to hang on to his Premiership for dear life.

Once upon a time, we in the Philippines had such men and women. In peace and war. This is a call for all of us to rise to meet that challenge and that need again.

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Last night, we saw President GMA being interviewed on ABS-CBN by Senator Noli de Castro (who can’t decide whether he is a solon or a celebrity broadcaster – in my mind, you can’t be a media star and a serious political leader at the same time).

In reply to a question about Balikatan, the President said it was definitely no longer going to be held in Sulu – "I don’t like Sulu anymore," she snapped then, catching herself immediately, explained that it wasn’t the Sulu people she didn’t like (she "loved" them) but the idea of holding the joint Philippine-American training exercises on that controversial island. They would be held, instead, on the Mindanao mainland. When pressed on whether Balikatan would be concluded instead in North Cotabato – Susmariosep, the heartland of Hashim Salamat’s Moro Islamic Liberation Front operations – the Commander-in-Chief turned coy. She said that this was still being discussed. C’mon, go there. That would be interesting.

Would that provoke the MILF any further? Gee whiz. They’re already provoked. Maybe irritating them some more might even make them careless. Can peace talks be resumed? What for? Fighting will only flare up again. For that matter, even if – by some miracle – Hashim Salamat (who was trained in Egypt) signed a "peace deal", how could he enforce it among his cadres? If the MILF has, as it claims, 12,000 men, how could the government expect 12,000 armed Moros to surrender their guns? How, even worse, could the government permit 12,000 Moros to keep their guns as part of any peace agreement?

It’s a simple truth, but one which the do-gooders, peace-niks, and many in the media don’t seem to understand. As long as there are armed civilians in Mindanao, whether Muslim or Christian, there will never be peace there. Armed men always make trouble. Carrying weapons and swaggering around are too delicious a practice to give up. Whether they’re rebels or bandits, armed men can extort money (calling this "taxation"), kidnap and demand millions of pesos in ransom, seize desirable young girls or helpless women for sexual abuse (calling them "brides" or whatever) and be big shots in every province. Peace? You must be kidding. The only way is to disarm everybody except soldiers and policemen, the law enforcers of our Republic. Any other arrangement is illusory and self-defeating.

Nur Misuari – in the end, even if he really tried (maybe he didn’t?), could not control his men. The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) tried to call those upstart bandits "Lost Commands", but this ploy was not credible.

Neither can Hashim Salamat, even if he makes "peace" – which, at the moment, he definitely won’t be able to exercise full control of the scattered units of his MILF.

Let’s stop dreaming and do the right thing: Fight ’em, defeat ’em – then disarm ’em. This won’t be easy. It will be bloody. We’ll take casualties and suffer. Innocent civilians, caught in between, will suffer, as they’re doing now. But it’s the only way. The hard way, as the essayist Robert Louis Stevenson once put it, is the only enduring way.