LuisTeodoro.com

Filipino opposition to a US invasion of Iraq was never premised on doubts that the United States would not prevail. But that was exactly what President Arroyo was saying the other day in downplaying her minus 14 approval rating for March.

Rather than wait for the Social Weather Stations to release that part of the results of its March 10-25 survey, Malacañang beat SWS to it. But both Palace spokesman Ignacio Bunye and Mrs. Arroyo herself suggested that those results are likely to be temporary. Now that the US Coalition of Three has emerged “victorious,” Mrs. Arroyo said, her approval ratings should improve.

Mrs. Arroyo is of course right in attributing the precipitous drop in her approval rating— from plus something as 2002 ended, to negative 14 last month—to her support for the US invasion of Iraq. That support has invariably been described as “staunch” by the Malacañang Press Office, but is more accurately characterized by words like “mindless,” “self-serving,” “short-sighted” and—that word straight out of the Estrada regime—“stupid.”

But it seems that in these past many months, Mrs. Arroyo has entirely missed the reasons Filipinos—or at least those among them who have not lost the capacity for thought—oppose the US war on Iraq.

Someone in Malacañang—perhaps the brilliant minds that coined the appalling phrase “strong Republic”—should explain to Mrs. Arroyo that far from fearing that the United States might be defeated, Filipinos feared that a US attack on Iraq would directly put the millions of overseas Filipino workers in the Middle East in harm’s way, particularly those in Iraq and Kuwait.

But she should also be told that others feared as well that Philippine government support for the US would endanger OFWs in a less direct way—by being targeted for attack or harassment in the Arab societies now seething with rage over the US war of aggression for Iraqi oil. Immigrant groups report that for much of the past month since March 20, Filipino workers in the Gulf have had to deny their citizenship for fear of Arab anger. The same immigrant groups fear that the US “victory”—one has to put it between quotation marks because the conflict is likely to drag on for months—will make matters worse, not better.

To these reasons add humanitarian concerns, compassion and principle.

An attack on Iraq was likely to cost thousands in civilian casualties, despite US claims about how smart its bombs are. This fear has proven to be tragically well-founded.

A rain of 3,000 bombs and missiles on a densely populated city will inevitably kill noncombatants, cluster bombs being especially indiscriminate.

What is a cluster bomb? Mrs. Arroyo’s experts in the military should inform her for her edification that a cluster bomb is actually made up of 200 to 700 smaller bombs. Each of these bombs fragments into hundreds of pieces of steel when it explodes, decapitating people, severing arms, legs, hands and feet, and shredding bodies into ribbons.

Cluster bombs have been released over Iraq by US warplanes flying at high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft fire. Because these bombs are preset to release their “bomblets,” they killed and are still killing indiscriminately and horribly, as they did in the US war against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1970s.

There are reports from hospital workers and independent (non-“embedded”) journalists of people dismembered by these bombs in addition to many others including children charred beyond recognition by other US superbombs and missiles—some of them so “accurate” they miss their targets not only by blocks but even by country (one landed in Iran, another in Turkey).

Those who opposed the war, in short, recognized their common humanity with the Iraqis, rather than with the Bush-Blair wrecking crew. They foresaw that Saddam Hussein and company, with their vast network of palaces, bunkers and tunnels, were likely to escape the bombing, but that ordinary Iraqis won’t. (There are indeed reports from the Arab TV network al-Jazeera that the US government is in negotiations to guarantee Saddam Hussein, his family and his officials a safe haven somewhere in return for his surrender.)

Which leads to the matter of principle. The United States went into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, replace him with a puppet (who, it turns out, is an embezzler wanted in Jordan, where a jail term awaits him), and thus gain access to all that lovely Iraqi oil. From there, all indications are that the US will go on to affect “regime change” through subversion, blackmail, propaganda and even war in the rest of the Middle East, the better to assure the satisfaction of its voracious appetite for oil, and the better to assure the future of its partner in crime, Israel, which has illegally occupied Palestine for over 30 years.

In Iraq as in Palestine, the principle at stake is the right of the people of each nation to self-determination. That principle, incidentally inscribed in the US Constitution, was among those that drove EDSA 1 and 2, both of which were more than a few Filipinos hamming it up for US TV cameras.

From “embedded” TV cameras Mrs. Arroyo saw Iraqis of the same type as the Filipinos who rioted on May 1, 2001, in Manila toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue and defacing his portraits.

Those were the images Mrs. Arroyo saw over the Murdoch channel Fox News and CNN — a Time Warner company that might as well be an official US news agency—and she concluded that it was EDSA all over again, except that it’s in Baghdad.

Wrong. EDSA 1 was not achieved at the cost of a foreign invasion and the permanent presence of foreign troops, thousands of noncombatant lives, the ruin of one of the most modern cities in the Middle East, and the destruction of the artifacts, crucial to the entire human race, kept in Iraq’s museums of antiquities.

Filipinos exercising the sovereign right to remove a hated government and to install in its place a government of their choice achieved it. EDSA 1 was also achieved, despite 14 years of armed resistance to martial rule by the revolutionary underground, with no loss in civilian life, and at no cost to either culture or infrastructure.

It was, in short, achieved without the US wrecking crew that Mrs. Arroyo so fully and ecstatically supports despite reason and the country’s best interests. This is a wrecking crew expert in demolition but thoroughly indifferent to rebuilding what it has destroyed, as it is right now demonstrating in Afghanistan.

Remember that country? It was supposed to be the first front in the US “war on terrorism” in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The United States affected regime change there 18 months ago, replacing the Taliban—which it had once funded, armed and supported—with a pliant Afghani named Hamid Karzai, whose official title is “President,” but who is little more than mayor of Kabul, the capital.

Karzai has been pleading for US aid for months. The entire country is still in shambles, but not one cent has been appropriated for aid to Afghanistan in the new US budget. Karzai is under constant threat from the warlords of the so-called Northern Coalition which helped the US destroy the Taliban and much of what remained of Afghanistan. The principal crop is still poppy (the source of heroin). Fighting is increasing in many parts of the country, and has involved US Special Forces, which have taken more than 200 casualties. The country is even more unstable and insecure than during Taliban rule.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda are recruiting a new generation of suicide bombers outraged by the destruction of Iraq and its “liberation” at the cost of its right to self-determination.

The results of the US attack are exactly as those opposed to the war predicted: that the US attack will not make the world any safer, but more dangerous; that it will be at the cost of thousands of innocent lives; that it will be only the first war in a new century of perpetual war; and that it will be at no one else’s benefit but the US clique of militarists, world conquerors and asset-grabbers, otherwise known as the oil companies.

To that list add one more: a long period of instability, uncertainty, economic hardship, mass suffering and despair in an Iraq once ruled by a despot, but which will be governed for a time by a US military governor. Eventually, so the US says, the embezzler and his cohorts, with the backing of 200,000 foreign troops, will rule the “new Iraq.”

It is for these that thousands of Iraqis died, and for which thousands more will die. And it is their killers and the wrecking crew Mrs. Arroyo has gone to bed with. Her minus 14 rating is, by these lights, still too high.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, Apirl 12, 2003)

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