Coup in offing? / Two Saddam sons killed

George Bernard Shaw delivered himself of this jewel: "It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor." And so it does. Because courage is resistance to fear, eventually the mastery of fear. And fear is what begins to pervade the nation today, the growing apprehension there is no tomorrow, and thousands of Filipinos leave the country by the day to seek refuge abroad. This writer has long signaled a crack-up of the republic in this space, but few would believe us, or hardly cared. Now the shadows are coming dangerously close.

We have the shivers today because the headlines underscore rumblings and discontent among sectors of our military establishment. And the fear is that they may stage a coup – a golpe in the night. They are poorly paid, we are told, poorly recompensed for laying their lives on the line in combat, poorly recognized for the heroism they have displayed. Maybe our soldiers have reason to gripe. But so have all the others in our society – teachers, clerks, bureaucrats, workers, laborers, fisherfolk, farmers, agricultural earners, janitors et al. They all live below subsistence level.

If per capita, the citizen lives on merely fifty centavos per day, then our soldiery cannot complain too much. They are better off.

Misery loves company and we are almost all miserable. Unemployment is 13.4 percent, unemployment about 20 to 25 percent. For the past 50 years or so, our economy has been largely stagnant, an average 3.1 percent in GDP growth per year. Health and education have drooped to woebegone levels. The government’s war against the Muslim rebels and NPA guerrillas is a big drain on our treasury. Government graft alone costs the republic about P250 billion per year.

And if we have not drowned yet, it’s because our overseas workers transmit the amount of $7 billion annually to our national coffers. Yearly, we slice about a third from the national budget to service or pay for our foreign debt. It’s ghastly.

Now listen, and listen carefully, If restless elements of our soldiery are now taking to the verbal barricades, it’s because the big itch is back. And the itch is back with a big, frightening bang because of the "great escape" of Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi. No ordinary terrorist he, Al-Ghozi had the world in shivers because he was a Big Operator, with possible ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. So what does the return of the itch mean? The military comes out of the escape of Al-Ghozi clean as a hound’s tooth. The Philippine National Police is widely believed to have engineered the escape. The names of Ping Lacson and Juan Ponce Enrile are also mentioned. Can a coup be far away?

And if the name of the PNP is mud thrice layered, so, they say is the name of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She and the top officers of the PNP command were perceived to be as close as lips and teeth. That explains why PNP chief Gen. Hermogenes Ebdane was not even slapped on the wrist by GMA. Quondam military idealists looked upon the PNP as the offshoot of the old Philippine Constabulary – mercenary, highly corrupt, spear-carriers of the Japanese Imperial Army during the occupation. Even during the Marcos dictatorship, the police never managed to scratch off the notoriety of the Constabulary.

Back to EDSA in 1986. The trigger was a military mutiny in the Palace with Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile and Col. Gringo Honasan calling the shots. People Power prevailed as Jaime Cardinal Sin entered the picture, stole the thunder from JPE and Gringo. Now, with the Church hobbled (Sin retiring, sex scandals and all that), a big power vacuum is yawning at us all. The nation’s political system is all shot. The system – whatever we call that system – isn’t working,

And, dammitohell, it won’t work at all if there should be a shift from bicameral to unicameral. The same thieves and cutthroats will rule the country.

So to use a stale metaphor, the ship is sinking. But caveat emptor.

Woe betide this country if a cabal of majors, colonels and generals should seize power. They have had their time in contemporary history when in the 60s and 70s, military dictatorship was the fashion. We had ours, the Marcos dictatorship. They all bungled the job of governing humanity because they were just as inept, power-hungry and corrupt. They had absolutely no knowledge of governing. Their escadrons de la muerte (killer squadrons) were just as ruthless. And as we said before, a communist revolution today would be just as futile.

And so we are back to the concept that only civil society can save the country.

But we don’t see their leaders and organizations anymore. Many have been suckered into positions of government power where providentially for GMA, they now sing paeans in her name. They are members of boards of directors, presidential assistants, special Malacañang counsel. Many have six-figure incomes. They ride chauffeur-driven SUVs, take their vacations abroad. Of such stuff were COPA and KOMPIL made, their leadership co-opted and suborned, their former thunder in the streets reduced to allelujas, odes to Guinevere.

And yet, hope springs eternal from the human breast. Civil society is far from dead. The first two waves (EDSA One and Two), as history unravels, simply secured a beachhead. They were local versions of a Normandy Landing. And all the brave hearts died or sold themselves at this landing. Now we shall have to stir the brave hearts again. That is how history is. It proceeds in waves. If the first wave falters and fails, a second wave follows. Then a third wave and so on.

I have suggested in the past, and I suggest again, that civil society recoup its forces. The battles ahead are grim and foreboding. That is the nature of a badly-wounded beast. It heaves and tosses, twitches… and struggles. The corporate and landed right of society will fight to maintain its power. So will the politicians. The Left – communist and nationalist – will tumble into the tunnels of the poor, seek to ignite them to revolution. The Church, no longer the power it used to be, will crouch on the sidelines, waiting for divine guidance for the first time, no formidable ideological glue unites the protagonists.

Communism cuts no ice. Martial law ruled by a single dictator cuts none either. We have tried it before and Ferdinand Marcos brought the country to shambles. Our brand of democracy – freewheeling, bitchy and irresponsible – never really took off despite more than 50 years in the saddle. We have all the assorted ills of democracy, hardly any of its strengths. We have had all the blessings and preaching of the Church, but none ever put us on the road to Valhalla. Now we discover. The ogre-head of Sex has a lot of disciples in The Church. And the stink is coming out.

There are two routes open. First is the narrowing road to the 2004 elections. If that should be dynamited, civil society should structure another road, even if that should lead to a temporary revolutionary government.

* * *

The US leadership now belches the huzzahs because Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein’s sons, have been killed in battle at Mosul. Any day now, their bodies will be displayed in public to prove that indeed these were the siblings that sowed so much terror in Iraq, tortured and killed so many people, raped so many women, imprisoned so many innocents. The killing was indeed a coup of sorts since it punctured weeks of American troops dying by the dozen from hostile Iraqi fire.

But will it turn the tide? Will it enable the US to speed up Iraq’s recovery? Get the goodwill of the citizenry which so far has been critical of the US occupying their country? Will it calm what looks like a guerrilla uprising against the Yanks?

To a certain extent, yes. To a great extent, no.

Before the war, before the US invasion, the Iraqis’ standard of living was much higher than it is today. Whatever the excesses and abuses of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were relatively at peace with each other. They had electricity, police secured their neighborhoods, important government services like hospitals and welfare were available, the citizenry was gainfully employed, millions had not yet been shredded from the police and military and are now jobless.

They are bleeding today not because of Saddam Hussein and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, but because the Americans intruded into their way of life. They had expected freedom, liberation, the early blessings of democracy, the reconstruction of their badly battered nation, particularly Baghdad which was devastated by a long series of bombings. If only the Americans could give these to them in a jiffy, then the hostility would disappear.

But the American are paying for the wages of war. Their exaltation in victory was short-lived. They never managed to rebuild or reconstruct Afghanistan despite all the promises. And rebuilding and reconstructing Iraq will take many years, big bumps along the road, diplomatic hurdles. They expected to stay two years. Now they are stuck in Iraq from five to ten years, and they’re not even sure the Iraqis will be grateful. It hurts when the majority say the US is good at making war but clumsy and heavy-handed in making peace. What is worse is that George W. Bush is now bleeding from the charge that he lied to America and the world in waging the war. Six months after, no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Worse, a highly respected British scientist has committed suicide because it was reportedly he who exposed the "phony war" and accused the US-Britain coalition of "sexing it up".