The DFA and our government may be doing their best: But our rescue efforts look woefully pathetic

The stampede on the part of many nations to rescue their nationals from burning Beirut and aircraft-pounded, shell-wracked Lebanon exposes us as a country unprepared for any emergency – not only foreign, I’m sorry to say, but even domestic.

This is because we fritter away our funds making our politicians millionaires, and pogi projects made them, from top to bottom, look and "smell" good in pursuit not of the general welfare but of the next election.

Education? Despite everybody perorating that it’s important, it’s forever on the back burner. Our Armed Forces? We don’t have an Air Force, our last fighter jets – which are too rusty to even be donated to the neighborhood junk dealer – are on the ground in disrepair. The nearest allegory to this is the mythical Dodo, the bird that cannot fly. Our Navy? We have fine officers and seamen, but no ships – whether shallow draft, or of the blue sea variety. Our grandest warships are hand-me-downs from the US Mothball Fleet.

Heck, the USS Missouri on whose battledeck the Japanese surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay is decommissioned and at anchor in Hawaii, an exhibit and tourist attraction cadged from the US Navy by US Senator Daniel Inouye, the heroic World War II veteran who lost an arm fighting for America, while most of the Nisei and other innocent Japanese-Americans were in, well "Concentration camps", rounded up by the government in their outrage over Pearl Harbor.

If we could only "borrow" the USS Missouri from Inouye and Hawaii, it would be the proud flagship of our rust-bucket Navy. When Chinese or other nations’ warships "invade" the Kalayaan islands, as we call our Spratlys (Beijing claims them as their so-called Nansha Islands), our Philippine Navy’s prepared tactic, lacking missile capacity and most everything else, would be to ram the intruders – in the same antique manner in which the ancient Roman tiremes would ram their adversaries in any sea battle. How antiquated can we get?

All because our politicians declare we have no money. No money for our own defense? Sanamagan, those spendthrifts in junkets and parliamentary union extravaganzas, cackle that everything can be accomplished, even our defense, by sweet talk and diplomacy. In short, all we have to defend and protect our 7,100 islands and 85 million people is . . . saliva.

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This has come into focus in the evacuation of OFWs from the current battlefield which is called Lebanon. We don’t have a darned vessel to send to pluck our OFWs and other Filipino residents out. Nor any long-range helicopters or other aircraft to ferry them to safety in the nearby Mediterranean island of Cyprus – as everybody’s doing, from the Brits, Canadians, French, and Americans, etc.

Surely, Cyprus which sparkles in the blue Mediterranean is "overbooked" by now. The refugees must be sleeping in tent cities, or on the beaches.

The interesting thing is that Cyprus not long ago went through its own Civil War. In 1983, the Turkish-held area declared itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. (Turkey, indeed, keeps about 30,000 troops stationed there to protect the Turkish-Cypriots from their enemies – the Greek-Cypriots). The island has been partitioned de facto, with the northern one-third of it inhabited by Turkish-Cypriots while the southern two-thirds is held by the Greek-Cypriots.

A "Green Line" divides the two hostile segments, from Morphou through Famagusta to Nicosia (the old capital). In truth, Turkish troops had invaded the island in 1974 when a military coup in the island, backed by Athens, threatened to take over the government of the entire place.

Now, in the fractious Middle East, Cyprus has become a place of safe haven (and a jump-off point for their home destinations) of scores of thousands of refugees from Beirut and Lebanon fleeing the fighting there. This is a troubled and violent planet, indeed.

And to think that Cyprus is supposed to be the "traditional" birthplace of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus.

I remember a few years before the Greek-Turkish clash, my wife and I had arrived in Nicosia, flying there from Beirut. The United Nations peacekeeping troops were already there, supposed to keep things tranquil. We could spot their blue helmets and gun emplacements on the roof of the Ledra Palace Hotel, at that time the priciest deluxe hostelry. The UN soldiers were always on patrol in their familiar jeeps and personnel carriers. When trouble finally erupted, they proved puny and could not contain the situation.

Well, the UN "force" is still there, largely ignored by Cyprus’ 807,000 population. They patrol the "buffer zone," but could be pushed around by the Turkish troops, or by the Greek-Cypriot militia.

I mention this because Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, and other European countries, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (soon to retire himself), are talking about sending 10,000 United Nations peacekeepers or "monitors" to Lebanon to sort of stop the fighting between the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the Hezbollah. Gee, don’t those blue helmets ever tire of being humiliated?

The fanatical Islamic Hezbollah could dispatch against the UN "force" a few of their stockpile of 13,000 rockets (they’re daily barraging Northern Israel from Haifa to Nahariya with 100 or more Katyusha rockets (supplied by Syria) per day, while they also have Iranian-made FAJR-3 and C-802 rockets with Israel’s second most important city, and its financial and diamond center, Tel Aviv within range.

Those blue helmets wouldn’t stand a chance either if the IDF generals, eager to finish off the Hezbollah before the UN, the diplomats and the politicians interfere trampled them underfoot.

In sum, any UN body of troops would merely be sitting ducks, an irritation to both sides – and even more ineffective than the 2,000 UN troops called UNAFIL which they’ve already stationed there since the year 2000. Those UN soldiers, I think under a French general in Southern Lebanon, were reduced to playing tiddly-winks and merely "observing" the raids and counterattacks between the well-armed Hezbollah and the resentful, even better-armed Israelis across the frontier, both of them raring for a fight.

Now, with Hezbollah having raided an Israeli outpost a week and a half ago, and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers (a deliberate provocation), the IDF has been given an excuse to convert Lebanon, and its major cities, from Beirut to Tyre (the latter seaport city a Hezbollah stronghold) into toast.

In the meantime, the Hezbollah keep on sending waves of rockets into Israel. The Israelis are determined to finish them off – if they can find and catch them.

Poor Lebanon. But they ought to have known what was coming when they permitted the Iranian-sponsored, Syrian-backed Hezbollah (the "Party of God") to have the run of the place, while prosecuting their vow to eradicate Israel.

The Jews, with bitter second-and-third generation memories of the Holocaust, are determined they won’t be marched to the cadaver-ovens again, or barbecued Hitler-style, nor will they allow themselves to be shoved into the sea for drowning. They realize they’re fighting for their very lives.

The world condemns the "invasion" of another sovereign country like Lebanon. But are the Lebanese friend or foe? Alas, the murderous Hezbollah since 1982 have provided the Israelis with the answer to that question.

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How will we get our 30,000 OFWs out of the war zone? Most of them have headed for designated Catholic Churches and other safer havens. But 900 have registered themselves as eager and ready to go home.

The United States has sent four Navy ships to evacuate its citizens. The Brits have the Royal Navy and chartered vessels to also pluck out and ferry their own to Cyprus. The French and Canadians have done the same thing. They had to get "permission" and safe conduct from the Israeli Navy, which is blockading Lebanon and shelling targets on the shore. Shucks, even the Indian Navy has dispatched warships to rescue their nationals.

As for us, the government has announced it got "safe conduct" from the government in Jerusalem to permit the first batch of 100, with the rest to follow, to go by land to Damascus, Syria, where a waiting aircraft would fly them to Dubai – from where they could enplane for their onward flight to Manila. Let’s see what happens. There’s a horrendous traffic jam on the highway to the Syrian border, with everybody on wheels fleeing Israeli aerial and artillery attack.

The IDF might even decide to punch in, and once the Israeli juggernaut gets going, beware anybody in its path. The Hezbollah, and their other sponsors like the Syrians won’t take this intrusion sitting down. There will be more fireworks erupting everywhere than on a Chinese holiday.

Oh well. Our OFWs are used to getting it from every side, as when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and occupied it until dislodged by Desert Storm in the Second Gulf War. I remember how the occupying Iraqis raped some of our women workers, and savaged the rest of our OFWs.

The Americans, led by Dubya’s father, former US President George Bush Sr., beseeched the Israelis not to join in the fight, fearful of alienating the Saudis, and their other Arab allies in the coalition. The Jews reluctantly complied, keeping their jet warplanes locked in their hangers even though they were being attacked by Scud missiles fired by the Iraqis, I recall, however, slipping into Jerusalem from Abu Dhabi and Dubai at the end of the Gulf War. Israelis were wearing t-shirts proclaiming, "DON’T WORRY AMERICA, ISRAEL IS BEHIND YOU!"

What would the t-shirts (nowadays all Made in China) proclaim today: "DON’T WORRY ISRAEL, GEORGE IS BEHIND YOU"?