Special award for GMA / On course for 2004?

If this columnist had a few remaining doubts that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was now officially "the Asian darling" of America, they were dispelled by the headline story of the International Herald Tribune Thursday. The story, a gold-plated New York Times original, bylined David E. Sanger, had this key paragraph: "And last week (President George W. Bush) pulled out all the stops for the president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – even during a formal news conference in the East Room, one of Bush’s least favorite venues – to make clear to her constituents half a world away they would be rewarded for allowing the US military to pursue terrorists on their territory."

Yummy. What was the reward?

GMA proudly delved on the rewards when she addressed the Philippine Navy’s 105th anniversary rites Tuesday. She said they amounted to a whopping $356 million in defense and security assistance, the most ample US aid package since the Senate closed down Clark and Subic in 1992. This included $47 million to backstop the Balikatan 03-1 joint military exercises, $20 million to muscle "peace negotiations" with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and – voila! – $30 million worth of economic assistance "to support peace in Mindanao".

This was virtually clear to me more than a week ago when I saw the White House and George W. Bush spruce up for GMA’s impending state visit.

The stir was unusual. Not even President Manuel Quezon, Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino were welcomed as visiting royalty, lavished with fulsome praise, placed on a political pedestal. I knew, I just knew Washington had rounded a corner in its geopolitical strategy. The Philippines would occupy a top perch as the US poised to engage Asia in a "final battle". And this battle would engage (1) international terror in the hinterlands of Islam and (2) "enemies" and rogue states who would deny America strategic predominance in this continent whose culture and civilization would not be awed by Pax Americana.

As David Sanger put it in his devastatingly candid story, GMA was now a "member of the Bush inner circle". There, she would be charmed, wined, dined, a treatment accorded only to two others – Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Australian Prime Minister John Howard – outside of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and presumably Poland. All jumped aboard the "coalition of the willing" as even America’s main Atlantic allies – France and Germany – steadfastly refused. And so did the UN Security Council.

But read even more carefully as Sanger gets to the bold print, actually the key point:

"So Arroyo’s visit was intended to bolster a leader who is still facing considerable opposition at home to the idea that US forces would hunt down terrorists on the territory of a nation that was once an American colony."

So everything is clear as clear can be.

When The New York Times reports or comments on major American policies, you can be sure, as America’s most prestigious publication – it has had the most intimate access to the US leadership, to all strategic plans and secret documents, the most delicate insights to promote Pax Americana, to the Philippines’ central role supporting US policies in the seething, swirling, changing huge continent that is Asia.

First, it is now declared policy that America’s armed forces will eventually swarm to our country to do battle with Filipino "terrorists". These are presently the guerrilla fighters and support components of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA), and maybe, and eventually the 12,500-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and its support groups. I do not know how the White House and Malacañang can cope with or contravene the constitutional provision expressly forbidding foreign troops to fight in our country. But like Lola of Hollywood lore, what the US wants the US gets. It is not a superpower for nothing.

Look at the way the US virtually sideswiped the rest of the world which was against the war on Iraq.

Second, let’s get back to that word "bolster" in David Sanger’s story – that Arroyo’s visit was "intended to bolster a leader who is still facing considerable opposition at home to the idea that the US forces would hunt down terrorists on the territory of a nation that was once American colony". This means that US is out to get GMA out of her present popularity quagmire, and get her to shoot up the surveys so she can run for the presidency in 2004. This also means – and this is what frightens me – that the Philippines will or could be once again occupied territory, a US colony in disguise as a "major partner" of the US blowing the mighty breath of Pax Americana into all of Asia.

When will all of this happen?

Sooner than later, I am afraid. The US war against Iraq ended in a jiffy. And the US invasion armada can easily be put together to move into the South China Sea. A defiant North Korea, armed with nuclear missiles, dares the US to engage it in a knockdown and drag out fight. America will only be too eager to please. Japan is seemingly on the verge of rearming, another frightening development for Filipinos who still remember Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere. The people of South Korea now emit angry noises against America where before they praised the US to the high heavens. Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf is perched on a tight-rope as a US ally. The Pakistani citizenry, a great many of them Muslim fundamentalists, intensely dislike, even abhor America.

And to top it all, terror has once again lifted its ugly monster head, what with the strikes in Riyadh and Casablanca. George W. Bush figured wrong. The short, successful war on Iraq did not squelch terrorism. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak figured right. The war opened the gunwales for a long succession of Osama bin Ladens. And America is waging a war it was not prepared for. Its bombs, missiles, and bullets may be the smartest in the world. But they were meant for set-piece battles, for a visible enemy on the plain, for an enemy navy on the sea, for cities and governments that could be conquered and destroyed, not today’s terrorists without national borders who can slither from country to country and strike wherever they please.

* * *

What concerns me right at this moment is what happens to our elections scheduled 2004.

All of the known and declared presidential aspirants go through their paces as if we were living in normal times. They follow the same old formulae of focusing on political parties, stereotyped ground operations, stereotyped media programs and presentations, networking, how to improve popularity, geographic cohesion and integration and the like. Issues are conveniently forgotten or just set aside. It’s brawn that counts instead of brains, numbers instead of issues and concepts. They are insulated from the outside world, little realizing the outside world impacts on the Philippines with the gale force of a hundred political typhoons.

I do not discount the campaign formulae. They do constitute the body organs of a presidential candidate’s operations. And without them, any campaign flounders and hits the shoals. But equally important today, maybe even more important, particularly in the wake of GMA’s White House visit and an America vesting itself with "pre-emptive power" – is the superior power of ideas, of creative political strategy, the skill and ability to spot objects and events on the horizon before they move with the speed of lighting and explode in our faces. Mindanao has to be analyzed and "intellectualized" before the Americans take over. And so, too, perhaps more importantly, the emerging relations between the US and the Philippines. How will these affect our future? How about the CPP-NPA?

How do you tackle issues? With the same motherhood statements that have worn thin and threadbare? How indeed does a presidential candidate make himself clear on graft and corruption, crime and violence, poverty, the urban blight, overpopulation, drugs, ecology, out-migration, foreign policy? What does he do once he accedes to Malacañang? Will heads roll? And whose heads? Or will things remain as before?

Miriam Defensor-Santiago had the crowds in the hollow of their heads; when, asked how she would cope with crime and criminals, she answered: "I will double our prisons, triple them if necessary. I will have no mercy for criminals." Miriam had that rare gift of hitting the potential voter on three levels – his brain, his heart and his stomach. She had fire in the belly. She was Maximus the gladiator. She almost won the 1992 presidential elections.