The Arroyo Principle
April 28th, 2003
In one of those increasingly rare moments nowadays, Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople, who fancies himself a world-class diplomat trapped in a Third World country, was right. While his Cabinet colleagues were debating whether the 500-member “humanitarian mission” the Philippines plans to send to Iraq will be under the command of the United States forces there or of the United Nations, Ople declared that the debate was “irrelevant in light of the urgent need to act to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Iraq.”
It’s not to prevent a humanitarian disaster which makes the debate “irrelevant.” It’s the principle—if one can call it that—the Arroyo administration has so far observed on Iraq, meaning the war and its aftermath. The principle is that the Philippines will go with the strongest. Who has the weapons of mass destruction rules.
Which means that it is the United States “coalition” of three, not the UN, which will have command over the 500 Filipinos who’ll be in the “humanitarian mission” the country is sending. What’s not clear is who’ll be paying them once they’re in Baghdad, since this time, the UN won’t. As unclear as that issue is, the Arroyo administration—whose strategic sense is as limited as its current approval rating—is determined anyway to send the “mission” to Iraq as part of its continuing effort to prove its total devotion to the US government.
Mrs. Arroyo and Ople are therefore not about to contradict George W. Bush’s disdain for any UN role in the country his glorious army has just liberated from Saddam Hussein, its oil, and much of its cultural heritage (or, as US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld so sensitively put it, “a few old pots” looted from Iraq’s National Museum).
The overarching reason why the Arroyo administration is firmly committed to be the world’s best camp follower of the US to the extent of providing its forces the bases it needs to police Asia in The New American Century is the belief that such devotion will guarantee it US support (vital in elections and other exercises) for many more years to come. But there’s also that promise of 100,000 jobs from the US companies favored by the Bush clique (Halliburton and Bechtel are ahead of the pack; no non-US companies need apply).
Ople was therefore dead right in dismissing the debate—so fruitlessly premised on the quaint need to preserve the fiction of Philippine independence—as irrelevant. But Ople was wrong (as usual) in assuming that a humanitarian disaster has not already occurred in much of Iraq, in most of whose cities there is no electricity, water, food or adequate medical care for the population, among whom the cost of “liberation” is estimated to be about 10,000 deaths, and climbing.
It’s not just Saddam Hussein’s statues, but much of Iraq that’s in ruins, thanks not only to the rain of bombs and missiles the US forces let loose on that unhappy land, but also to the unerring marksmanship of US tank and artillery commanders whose prime directive appears to be to demolish anything that could be hiding an armed Iraqi—or even a journalist armed only with a laptop.
There are in fact reports that in one of its most recent displays of its overwhelming military might, the United States detonated its 23,000-pound superbomb—only a tad less powerful than a tactical nuclear bomb—somewhere in Iraq where Saddam Hussein was thought to be hiding.
The bomb missed Saddam, it seems, but killed tens of thousands in the process, and obliterated surrounding areas. Along with houses and trees, the bomb may be expected to have destroyed water pipelines (not as precious to the US as the oil pipelines and wells its forces began securing from day one of its invasion), markets, schools and hospitals.
Electrical power is not on this list because US bombers have already destroyed much of Iraq’s power-generating capacity—of course the better for it to be rebuilt by US Vice President Richard Cheney’s Halliburton company, which has cornered most of the contracts to “rebuild” Iraq.
Critics of the way the US government is handing out contracts without the benefit of public bidding say that some of the contracts defy logic. For example, there have been contracts to reorganize local governments and rebuild the educational system—all awarded exclusively to US companies because, says the US government, of security concerns.
Exactly what security concerns are involved in rebuilding schoolhouses and rehiring the teachers of which Iraq has an ample supply, the US government has not specified. This has led to the conclusion that, having spent billions on the destruction of Iraq, the US wants its companies, especially those close to its leadership, to profit from its reconstruction.
And there are profits to be made—by US Vice President Richard Cheney and Co.’s corporations among others, in an arrangement reminiscent of Nazi Germany, where no one could tell private business from the government. In one more demonstration that you can always fry anything in its own lard—or in this case, its own oil—the US will also be rebuilding Iraq using Iraqi oil money.
Never mind the legal niceties, which say that under international law the US can’t touch Iraqi oil. The US knows no law except that of the gun. It is thus the US that will decide who gets to do what in Iraq, being the 21st century’s first certified colonial power.
As if to make that fact even clearer, the US has rejected any critical role for the UN in Iraq except the “vital” one of providing humanitarian aid—and of legitimizing US occupation. About this no one—neither the UN nor the Germans, the Russians, the French or the Chinese, who are, in any case, already tripping over each other congratulating the US in the hope of sharing in the spoils—can do anything. US might makes right, and to the victors go the spoils. Unfortunately for the French, Russians, etc., the spoils are going to go exclusively to US companies.
But there is another sense in which the debate is irrelevant. The concern by some officials for Philippine sovereignty and for the possibility of being involved in the shooting war that’s likely to persist for some time in Iraq is far too late to be anything else but feeble attempts at preserving Philippine honor before the domestic and international communities.
The Arroyo administration after all was first in line in Asia to demand a UN mandate for the US attack on Iraq, and it is so far the first in much of the world to have appointed a new ambassador to Iraq although there is no Iraqi government with which he can be accredited.
The formation of the “humanitarian mission” was itself no less hurried and is transparently part of the pathetic, shameless and continuing Philippine campaign to curry favor with the United States and to be there when the US corporations start recruiting for peons when they rebuild what US forces have destroyed.
“We would like to take advantage of the huge opportunities in Iraq,” said a DFA spokesman last week, in that statement summarizing the core of Philippine policy not only on Iraq but the entire Middle East. The Department of Foreign Affairs, said this spokesman, was in fact in the middle of negotiating contracts with Halliburton et al. in the hope of profiting from its support for the destruction of Iraq.
What will be interesting is how the “mission” the Arroyo administration is sending—and later, whatever number of Filipino workers get to dig ditches in Iraq—will be received there and in the rest of the Middle East. Will they be welcomed as “liberators” or as collaborators in the destruction of Iraq, as Arab resentment over the US attack and its continuing military occupation worsens?
For such long-term concerns is current foreign policy not made, but for whatever crumbs from the US table Bush is willing to spare in exchange for what Claro M. Recto called canine devotion. Call it the Arroyo Principle.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, April 22, 2003)