Then and now

In June 1898, a paralytic borne in a hammock made his way from his home in Bay, Laguna to Cavite where he was to meet the chief of the Philippine armed revolution, the formidable General Emilio Aguinaldo. Aguinaldo had called for Mabini, because he had heard of his political brilliance and needed his help to conceptualize the nation he envisioned.The General, as he was referred to then, issued orders to all towns and municipalities on the way to ensure his safe passage. Cesar Majul wrote on this journey in his prizewinning biography of Mabini.

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He devotes a paragraph that may give us a historical perspective in the contemporary struggle for constitutional reform: "The traveller, no doubt, as a social thinker, must have been intimately aware of the tremendous difficulties involved in transferring his liberal conceptions to the minds of others in his country. The social system of his time and place had taken a few centuries to evolve. Upon its basically Malay matrix had been imposed an alien religion and culture such that the Church had become one of the most fundamental institutions in that society. It was this institution which was believed to be the bastion of conservatism and staunch opponent to the concretization of liberal ideas in the country and for that matter, in all the countries of Western Europe. What aggravated the situation was that "the habitual obedience which this institution exacted was repeated in the colonial institutions where relations between colonial authorities and subjects were fixed so as to enhance mainly the interests of the Mother Country (Spain)"

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To Mabini, the challenge thrown at him by the military arm of the revolution on how to overcome through the power of his ideas and his pen was two-fold: the vestiges of Spanish colonial and ecclesiastical institutions and the attitudes and character of the people conditioned by these institutions. As he made the painful journey to meet Aguinaldo, to whom he had not been personally introduced even then, he must have begun to think of various strategies that he might use to convey the message of independence and libertarian values to a generally indifferent public. "What had become second nature in the social fabric would not be easy to alter much less destroy," Majul writes. But Mabini was undaunted. As far as he was concerned difficulties and complexities had to be faced without flinching from the original problem at hand — how to free his people from colonial rule so they can fulfill their true potential and stand proudly with the rest of free nations. The General was impressed. Mabini became the first Prime Minister of the Philippines.

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So here we are at the crossroads of yet another journey as we retrace the first steps taken by heroes like Mabini to cobble parliamentary government. We are an independent country now, at least in name, but I am not sure whether we are less in the grip of the vestiges of colonial and ecclesiastical institutions. Only this time our colonizers are home-grown and ecclesiastical institutions (here I do not refer only to the Catholic Church but also its caricatures) have continued to exercise their disproportionate influence in state affairs. Today as it was in Mabini’s time, the challenge is the same. The problem is how to articulate and recognize the problem. But I am confident that if the challenge is the same, personalities equal to the task will rise and be counted. The task requires the intellectual discipline of a paralytic who ignored the weakness of his body and trained his mind to think only of what was good for his country.

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An American’s critique of the war on Iraq. Some of the finest critiques on the war in Iraq are coming from Americans themselves. This is a tribute to its open society and its freedoms. The following excerpts came from Jay Bookman’s The President’s real goal in Iraq in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a resonance to one written by an Arab political analyst for Arab News which I had reprinted under the title "In crime, as in war, the motive is the key." Because I received some hate mail for that column, curiously not from Americans but from Filipinos who think themselves more American than the Americans, I thought it would be good to publish excerpts from Bookman.

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"The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaeda has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence. The pieces just didn’t fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing. In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

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This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were. Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled? Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

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In an interview, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside that suggestion, noting that the United States does not covet other nations’ territory. That may be true, but 57 years after World War II ended, we still have major bases in Germany and Japan. We will do the same in Iraq. And why has the administration dismissed the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. Besides, they are beneath us as an empire. Rome did not stoop to containment; it conquered. And so should we. Among the architects of this would-be American Empire are a group of brilliant and powerful people who now hold key positions in the Bush administration: They envision the creation and enforcement of what they call a worldwide Pax Americana, or American peace. But so far, the American people have not appreciated the true extent of that ambition.

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Part of it is laid out in the National Security Strategy, a document in which each administration outlines its approach to defending the country. The Bush administration plan, released Sept. 20, marks a significant departure from previous approaches, a change that it attributes largely to the attacks of Sept. 11. To address the terrorism threat, the president’s report lays out a newly aggressive military and foreign policy, embracing pre-emptive attack against perceived enemies. It speaks in blunt terms of what it calls American internationalism, of ignoring international opinion if that suits U.S. interests. "The best defense is a good offense, the document asserts. It dismisses deterrence as a Cold War relic and instead talks of convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities. In essence, it lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence. The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, the document warns, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops.

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The report’s repeated references to terrorism are misleading, however, because the approach of the new National Security Strategy was clearly not inspired by the events of Sept. 11. They can be found in much the same language in a report issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a group of conservative interventionists outraged by the thought that the United States might be forfeiting its chance at a global empire. At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals, the report said. stated two years ago. The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this American peace. (article to be continued in my next column.)

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