Bushwhacked by Iraq

La Presidenta GMA won’t toss Defense Secretary Avelino "Nonong" Cruz out of her Cabinet – that’s for sure. Even if she were irritated at Secretary Cruz’ remarks that the "People’s Initiative" was a "harebrained idea", etc., Realpolitik demands that she come home with a warm abrazo and a smiling face for Nonong.

The Administration officials who have been blustering angrily against the 8-7 Supreme Court decision, and grumbling about the DND Secretary’s former connections with The Firm (now infirm in La Gloria’s eyes) and his former partner Justice Antonio Carpio – the ponente of the High Court resolution junking the "People’s Initiative" – have been told from abroad to shut up.

Disunity in the Cabinet is what’s not needed at this juncture. Indeed, the opposition would jump on any expulsion or purge and call it "Hyatt 10" Part Two. In sum, you can bet, unless he himself decides to exit, Nonong is assured of staying "happily" in the Cabinet family. Any shakeup in the Department of Defense, after all, would give some still restive young Turkeys in the military, fired by ambition and the usual "messianic" complex, an excuse to once more invoke their "constitutional" role as "the guardian of the nation" and attempt to mount a putsch. Enough nonsense, please. Let’s just simmer down and get back to work.

Looking at the photograph of the leaders of our fellow ASEAN countries who met with China’s Premier Wen Jiabao in Nanning, China, we’re reminded that so many of our neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have passed us by economically and in the world’s esteem. Luckily for us, La Gloria still held center-stage at their one-day summit since she’s this year’s ASEAN Chairperson. This provided her with a major speaking role and a photo opportunity.

Being a sinner stranded on All Saints’ Day in this vale of tears, I wish our politicians and leaders would learn to work together for our people’s welfare, security and progress instead of daily attempting to tear each other apart. This is not democracy we’re practicing – it’s idiocy.

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Political strife has begun to engulf the world’s only democratic superpower, too – particularly in this frenzied period in which America’s Mid-term elections (on November 7th) are only a week away.

The Bush-bashing is escalating, since – although he’s not personally in the race – President George W. Bush and the Iraq War have become the major issue in the campaign.

The awful truth is that many of his own Republicans, who’re running for reelection in the House of Representatives and the Senate, have not been asking the harassed President Dubya to join them in their campaign rallies, some even trying to actively dissociate themselves from Mr. Bush.

There’s gloom in the Republican camp, and great expectations in the Democratic Party caravan – but nothing’s a sure thing. The Democrats, as Mr. Bush himself defiantly huffed in a nationally-televised White House press conference last week, are already posturing in "the end zone", even looking around for new furniture for their offices in the Hill and homes in D.C. – but he still predicts a Republican electoral victory. Sorry to say, the besieged American President’s expressed "confidence" that the Republicans will hang on to their dominance in Senate and House are not reflected in the surveys. TIME magazine whose US Election Review came off the press yesterday points out that at his Gallup-poll peak just after 9/11, the President enjoyed 90 percent approval but now he's in the dumps, having sunk in approval to the depths of 31 percent last May.

How Bush must envy Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who announced a few days ago that he will abide by Constitutional term limits and not seek a third term. After six years in office, Putin enjoys a 75 percent approval rating, and will be only 55 years old when he steps down in 2008. (He could, after all, stand again for President in 2012 after a four-year break). Do you think Mr. Putin, who’s become a virtual Czar in his bid to reconstruct the power and reach of the old Soviet Union – without Communism, of course – will be content to sit back and not to be the whispering "consultant" of his handpicked successor? Not likely. Putin’s good fortune is that he brought Russia up from being the sick man of Europe after the disintegration of the old USSR and the boozy reign of Boris Yeltsin, into economic success – owing to the growing importance of that vast country’s oil and gas reserves. Western Europe may be 46 percent dependent in the years to come on the gas and oil that is piped out of Russia. As for the KGB, from whence Mr. Putin sprang, it’s now termed in acronym the FSI, with a friendlier face but, perhaps, the same bad habits.

In sharp contrast, Bush had to return to the hustings in his home state of Texas where, even in the Panhandle, the Republican bulwark is under challenge.

Yet, who knows? Americans, although reeling from the wounds inflicted on them by Iraq, may surprise everybody and themselves by deciding to give Bush and his Republicans a sudden reprieve. All that relentless Bush-bashing and Bush-whacking, with the television screens and airwaves filled with political venom, may become – some analysts say – counter-productive. That is the Bush pangkat’s forlorn hope.

It may be salutary, after November 7th and the election count are over, for the US to reassess its options in Iraq. The Americans, for instance, can begin a draw-down from the current level of 144,000 US servicemen fighting in Iraq. With sectarian strife becoming daily more murderous, with Shiites murdering Sunnis, Sunnis murdering Shiites, the Kurds ready to secede – all of them Muslims hating one another – Iraq may be going to hell in a handcart without any help or hindrance from the "surrounded" American grunts and GIs. As statistics show, more than two-thirds of the 300,000 Iraqis who were killed since the invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Insane more than three years ago, were murdered in sectarian strife.

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For that matter, is the government of Iraq’s Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki (who’s not America’s friend, despite US insistence on good relations with him) worth all the heartbreak on the ground, and the big hole it has torn in America’s pockets? The United States has trained and equipped more than 300,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen. The US spent $133 million on the Iraqi defense forces’ weapons program and $666 million on building up Iraqi logistics capabilities.

Yet, The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune reported yesterday that US Department of Defense officials are worried about whether the Iraqi government can take over the operation and financing of its own security forces.

In fact, in an assessment of Iraqi weaponry, the DOD’s inspector general has concluded that most of the 503,093 weapons given by the US to the Iraqi ministries of interior and defense over the last few years are not traceable, since serial numbers for only 12,128 of these individual weapons were "properly recorded". The untracked weapons include rocket-propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, semi-automatic pistols – and sniper rifles. Possibly, some of those very sniper rifles are being used by guerrillas and mujahideen to pick off American marines and other servicemen as they walk through markets, or patrol the streets.

Of those weapons, the dispatch said, "370,000 were purchased with American taxpayers’ money under what is called the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund, or IRRF."

By golly, I wish they could have given the Philippine armed forces some of those weapons with which to combat terrorism and insurgency here in our archipelago.

The gloomy cover of "TIME" magazine (November 5 issue) depicts President Bush stepping off the margin of the page, accompanied by the cover headline: "THE LONE RANGER." The subtitle says of Dubya: "He’s faltering in Iraq. He’s out of favor with his own party. He’s increasingly isolated. Why this US election is all about George W. Bush and the world he created."

Cruel and concise – a vintage TIME cover put-down.

"NEWSWEEK" is only marginally less bleak. It shows four American marines, backs to the camera, trudging off into the desert under the banner: "America is losing, but all isn’t lost." The cover byline of Fareed Zakaria promises: "The Road Out of Iraq."

Maybe the entire tragedy could be entitled, with apologies to the movie, "Exit Wounds."