A credible assessment, or wishful thinking?
October 5th, 2002
The country can only hope that the Cabinet and the National Security Council are right. The truth is that that’s about the only option it has under the circumstances.
In a joint meeting Tuesday, the members of both groups present arrived at the conclusion that the impending U.S. war against Iraq—a foregone certainty in the view of analysts the world over—would be over in a matter of days.
The officials in attendance said the war would also be contained in Iraq rather than spill over into surrounding countries, and would not affect the one million Filipinos in the Middle East, of which an estimated 60,000 are in Iraq.
President Arroyo said “there is no cause for undue alarm,” a statement that was either carefully thought out or recklessly made without regard for the English language, since certainly any alarm that is undue is by definition also unjustified.
Assuming it was a case of linguistic recklessness and that what Mrs. Arroyo meant to say was that “there is no cause for alarm,” this sanguine evaluation is the basis for the government’s shelving earlier thoughts to evacuate Filipinos as the government of Corazon Aquino did during the 1991 Gulf War. Instead of evacuation, “relocation to safer ground” of the Filipino workers in the Middle East would be enough, said Mrs. Arroyo.
Her national security adviser, Roilo Golez, said the war would be over in days because of America’s advanced technology and overwhelming military superiority, and not in the weeks or even months that some analysts have been predicting. Unfortunately, this optimism is not shared even by U.S. military planners, who do want a quick end to any war they will be ordered to launch against Iraq, but who are not certain that they will get what they wish for.
U.S. military analysts, said the Washington Post last month, are preparing an invasion force of as many as 200,000 troops. The deployment of ground troops, however, will be preceded by massive air strikes with hundreds of missiles, bombers and fighter aircraft targeting anti-aircraft systems, missile sites and any aircraft including modified crop dusters that Saddam Hussein could use to deliver chemical and biological weapons.
That first phase would then proceed to the second, which is the destruction of secret police headquarters, intelligence facilities, presidential palaces, the Republican Guards who constitute Saddam Hussein’s corps of bodyguards, and other regime supporters.
All this—plus hitherto secret weaponry the U.S. may deploy—suggests the use of overwhelming air power, after which ground troops would have to move in to secure key installations and cities, among the latter the capital, Baghdad.
The war would end quickly, however, only if three things occur or fall into place:
1. If, as anticipated, key units of the Iraqi military either refuse to fight or choose to join the invading forces together with whatever segments of the Iraqi opposition the U.S. is able to arm and mobilize. If this does not happen, the alternative scenario—that of U.S. troops’ having to besiege cities like Baghdad and to secure them “block by block,” could happen;
2. If, despite the threat of imminent defeat, Saddam Hussein is unable to launch missiles or modified aircraft to deliver chemical and biological weapons because his air capability has been sufficiently crippled. If he is able to do so anyway, he is likely to target Israel as well as invading forces. Israel in that event is likely to retaliate, an eventuality which could lead to a “general war” in all of the Middle East; and
3. If the Iraqi population does not rally in support of the government. If it does, the war is likely to drag on for two or three months, with the U.S. emerging victorious but with the long-term prospect of having to deal with a hostile population, among whom, as in Afghanistan, there would likely be resistance groups that will continue to harass U.S. ground troops.
The failure of any of these scenarios—or worse, all three of them—to occur will mean prolonged war lasting months rather than days. A prolonged siege of Baghdad would put the lives of the Filipinos working there in danger, unless the “safer ground” the Arroyo government is referring to means well outside the Middle East, in which case it might as well be the Philippines.
An Iraqi missile attack on Israel would trigger a region-wide war which would put all one million Filipinos in the region in danger. In fact this eventuality could even lead to nuclear war in the region, widening to include the rest of the globe.
Should the third hoped-for event happen, the war would not only last for two to three months. It would also mean, in the aftermath, extremely fluid, unpredictable and dangerous conditions for anyone in Iraqi cities including—perhaps specially—Baghdad, where the bulk of Filipino workers are concentrated.
The National Security Council-Cabinet evaluation is thus iffier than Mrs. Arroyo’s sanguine tone suggests. It may be that the Arroyo government cannot help but hope for the best quite simply because it has neither the means nor the enthusiasm to evacuate back to the Philippines as many as possible of the Filipino workers in the Middle East.
The P200 million it has allocated for evacuating Filipinos “should an emergency arise” (would not an actual shooting war constitute such an emergency?) is laughable for its inadequacy, for example. But perhaps even more crucial in the consideration of the Arroyo government would be the economic, social, and—not the least—the political consequences of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos’ returning to a Philippines without jobs, without future prospects, and without hope.
The disaffection of such a large population of the disgruntled, denied the one single option—leaving the country for greener pastures—that had given them any hope for better lives would have a ripple effect on the rest of the population in 2004, and one suspects that that possibility was also in the collective minds of the joint Cabinet-National Security Council meeting Tuesday.
In these circumstances the only option available to the rest of the country is to believe that, as the meeting predicted—and hopes—the U.S. war on Iraq will indeed end in a matter of days, and not the months that the worst case scenario predicts.
(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 2, 2002)