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In its attempt to fig-leaf its illegal war on Iraq by making it look like the work of a coalition rather than a unilateral drive for world dominance, the United States government now claims that several countries have joined the “coalition of the willing” but do not want to be identified. Those countries were not on the list of 30 countries the US State Department released March 18.

The US government could be lying about those “unwilling to be identified” nations as it lied about the “evidence” on Iraq’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program last month. Lacking evidence to the contrary, however, we can assume that it’s not lying, at least not this time—which leads us to ask why those countries don’t want to be mentioned at all, at least not in public.

There at least two possible reasons. One is that being part of the US war on Iraq is not only illegal but also so immoral that support for it is a shameful secret that must be kept hidden. The other is that the constituencies of those countries overwhelmingly oppose the war, and it would not be politically prudent—one has to think of elections in those countries that have them—to be seen as supporting a war that’s not only unpopular but apparently unnecessary.

Unpopular or not, immoral and illegal or not, insane or not, the United States has nevertheless launched its war for oil, in the process destabilizing the entire planet, making it a far more dangerous place for everyone and setting the stage for a vast humanitarian tragedy among the people of Iraq, of whom 600,000 to 3 million, say UN relief agencies, could end up refugees.

It is a measure of this war’s madness and stupidity that American commanders have for months been belittling Iraq’s capacity to resist—trotting out the statistics on its diminished, poorly trained army and aging equipment compared to the high-tech, overequipped US forces—while George W. Bush and company were describing Iraq as a threat to the United States and the world.

The countries that have allowed themselves to be used in the US effort to perpetrate the canard that “every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duties and share the honor of serving in our common defense” (Bush’s words) do have many things in common, not the least of them being their public acceptance of the US thesis.

They also share a common shamelessness which defies those very same precepts—honor and decency—that from Bush’s mouth on March 20 sounded exactly like the Devil quoting scripture. Many of them are in the “coalition” either out of fear of US sanctions or out of hope that they will be rewarded with US aid.

Their stated reasons for supporting the US war on Iraq thus echo US excuses because they can’t really find any of their own and must parrot those the US has already said. Over the last several months those “reasons” have ranged from Iraq’s supposedly being part of the conspiracy that led to the September 11, 2001, attacks because of its links with al-Qaeda (unproven), Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (unproven), to the need for regime change (the sole prerogative of the Iraqi people), to Iraq’s providing its probably nonexistent WMDs to terrorist groups (unlikely).

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who not surprisingly declared on Thursday her government’s support for the US war, thus echoed the last line straight out of US government briefings.

Joining the coalition was a difficult decision but necessary, said Mrs. Arroyo, because the worst thing that could happen would be for Iraq’s WMDs to fall into the hands of the Abu Sayyaf or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Just how compelling this argument is we can judge from the fact that, first, Iraq’s continuing possession of WMDs (provided them in the late 1980s by at least 24 US companies dealing in anthrax germs and nerve gas) is at the very worst unproven, as the reports of the UN inspectors show. Second, it presumes not only Iraq’s links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, about which both British and American intelligence agencies are skeptical, but also Abu Sayyaf and MILF links with the same terrorist network.

If the Abu Sayyaf had those links, they were developed during the US-supported, -armed and-funded Taliban campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Abu Sayyaf still had a semblance of ideological and religious principle. No intelligence agency of any repute (which excludes Philippine intelligence agencies) will argue the existence of those links now, when the Abu Sayyaf is no more than a bandit group.

As for the MILF, no such link has ever been claimed, much less established, except by the Philippine police and military, whose professional allegiance to credible intelligence is at least as doubtful as the Abu Sayyaf’s occasional claims of allegiance to the goal of an independent Muslim state.

Despite all the efforts expended by Bush and his coterie of far- Right Christian fundamentalists in the US government to convince the world of it, no links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein have ever been established by the Central Intelligence Agency or any other branch of US and British intelligence.

On the contrary. The United Kingdom’s MI-5 is credibly reported to have taken exception to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s efforts to make a public case for such links quite simply because there is no evidence to support that claim, just as the CIA, though not known for consistent adherence to the facts, has privately admitted the weakness of the US case.

To defend the claim that what the US is doing is preventing Iraq’s probably nonexistent weapons from falling into the hands of “our own terrorists” (Mrs. Arroyo’s words), those links would have to be established. The fact is that they haven’t been.

Mrs. Arroyo also parroted the US line that because the US failed to get UN sanction, then its “coalition,” which includes the Philippines, has to go it alone. Like her expression of support for the US war, this is a statement tantamount to supporting outlawry, since by using force against another country without UN sanctions, it is in patent violation of international law.

This makes the Arroyo argument just one more fig leaf in its long-running effort to conceal the real reasons for the Philippine government’s shameless expression of support not only for the war on Iraq but also for US global policy in its entirety. It is that the Arroyo administration has been bought into supporting an immoral and illegal war by being promised aid, whether military or otherwise—and that Mrs. Arroyo herself has been promised US support for whatever plans she’s cooking up before or during 2004, which could very well include her, or her surrogate’s, running for the presidency.

The consequences of this shameless pandering to the United States despite Philippine national interests’ (the Philippine economy, so dependent on the remittances of overseas Filipino workers, will undoubtedly suffer) and nationals’ (the Philippines has the most number of workers in the Middle East) being so obviously at risk the Arroyo administration has in effect ignored for the sake of its limited interests.

As if that were not treason enough, Mrs. Arroyo is also likely to be violating the Philippine Constitution, which renounces war as a national policy in keeping with its international obligations under the UN Charter. Apparently, and unlike those other countries supporting the US war but are too embarrassed to be identified with it, Mrs. Arroyo is not particularly ashamed of being involved in an immoral and illegal war for utterly self-serving reasons, and in violation of her country’s Constitution too. That makes her administration a fitting member of the coalition of the shameless—and in the same category of such aid-starved US dependencies as Ethiopia, Eritrea, Latvia and Azerbaijan.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, March 22, 2003)

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