LuisTeodoro.com

Defending her administration’s support for the United States determination to make war on Iraq as well as her government’s subservience to US interests, President Arroyo told the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of the Philippines the other day that “we are not doing this to please the United States.”

The Philippine government is in violation of the Constitution, and has denied the painful lessons of its history. It has undermined its own frail sovereignty by allowing foreign troops to intervene in its domestic affairs, and this October is welcoming an additional 1,000 others. It is supporting the US demand for a new UN Security Council resolution that would make war against Iraq automatic if Iraq does not meet near-impossible US conditions.
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Former U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Stephen Bosworth says the United States will attack Iraq “between now and the end of February” 2003.

The chances for such an attack are now 70 percent, said Bosworth, which is not to say much that’s new.
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Despite United States claims that in the event of an attack on Iraq the use of its most advanced war technology will destroy only military targets as well as Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces suspected of concealing weapons of mass destruction, some collateral damage—civilian deaths—is certain. No intelligence and no bomb are ever infallible or smart enough to pinpoint and destroy only military targets all the time while humanely sparing noncombatants.
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Declared defeated in so many words by the President of this rumored Republic herself, as well as by her subalterns in the military, the Abu Sayyaf (or its ghost) appears to have planted a bomb in Zamboanga the other day, injuring several people and killing one American soldier and two Filipinos, one of the Filipinos being the bomber himself—or so say the police.

This is the same kidnap-for-ransom group—a foreign terrorist organization according to the United States State Department because of its past (and now nonexistent) links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network—for which some 600 US troops were deployed in Zamboanga and Basilan from January to July this year during the Balikatan military exercises.
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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.
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Last Saturday I said that the impending US war against Iraq is driven by the US aim to procure as many of the world’s oil resources as possible, in the course of which it would not balk at creating a global empire.

I owe readers of this column an apology. The empire does not need creating; it is already here. It was born over a hundred years ago during the US’s “splendid little war” (Theodore Roosevelt’s words) with Spain—in the course of which the United States conquered at the cost of a million native lives a country newly emerging from Spanish colonial rule, turned it into its own colony and forward military base and coaling station for nearly 50 years, and formally released it only after the Second World War, but kept it firmly within its orbit of influence.
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It’s at least partly about oil, if not primarily about it and only dimly about antiterrorism—the determination of the Bush administration and its chief altar boy Tony Blair of the United Kingdom to wage war on Iraq.

Iraq’s proven oil reserves are estimated at 115 billion barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia’s 261 billion. The Iraqi government is building up these reserves to an eventual 300 billion barrels.
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