LuisTeodoro.com

Of course there will be war.

The conclusion is inescapable not only because of US President George W. Bush’s virtual declaration of one against Iraq during his State of the Union address on Wednesday (Tuesday in the US). It proceeds even more fundamentally from the logic of the so-called case the US has been trying to make for months against Saddam Hussein, as well as from its long-term intentions in the Middle East.
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To expect the United States not to attack Iraq would be to believe the impossible. It has massed and is continuing to position troops that could number as many as 150,000 in the Gulf region, prepared its military bases to support an attack, enlisted the cooperation of countries like Turkey to allow the use of the latter’s bases by U.S. troops, positioned carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf, and continues to escalate its rhetoric.
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The Catholic Church is of course correct. Population control is not the solution to poverty.

The solution is elsewhere: in the reform and even dismantling of the unjust economic and social structures of society, which in many cases cannot be achieved without the transfer of political power from one class to another—or at least the thorough, noncosmetic, authentic democratization of power.
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As more and more people, including Americans, are finding out, it’s not so much the “axis of evil” the world has to fear as the people who made up that phrase.

An “axis of evil” was how US President George Bush referred to Iraq, Iran and North Korea last year, identifying those countries as “rogue states” whose alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction threatens the world.
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Commemorated on January 20, when Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. swore then-Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo into the presidency, the second anniversary of People Power 2 this year occurred less than three weeks after Mrs. Arroyo’s December 30 speech.

Ever hopeful, although perhaps clutching at straws, many Filipinos thought that by announcing her withdrawal from the 2004 presidential elections, Mrs. Arroyo would refocus her government’s priorities towards the reforms implicit in People Power 2’s successful campaign to oust then-President Joseph Estrada.
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A constitution is so fundamental to a country’s self-awareness, so critical to the goals it has set for itself and the means it has adopted to attain them, that it should be the product of rigorous analysis of a society’s needs at particular junctures of its history, as well as of the most thoughtful debate among the sectors and classes in a diverse society.

Although several nonpolitical groups are urging Charter changes, it is the politicians who have been most clearly identified with the current call for them. And yet partisan politics has been our ruin, because driven almost solely by self-interest—the kind of self-interest that can’t withstand either rational analysis or serious thought, and which can flourish only by ram-rodding self-interested changes, usually for the worst, through a politicized and mindless process.
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The dismissal from the service of a policeman accused of killing a Mindanao journalist, and of his former superior, would be encouraging if it had been the result of normal institutional processes in this country—processes that in other countries take place as a matter of course.

The dismissals of the two persons that the National Police chief Hermogenes Ebdane described in his order as “an insult” to the police, and as “unprofessional,” respectively, should have proceeded as part of the normal chain of events, as should have the workings of the justice system.
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