LuisTeodoro.com

The Philippine government declared last week its support for the US attack on Iraq after a few days of feigned agony over the issue. That its agony was feigned was evident from President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s statements, made since a month ago, that were clearly supportive of the US position on the Iraqi crisis.

Among other statements, Mrs. Arroyo had criticized the United Nations for its refusal to be stampeded by the United States into authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Earlier she had announced that she had been “convinced” of the need for the invasion of Iraq by the February UN presentation of US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

That Powell’s presentation was not at all convincing to either the UN Security Council or to millions of thinking men and women all over the world suggested that Mrs. Arroyo had been “convinced” all along. Powell could have held up photos of moon craters and claimed them to be Iraqi laboratories, and Mrs. Arroyo would have still been “convinced.”

There was also the matter of the expulsion of an Iraqi diplomat from Manila, whom the Arroyo government accused of funding the Abu Sayyaf on no more evidence than the scripted say-so of the Philippine’s so-called “intelligence” agencies. That act tended to validate the US claim that Iraq was in collusion with the Al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, with which the Abu Sayyaf had links in the early 1990s.

No one aware of all of these, or of its efforts to return US troops and “facilities” to the Philippines despite the Constitutional ban on foreign troops and military bases really believed that the Arroyo government ever seriously weighed its options in the light of national interests. When as expected it did announce that it could be counted among the 35 countries, most of them aid-starved and/or US dependencies, that were part of George W. Bush’s “Coalition of the willing,” no one was surprised.

The only question was what form the Arroyo government’s support for a war likely to result in a humanitarian tragedy of unprecedented proportions would take, given its announcement that it would not send troops—for which the United States never asked, anyway.

Since the US launched its war for oil last week, however, the Philippine role in the US campaign for “regime change” in Iraq through the illegal use of force is becoming clearer. It is to contribute to the fall of the Iraqi government by harassing its diplomats in Manila first, and its nationals second, in a calculated attempt to force Baghdad to cut diplomatic ties with the Philippines. By pandering to the United States, the Arroyo government also hopes to profit from the destruction of Iraq and its people’s misery through involvement in its post-war reconstruction.

Apparently there are more ways than one to be part of an illegal war. A day after it began its open aggression against Iraq on March 19, the United States called on some 62 countries to cut diplomatic ties with that country and to expel Iraqi diplomats, claiming that they spied for Iraq and endangered US security. The intent was to isolate Iraq diplomatically and thus undermine the Iraqi government’s claims to legitimacy.

Every embassy is presumed to be “spying”—in the sense of amassing information, some of it sensitive, on the host country—to advance its government’s interests. It’s a stupid host country which presumes that the staff members of foreign embassies are in residence to attend cocktail parties and indulge in small talk during official dinners.

Intelligence personnel are thus part of any embassy’s staff. United States Embassies, for example, have Central Intelligence Agency operatives among their own staffs, just as other countries keep intelligence officers in residence in their embassies. In times of conflict or impending conflict, the embassies of the countries involved may be reasonably expected to focus on the gathering of intelligence on its presumptive enemies.

We may thus safely assume that this was and is the case with the Iraqi embassy—but that it is also the case with the US, British and Australian embassies in Manila, which embassies, in any case, have always maintained significant levels of intelligence-gathering in this country and elsewhere. If certain Iraqi embassy personnel have been or are engaged in espionage, so are certain members of the US, British and Australian embassy staffs.

To the US “request” to cut diplomatic ties with Iraq, the Philippines officially reacted with the pious claim that it will not do so merely on the say so of the United States—and then proceeded to deport Iraqi diplomats and nationals on grounds a number of Philippine lawmakers have characterized as flimsy, and worse, as meant to demonstrate Philippine subservience to Washington.

Although it had earlier expelled an Iraqi diplomat for no other reason than his attending anti-war rallies, the Arroyo government’s actions since March 19 have been transparently in obedience to the US “requests”.

On March 21 it arrested 11 Iraqi nationals as part of a government crackdown. It began deportation proceedings against them on March 22, and on March 25 gave two staff members of the Iraqi embassy 72 hours to leave the country.

In expelling Iraqi diplomats on no other basis than “information” its less than professional intelligence agencies had apparently been ordered to manufacture—among them the outrageous lie that Iraqi diplomats are funding such peace forums as that one sponsored by the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila and Miriam College– the Philippine government is courting isolation in the ASEAN region, where only Singapore has demonstrated almost the same level of subservience to Washington.

Malaysia, for example, rejected the US demand outright, and has not expelled a single Iraqi diplomat. Thailand has acted with similar discretion. Unlike the Arroyo government, the Thaksin government did not suddenly find evidence of espionage among Iraqi diplomats as an excuse to expel them, and it has, to date, done nothing to harass the Iraqis within its territory. The largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, which has condemned the US attack on Iraq as illegal and immoral, the United States did not even bother to ask to expel Iraqi diplomats because it won’t.

At the same time that the Philippine government is risking isolation in ASEAN, it is doing the same in the Arab League, the member countries of which host the 1.5 million Overseas Filipino Workers deployed in the Middle East as construction workers, engineers, domestics, etc. The members of the Arab League, with the exception of Kuwait, have condemned the war on Iraq as contrary to international law.

By summarily arresting Iraqi nationals and lining them up for deportation, the Arroyo government is on the other hand identifying itself with those other US client states for which human rights are of no consequence. What’s worse is that by deporting these nationals back to Iraq, this same government is actually exposing them to the risk of being arrested, imprisoned, or worse in their own country.

A number of Iraqi nationals arrested on the charge that they are spying for the Iraqi government are actually refugees who have been in the country for years and who’re married to Filipino women. At least one has UN refugee status, and has been in the country since 1993. Several more, say the Iraqis’ lawyers, are also UN-recognized refugees who fled Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.

There is also the possibility that all these acts will not go unnoticed in the circles of the extremists who regard the US and whoever collaborates with it in the attack on Iraq as infidels out to destroy Islam. Through these actions the Arroyo government is also courting a greater peril: that of terrorist attacks—this time real and not manufactured like the bombing of the Davao airport—in its territory and against its citizens.

It is difficult to fathom the motives behind the Philippine government’s only too obvious effort to please the United States at its own people’s expense, and at the cost of its standing in those groups of nations whose goodwill is critical to its future in a world ruled by a superpower of ephemeral loyalties to even its most ardent panderers, and whose friendship is based solely on its own interests.

The government of Saddam Hussein was after all itself once a United States client. It was the US that provided Iraq the biological and chemical weapons that it acquired before 1991 (but which, says the UN inspection team, it appears to have destroyed) when it suited US interests. That the United States is now attacking that same government should be a lesson to anyone about the uncertainty of total commitment to it to the extent of alienating the rest of the world, and making enemies of former friends.

The Arroyo foreign policy, however, can apparently look no farther than the present. The capacity to imagine a future different from today, and to plan for all of the possibilities that can be reasonably anticipated in the coming years are at the very heart of competent policy making. Apparently the future is not something with which the Arroyo government is concerned, however. That explains why its foreign policy is not being made in Manila, but in Washington.

(abs-cbnNEWs.com, March 26, 2003)

Comments RSS