Mission impossible
May 4th, 2003
The 500-person “humanitarian mission” the Arroyo government insists on sending to Iraq may not have any legal basis at all in that no one asked for it: not the U.N., not the Iraqis who now have no government to call their own, and not even Iraq’s current overlord, the United States.
Although the U.N. mission has returned to Iraq and is engaged in humanitarian relief and aid work, it should be obvious to anyone, except Malacañang and the Department of Foreign Affairs, that the U.N. doesn’t want any sizeable group in Iraq unfamiliar with the country, and whose security it can’t guarantee. (The U.N. has no peacekeeping forces in Iraq because the U.S. doesn’t want any.)
From all appearances, neither does the U.S. want the mission, and probably for the exact same reasons. Since the U.S. invasion, Iraq has become a very dangerous place and is likely to continue in that state.
(Take it from the journalists. Highlighting the death of 15 journalists in Iraq since the U.S. attack, the Committee to Protect Journalists predicts that “Banditry, gunfire, and physical attacks will likely make Iraq a dangerous assignment [for journalists] for the foreseeable future.”)
Over the last two days jittery U.S. troops—some of them presumably with brains enough to realize that they’re not wanted in Iraq, where there must be more guns per capita than in the U.S. itself (where one-fourth of the population is armed)—have killed at least 15 Iraqi participants in two demonstrations in the city of Falluja demanding that U.S. troops leave.
The latter claim that they had been fired upon, or that, in any case, the rocks the demonstrators were throwing at them looked like grenades, thus justifying the shootings. Although no similar shootings have occurred in Baghdad—at least none that the Western media have reported—similar demonstrations have been taking place there and in other cities as well, all with the same message: the U.S. troops must leave Iraq.
Unfortunately that would be a prescription for disaster both for the Iraqis as well as U.S. interests. Having destroyed the Iraqi government and much of civil society, only the presence of the U.S. troops is preventing widespread disorder and even civil war, which means that the U.S. forces will have to stay for some time, if only to make sure that all that oil under Iraqi sand can be accessed by U.S. multinationals. By attacking Iraq, the United States in effect created the need for its own presence.
The U.S. is in that sense bogged down in Iraq, in the quagmire many had predicted, caught between the consequences of its attack on Iraq and the need to achieve one of its most immediate aims there, which is to secure Iraqi oil, even as continuing violence and disorder reveals that the war the U.S. claims to have won is far from over.
Between having to deal with an armed, hostile population, restoring essential services like medical care, water and electricity, trying to prevent the Shi’ite mullahs from collaborating with the ayatollahs of neighboring Iran in agitating for an Islamic state, and keeping the Kurds of northern Iraq in check, the United States has its hands full.
Imagine the Philippine mission in Baghdad, all 500 of them scurrying around the ruins, messing around in the hospitals already staffed by competent Iraqi doctors, most of them trained in Europe.
Imagine the security personnel among them being placed under U.S. command, and imagine the Iraqis concluding that they too are fair game for their AK-47s, as part of the invading force that has reduced much of their country to rubble.
Now note the unwonted silence of the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines—the very same ambassador who has an opinion on everything including Filipino corruption—and realize that the U.S. doesn’t want that mission in Iraq, at least not at this time, because it will not serve current U.S. purposes.
But wanted or not, illegal or not, the mission will be sent, unless of course the United States outright and very clearly says no, in which case the Arroyo government will obediently comply. Without that explicit rejection, however, and despite what Filipino public opinion and legislators may say, Arroyo will send the mission.
For what earthly reason is becoming clearer by the minute. Initially an unthinking knee-jerk reaction meant to camouflage the Arroyo government’s totally mercenary reasons for supporting the U.S. war, the mission has become, in the ad hoc policy-making style so characteristic of Arroyo and her Jurassic Age Foreign Affairs Secretary, the physical means to remind the U.S. about the Arroyo government’s support for its invasion of Iraq.
It’s true that that support came merely in the form of fig-leafing U.S. unilateralism and contempt for world opinion by making it appear that there was a 35-country coalition behind the U.S. war, but it was support nevertheless. Now the bad news could be that, having “won the war,” the United States will conveniently forget the Philippines’ role in that ignoble enterprise. After all, the United States has already forgotten its British and Australians lackeys by excluding their companies from involvement in the reconstruction of Iraq.
As she has several times pointed out in case no one has been listening and as if it were something to be proud of, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo defied Philippine public opinion and earned a minus six negative approval rating by echoing the Bush government’s disdain for the U.N.’s refusal to sanction the use of force against Saddam Hussein, and by supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
That sacrifice can’t be for naught. At the very least it should be for the 30,000 jobs Roberto Romulo says awaits Filipino workers in Iraq—provided, however, that the United States government and the host of U.S. companies led by Bush’s crony companies Halliburton and Bechtel that have won the juicy contracts to rebuild Iraq with Iraqi oil money don’t forget.
(How easily the U.S. does forget, of course. The 25,000 veterans of World War II have dwindled to 8,000, but still haven’t received their benefits for fighting on the U.S. side 60 years ago, for example. And there’s that bell from Balangiga, Samar, which the U.S. agreed to return many years ago, but hasn’t.)
Thus the mission, which will be the Philippines’ way of saying “hey, don’t forget us; we want our reward,” which the Arroyo government hopes will consist not only of the jobs it can’t provide here at home, but also of the $30 million in military aid that will further enhance the capacity of the Armed Forces to hire more CAFGUs and assassins to kill community activists.
The risks are of course considerable, and the Arroyo government knows it. The mission members can be shot at, and their presence in Iraq under U.S. control (they cannot be otherwise, the U.S. occupation forces being the only organized armed power in Iraq) could serve as a reminder to the entire Arab world that the country from where they get most of their construction workers and domestics supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
And has anyone done a survey on the ground in that country to find out how welcome to the Iraqis the mission would be? The Philippine mission could very well be as unwelcome as the U.S. troops, and equally regarded as ignorant interlopers (official Philippine sources, for example, seem to assume that Iraq lacks doctors, whereas it doesn’t). And to what extent would it succeed in keeping the Philippines visible in the eyes of U.S. policy makers, whose current triumphalism attributes what the U.S. claims to have achieved in Iraq solely to the superiority of U.S. arms?
Given these uncertainties, the mission doesn’t make sense. If it does go on, despite the voices of reason that say the risks are too great, and the rewards uncertain, this mission could turn out to be, in more ways than one, truly impossible.
(abs-cbnNEWS.com, May 2, 2003)