Another May 1 memory some may dearly hope to forget today

Every Labor Day, trade unions and federations demand an across-the-board increase in the Minimum Wage. It’s fair enough for labor leaders to make that demand, since their rank-and-file expect such demands to be voiced. But our politicians, from the President to members of Congress must realize that in this time of crisis – yes, crisis – it’s impossible to give in to such a demand.

What I fear is that politicians, alas, are always generous with money which is not coming from their own pockets, unmindful of the impact of any mandatory minimum wage hike at a period when employers are suffering from the burden of paying for a spiralling cost of fuel (the international market cost of oil per barrel has just soared to a frightening US$73 per barrel), with its multiplier effect on every front.

Instead of helping labor, particularly the millions of Filipinos desperately seeking employment, a government-imposed wage increase would be the kiss-of-death for their hopes and dreams. Far from helping labor, the deadening effect on business would be to impel employers to lay off personnel rather than employ additional workers.

You don’t need an economist or business management expert to tell you what your eyes can spot for themselves. On every hand, you see more people unemployed or underemployed, on top of masses of recent graduates milling about trying to find jobs to no avail.

Businesses are closing shop, while prospective foreign investors (except those of the hit-and-run variety) are shying away from investing in a country where labor is "expensive", when there are so many lower-wage countries nearby with less combative union movements in which to find a haven in which they can multiply their profits.

When you walk around, for example, haven’t you noticed? A large number of eateries, restaurants and coffee shops are already looking undermanned, with fewer waiters and waitresses. Either these enterprises are being compelled to make do with a smaller workforce, or balance off their employees by re-doing their shifts.

Yesterday, I heard Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas saying on television that the Filipino worker is paid a minimum wage equivalent to US$5.60 per day. This may not be a magnificent sum compared to wages in America and Western Europe, but in teeming Asia we’ve already priced ourselves out of the labor market. Compare this to the People’s Republic of China whose astounding economic boom is partly based on the fact that they can exploit their own countrymen – dare I say "outrageously."

Billions of dollars of investment are pouring into China daily – with even Airbus now courting Beijing to win a competitive edge in selling jetliners to China’s explosively expanding airline industry by offering to establish assembly plants there for its A320 family of commercial airliners. Airbus (European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co.) has four cities in China "offering to be the sites of an Airbus A320 assembly plant, starting with Shanghai, Xi’an, Tianjn and ending with Zhuhai (the economic zone right beside Macau).

The half-hidden side of the Chinese economic boom is the exploitation of 120 million "migrant" workers from the less prosperous provinces and farm villages of vast China who’re willing to work for a dollar, or less than a dollar per day!

In bustling, awe-inspiring chrome-plated Shanghai-Pudong, for instance, there are 20 million citizens, three million of whom are part of that swarm of underpaid, dollar-a-day migrant workers. These are the human "flies" who risk their necks without safety cords or nets, clambering up the facades of rising skyscrapers, like they were Spiderman – but they’re not. If they fall, they die. This revelation is not intended to denigrate or demean the Chinese economic "miracle," but merely to accentuate its cost in human terms.

Those who’re loudly pressing for an increase – like the TUCP’s demanded across-the-board P75 wage hike (mind you, the Trade Unions Council of the Philippines is one of the moderate, but large trade federations) – must think twice about the consequences. The adage that you cannot squeeze blood out of a turnip has never been more timely and appropriate with regard to our nation.

We’re fortunate that the Filipino, as I’ve underscored almost ad nauseam, is like "Ivory" Soap. He floats. He overcomes adversity with a smile, a can-do attitude, and an unwavering faith in God.

If we all work together, and care for each other, instead of wallowing in hate and spite, we will progress despite setback, disappointment, and political strife.

* * *

May 1 is notable not just for being world "Labor Day" but for an event which, I’m sure, the White House would like to forget.

This was May 1st, 2003, when an S-3B Viking jet descended on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier steaming home after a ten-month tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. At touchdown, 12:16 p.m. local time, out popped no less than George W. Bush, the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief. Attired in a green regulation flying suit, topped off with a white helmet, looking every inch the warrior, Mr. Bush (a trained pilot, by the way, who had served in the Texas Air National Guard in the Vietnam era, but had seen no combat) had personally flown the jet himself one-third of the way from San Diego.

It was a marvelous photo op as he climbed down from the cockpit, helmet under one arm. Bush shook hands with the sailors who greeted him on the flight deck, saying "Thank you" or "’preciate it".

"Good job" he yelled out to the crewmen who had participated in the war in Iraq. Behind him, as TV broadcast the event live, was a massive banner put up by the carrier’s officers which blared out: "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," President Bush announced, addressing his audience of officers and crewmen (the ceremony telecast on worldwide television), "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

He read out the names of the allies – the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland, and thanked the Iraqi citizens "who welcomed our troops and joined in the liberation of their country . . ." He ended with a quote from the Prophet Isaiah: "To the captives, come out; and to those in darkness, be free."

Sad to say, the applause for the six-week old "Operation Iraqi Freedom" which Mr. Bush described as "carried out with a combination of precision, speed and boldness the enemy did not expect – and the world has not seen before," was painfully premature.

Three years later, more than 130,000 American Marines, soldiers, air force and other service personnel are still fighting in Iraq – and April proved the deadliest month to them in that war which has seen, thus far, no "exit strategy" for the Americans and the Brits (their loyal but increasingly restive) allies in prospect. They are being waylaid by guerrilla ambushes, suicide-bombers and roadside IED bombs. Iraq is engulfed, to boot, in deadly sectarian strife which is degenerating into Civil War.

The first attacks which toppled Saddam Insane’s evil empire had been described as intended "to shock and awe." Saddam may be on trial, having been captured, but the insanity continues to rage over there.

The Mission is far from accomplished.

* * *

It doesn’t seem either that the Americans are preparing to leave. They’re building a US Embassy fortress complex at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. The war, analysts calculate, will soon have cost more than the entire Vietnam War. In yesterday’s International Herald Tribune, the second lead article on page one was headlined: "GI’s Hit the Practice Field of Battle." The subhead asserted: "Iraq-bound troops schooled in insurgency’s harsh realities."

According to the piece datelined Fort Irwin, California, by Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns, halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, units of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, New York, are among the war-bound troops going through three weeks of training in a center put up on the edge of Death Valley covering 2,500 square kilometers, in "towns" and villages made to appear exactly like those in Iraq.

Their "trainers" include Iraqi expats posting as Iraqi civilians (not allowed to speak English) who encounter the G.I.’s in mock Iraqi villages. Some soldiers are already experiencing "battle fatigue" it’s said, and those who had earlier served in Iraq and are returning for a second tour of duty express a weird feeling that they already "back in Iraq."

The 20 mock Iraqi villages are part of a multibillion dollar effort to remodel the US armed forces on the fly.

Reports the Tribune: "For the first time in more than 20 years, military planners are revising the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, adding emphasis on nation-building and peacekeeping, subjects once belittled by the Bush Administration."

At the army’s Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, officers are being required for the first time, the article revealed, to complete a course in counterinsurgency. They should have instituted such a course after the Philippine-American war when our Filipino revolutionary army, fighting a guerrilla conflict, slew 4,000 American soldiers, many more than had been killed during the Spanish-American War. We lost that war in 1902 having suffered much heavier casualties, but our barefoot battalions had scored heavily against a far better armed Americans).

Concluded the IHT article: "Perhaps the most troubling aspect of war games is that the insurgent force usually exacts enormous death tolls on the Americans. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the insurgents at Fort Irwin are the locals; they know the territory better."

"It’s not even close," said Specialist Anthony Manzanares, who plays the role of "Fuad Bahi al-Jabouri," a disguised insurgent. "It’s a massacre. We know the terrain. It’s our home turf."

"…The network of 12 mock Iraqi villages are eerie in their likeness to the real thing. That is the idea, of course: that the US soldiers will find the environment so real that they will make their mistakes here, first, so they do not make them in Iraq."

* * *

Having read this, I’m sorry to have to comment that I saw them make their mistakes in the Vietnam War, and by golly, the above report gives this old warhorse of a foreign corespondent a strange sense of deja vu.

Will a new, better US army be able to demonstrate a "difference" before rising anti-war sentiment and sheer emotional exhaustion moves the American public to demand a drawdown of American forces in Iraq? I’m glad not to be faced with President Bush’s dilemma. He went into Iraq because the American people, furious at 9/11 and hurting so badly, needed a visible target at which to hit back. Thus, Afghanistan, the base of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the HQ of Osama bin Laden – then Iraq.

Today, alas, the top terrorist leaders are still in business: despite the $25 million bounty now on their heads, Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri are still dishing out their threats on television or on the website. A few days ago al-Zawahiri crowed that 800 martyrdom attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda in the past year.

Another terrorist, Jordanian-born but now Iraq-based Masab al-Zarqawi is on the rise, and is even challenging Osama and al-Zawahiri for "supremacy" by his bloody exploits in Iraq, positioning himself as the al-Qaeda Chieftain in "Mesopotamia."

Indeed, the US State Department last Friday "admitted" that more than 11,000 terrorist attacks occurred worldwide last year, killing 14,600 people, as networks inspired by al-Qaeda have themselves been "spreading." The US government stated that Iran, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Cuba and North Korea remain on the US list of "state sponsors of terrorism." (This is based on a Reuters report).

What about our part in the war on terrorism?

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, is doing far better than us in combatting terrorism. Three Islamic terrorists were sentenced yesterday in Jakarta for up to seven years in prison for helping shelter one of Southeast Asia’s most-wanted Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists (bomb-maker Noordin Mohammad Top) and for financing suicide bombings in Bali and Jakarta. Indonesia was hit in Bali, in 2002, and in Jakarta, in 2003 and 2004.

The Bali bombings killed 220 persons, while 21 in all were slain in the J.W. Marriott and the Australian Embassy attacks in Jakarta.

But the Indonesians are vigorously striking back, arresting and convicting hundreds on terrorism charges.

In our case, what’s the score? The JI continues to conduct "training" camps in central Mindanao – under our very noses. Congress has again adjourned without passing an Anti-Terrorism law. Sanamagan.