The once-hostile Makati Business Club bows to GMA

Champagne corks, or at least Carlos Mondavi wine-corks, must be popping in the camp of President GMA.

Remember her tiff with the sneering Makati Business Club? Remember her super-taray salvo at the Makati business group delivered at the Manila Overseas Press Club (MOPC) press freedom anniversary last October, or about half a year ago? Referring peevishly to MBC Chairman Dick Romulo, GMA snapped on nationwide television: "What can you expect from the lawyer of PIATCO?"

La Presidenta, of course, was roundly assailed in several places, including some in the media, for that "un-Presidential" sulk. The MBC, its members boiling with resentment inside, was divided between groveling and glowering. The indignant "glowerers" proved to be in the majority, and a silent war was waged against GMA. Many at the top gravitated to ex-Secretary and former Senator Raul Roco, including a powerful Makati-based conglomerate which threw its weight solidly behind Raul. A number of them even surfaced – but very briefly – as part-time "advisers" of FPJ.

Last Wednesday, all was forgiven. Who forgave whom? It’s unclear. But the Makati Business Club expressed its overwhelming support for – (fanfare) La Gloria, restored to their category of "in excelsis".

Even the ones who had made a kind of "blood compact" with Pag-Asa’s Roco were publicly tailgating GMA in the triumphant photographs like she were Joan whose Ark was coming, flags flying gloriously, into the berth of "re-election". Their champion, Raul, alas, has gone off to the United States for medical treatment, and, although he pledges to return in two weeks to resume the fight, his pre-illness surveys were already showing political infirmity.

It was, indeed, MBC Chairman Ricardo Romulo who announced that Madam Arroyo was the clear choice of the members of the organization, as revealed in a survey taken January 7 to 23.

In fact, Dick was quoted in the press as saying, "there are only two main candidates . . ." Obviously only FPJ and GMA, in their estimate.

In the survey, the Makati clubbers had awarded 47 percent to GMA as the most capable, 29.3 percent to Roco, 4.9 percent to Senator Panfilo Lacson, and to FPJ, zero.

In sum, the Makati boys indicated that Poe’s heart might be in the right place – but, in effect, "business is business".

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It’s good that the President has finally declared – after much push-and-pull by the usual wimps and the even more usual Leftists in her inner camp-wagon – that she will not pull our Philippine Humanitarian Contingent out of Iraq. Gee whiz. Our contingent totals barely 100, anyway. More than that number are endangered on EDSA alone every day, from speeding bus and truck drivers, or reckless FX taxis.

Now that our Lilliputian contingent is going to stay put, it also makes sense for the government to begin preparations to evacuate or relocate our 500 OFWs, or overseas workers, allegedly "trapped" inside a military base near Baghdad. I guess Ambassador Roy Cimatu, a former Armed Forces chief of staff and the former chairman of our Oakwood negotiating team, knows the drill. He’ll offer our Pinoys evacuation, and, I suspect, most of them will decline to be plucked out. This is because they’re at least earning some money over there, while back home they’ll be jobless.

Susmariosep. Don’t we get it yet? Our Filipino overseas workers, time and again, have proven themselves remarkably plucky and persistent. They know there’s no gain without pain. Our OFWs have been in harm’s way before, and they’ll persist, whatever perils surround them. That’s the Filipino spirit.

Just consider the 30,000 Filipinos working in Israel, although this is just a handful compared to our 875,000 in Saudi Arabia. Despite the escalation in suicide-bombings, in buses and public places, do we notice a stampede on their part to get out?

At this stage, despite the extravagant comparison to it just made by Massachusetts (Democratic) Senator Ted Kennedy, the brave aquatic "hero" of Chappaquidick, the Iraqi War is nothing like the Vietnam War. The situation will get worse, naturally. Many more will die. But I’ve seen more American soldiers fall in a single day in Vietnam – or, for that matter, in Cambodia – than in the entire past year of conflict in Iraq.

If you ask me, there must be a lot of Americans who’re now wishing they could put Saddam Insane back in place, so they can skeddaddle the heck out of there. They’re beginning to think the Iraqis deserve Saddam – or the "civil war" they’re spoiling to fight with each other, Sunni versus Shi’ites, versus Kurds, or the Ayatollahs punching it out for supremacy over each other. But the Yanks, the Brits, and our coalition, are now stuck in Iraq – and running away is not an easy proposition. Iraq for the Iraqis? That’s supposed to be the general idea – but when? Nobody listens to me, but in my opinion, we ought to leave them to cut each other’s throats over who'll take power and slurp up all those perceived profits from oil.

US President George W. Bush, however, should not be faulted for making the decision to send US forces into Iraq. He may have done so, with true missionary zeal (America’s most dangerous reflex), to topple a tyrant and bring "democracy" to the Iraqi people. However, this is only in part. I like to think he did it for the benefit of the bomb-shocked American people, so he could rally them to the flag, and demonstrate to the world that Americans, uncowed by being cruelly attacked at home, are determined to fight "terrorism" everywhere – even on the wrong battlefields. If we were all cowards, trembling before terrorists, then the terrorists would know that they can have their way everywhere – by simply threatening to bomb us into submission.

Thank God that there’s a nation, perhaps as crazy and insanely-brave as the most fanatical Islamic terrorists, which is ready to fight – and with the resources and manpower to back its determination up.

I’ve just read that controversial book by Richard Clarke, whom the cover blurb describes as "the former counter-terrorism czar for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush". In his hortatory volume, Against All Odds, subtitled Inside America’s War on Terror, (Free Press, 2004, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney), Clarke charges that "after ignoring existing plans to attack al-Qaeda when he first took office, George Bush made disastrous decisions when he finally did pay attention".

In his preface, Clarke said that Bush "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al-Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks", then "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide".

Since the rambunctious Mr. Clarke was former President Clinton’s first National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter terrorism (since May 1998) and continued in that position under President Bush until March 2003, his accusations have been given weight in Washington, DC.

An independent commission, investigating why the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) bungled opportunities to thwart the al-Qaeda 9/11 attacks, interrogated Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice mercilessly, exploring the possibility that, indeed, Clarke and other critics were right – that Dubya had failed to act on warnings that could have saved thousands of lives.

I think that the late US President Harry S. Truman (who hated media, by the way) was right. He once remarked that "every schoolboy is smarter by hindsight than the President of the United States".

Every smart-ass in the world believes, months after the fact, that Bush and his White House crew should have seen the Twin Towers attack coming, or the attack on the Pentagon. When you riffle through a mountain of intelligence reports, I guess, you can spot a sentence or two of cautionary raw information. Most of this information, it’s axiomatic, never gets to a President – this is true here, in the Philippines, too. Intelligence reports are always "iffy". Clinton, for instance, could have zapped Osama bin La-den a year before al-Qaeda toppled the Twin Towers or banged the Pentagon, but perhaps he was too busy explaining what he and Monica did in the Oval Office everytime she delivered the pizzas.

Dubya should be given the benefit of the doubt. He’s supervising a "war". Let him do his job. If they don’t like what he’s doing, there’s the coming November election. As for Clarke, he declares, correctly this time in his last chapter, the Epilogue: "Never underestimate the enemy. Our current enemy is in it for the long haul. They are smart and they are patient. Defeating them will take creativity and imagination as well as energy . . . it is going to be a generation-long struggle."

You bet. But among America’s enemies is the American tendency to snitch. "Insiders" always, in the end, write books or publish articles, revealing to outsiders – and the outside world – even the best-kept secrets they were privy to. Why do they do it? In Clarke’s case, it seems even worse. He exaggerates not just the little snippets of fact and fancy he embroiders together – but his own importance. Yet, he has the kind of mosquito bite that kills.