A liberated nation

The Iraqis are a beautiful people. They deserve to be free.

That is, lest we forget, the final moral underpinning for the war of liberation that commenced last week.

Without that perspective, the blitz currently in progress will become a senseless blur of made-for-TV images. Without it, the intense media coverage of the war will become nothing more than a glorified body count or a seminar on the geography of Iraq.

It will become merely a festival of modern weaponry, a carnival of heroes and villains, an orgy of violence.

The television coverage is factual and informative, no doubt. But, as Tony Blair so sharply pointed out during his free-wheeling press conference Tuesday, that coverage could also distort.

So much TV time, for instance, has been devoted to the gaily-colored parades of the utopian pacifists. But no TV time has been given to allow the world a peek into Saddam’s gory torture chambers and execution houses.

The reason for the distortion should be obvious.

The fags and feminists, peaceniks and leftists perform precisely to gain media attention. The torture chambers are well-hidden from public view. Those tortured to death in Saddam’s extermination chambers tell no tales. They are simply too dead to wave gay banners and wear funny hats.

They are too dead to march about with soccer paint on their faces. Too dead to be counted in the omnipresent opinion polls measuring the public’s view of a crusade locked in battle.

Saddam does not love his people. Over the last few days, Saddam’s troops revealed their secret tactics for resisting a just war. They have herded civilians into military facilities to compose a human shield. They have literally marched women and children to cover Republic Guards taking potshots at coalition forces.

If Saddam does not love his people, can his people authentically love him?

When the shroud of fear thrown over Iraqi society by the sadistic regime of Saddam is finally torn open by a just war, the ultimate illegitimacy of this government will be established.

There is moral certainty about this in the eyes of Tony Blair. I believe him. I share his moral certainty.

It is that certainty that justifies the costs assumed by the democracies willing to undertake a necessary task. It is that certainty that has gifted the troops of the "coalition of the willing" with a sense of heroic duty.

Many years from now, children will ask their elders this question: Where did you stand when evil threatened the world and a hardy bunch of democratic nations took up the cudgels of bringing liberation to Iraq?

When that question is asked, I hope that Etta Rosales can look her grandchildren in the eye and admit she offered herself to be a "human shield"’ to protect that vain tyranny that was a blight on humanity.

I hope Satur Ocampo can look his grandchildren in the eye and admit that during a moment that required acute moral clarity, he helped to fudge the issues. That he did this to serve the obscene political position of the ideologically bankrupt party that he served.

I caught Satur on some TV talk show last weekend giving a long and tortured discourse about how, on the basis of precedence, it is technically possible for the UN General Assembly to convene and, by majority vote, call for the deployment of military forces to roll back the US-UK combat troops.

The anchorman stunned Satur with the most obvious question: Which country will send troops to confront the US and British forces in Iraq?

The intellectual value of Satur’s discourse is roughly the equivalent of that text joke about Saddam stopping the invasion by securing a TRO from the trial court of Pasay.

Like Etta, I consider Satur a friend. I know that he is not stupid. His tragedy lies in the fact of his servitude to a political movement that is doomed to mental infertility.

This is, after all, the same political stream that tried to get the Supreme Court to reverse the Senate’s ratification of our entry into the World Trade Organization. It is the same political stream that tried to sue Balikatan in order to stop it.

It is the same political movement that wanted to impeach Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo because, ostensibly, she took a position on the Iraq question contrary to the sentiments of the "overwhelming majority of our people". Now the surveys show that, on a 9-to-1 ratio, our people endorse the US-led coalition action against Saddam Hussein.

By projecting imaginary remedies to the continued pursuit of the war against Saddam, the leftists are merely muddling the blatant fact that they have overwhelmingly lost yet another vital political debate.

On another TV talk show, I caught Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Manuel Villar bemoaning the fact that the Philippines supported the US and British action without getting any remuneration for doing so.

Let me put Villar’s complaint most bluntly. He is saying our government took a principled and correct foreign policy position and yet did not demand payment for doing so.

To be sure, Villar has never been accused of having a profound grasp of the rich horizon of international affairs and the dramatic sweep of present history. But it is such a relief that this senator is merely heckling our foreign policy rather than shaping it.

For if our foreign policy was by some misfortune shaped by Villar’s mind the Philippines in this grand moment of decisive engagement will enter the stage of global politics behaving like a cheap prostitute.

Etta Rosales, Satur Ocampo and Manny Villar, all honorable members of our ill-fated legislative branch, missed completely what Blas Ople understood acutely.

In a piece of written for Time, Ople likened George W. Bush to sheriff Will Kane in the classic movie High Noon who single-handedly took on a marauding band of bandits. When everybody else seemed too timid, too confused and too petty to do anything about a tin-can tyrant who threatened the world, Bush and his courageous allies such as Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar decided to take on Saddam.

By that great act of democratic will, they liberate Iraq from fear and allow this great nation enough freedom to reinvent its future. They liberate humanity from a terrorist scourge. They liberate our future from this blight on our civility.