Mrs. Arroyo’s reward
October 27th, 2003
US President George W. Bush is visiting Asia ostensibly to attend the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Thailand But he’s also in the region to convince the Japanese to support their government’s decision to send troops to Iraq, to boost citizen support for the governments of Thailand and the Philippines, and over-all, to consolidate the US anti-terrorist alliance in Asia.
To achieve all these he needs friendly regimes in power in the region, where there is none friendlier than the Arroyo government.
But first things first.
The Bush government has discovered that it’s far easier to occupy a country than to secure it. Although together with its British partners it attacked Iraq last March with only token support from other countries, the US has since found that it needs help in the aftermath.
Iraq must be secured, and electricity, water, health and other services restored so Bush’s crony corporations can rebuild what the US military destroyed. But resistance against the occupation continues, and US soldiers are overworked, tired, and eager to return home. The costs of the occupation are also escalating for the US government, whose trillion-dollar budget deficit can only increase as a result.
The US corporations may be having a grand time under Bush, whose tax cuts and cronyism have made Halliburton and Bechtel, among others, more profitable than ever. But ordinary US citizens are hurting. They have not only lost an unprecedented three millions jobs during Bush’s watch. They’re also losing their sons and daughters in the war for oil and reconstruction contracts from which only Bush and his cronies will benefit.
There are limits to what the world’s only superpower can do alone. To clean up the mess the US is so expert at unilaterally creating, the US needs the help of other countries. Thus Bush’s harping on the theme of having to defend democracy by fighting the war against terror, and of the Asian countries’—including the Philippines’—responsibility to share its costs.
But George W. Bush is not only a businessman who happens to be US President. He is also a politician up for reelection in 2004 who has to maintain his popularity at a high enough level for him to win in November next year. He has to show the folks back home that the US attack on Iraq and its occupation was justified, and that its allies are willing to put the lives of their own citizens and soldiers on the line.
American troops are getting killed everyday in Iraq as the resistance to US occupation gathers both strength and sophistication, and it’s costing Bush points at home. His swing through Asia is thus also meant to change developing domestic perceptions that the war on Iraq was a mistake, and his foreign policy a disaster.
Thus did Bush visit Australia first—and described it as the US “sheriff” in the region—to thank it for the troops that it committed to the attack on Iraq last March and who are still in Iraq, trying to police it together with their US counterparts. But the real Bush triumph would be if Japan, despite its citizens’ opposition, were to announce in the aftermath of his visit that it would dispatch within the year the troops it has committed to send to Iraq. That triumph may yet come, although in exchange Japan is demanding a share in the profits to be made in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Where does the Philippines figure in these calculations? As Bush himself pointed out in his address to the Philippine Congress, the Arroyo government was one of the first in the world to support the US “war on terror” in 2001. That support was unconditional and was expressed even before it was asked, and with the assurance that the Philippines would support any US action, including the sending of troops to Afghanistan.
True to that pledge, the Arroyo government supported the war on Afghanistan without reservation as well as the US attack on Iraq despite the lack of a UN mandate. It has since sent a token peacekeeping and humanitarian force to Iraq. In every international forum, from the United Nations to the Non-Aligned Movement, the Philippines has also echoed the US line. The Philippines may also be relied upon to vote with the US in the UN and elsewhere.
While the United States does not have to wear itself out soliciting the support of the Arroyo government, the Philippines does have a major infirmity. Beyond token displays of support it doesn’t have the means to put much substance in its words. But support is support nevertheless, its expression alone being good enough in politics. Bush knows a good thing when he sees one, thus the Arroyo government’s being “rewarded,” as one US embassy official put it, with the visit.
But it isn’t the Arroyo government or the Philippines, as much as Mrs. Arroyo herself, that the visit rewarded.
Bush did pledge US technical and other assistance for the modernization of the Armed Forces, but pointedly reminded Congress that it had to “invest in the Philippine military”—i.e., produce part of the funds needed for its modernization.
In obedience to Bush’s instructions, the Philippines will still have to spend for AFP modernization. That is a principle against which no one should argue. The problem is that Bush expressed support for AFP modernization so it can improve its capacity to wage the “war on terror” that Bush insists should be the country’s principal concern.
The modernization of the AFP has also been problematic because it will mean diverting scarce resources from education and other needs. The US would only partially support it, but for the principal and even the only purpose of aligning it with the US focus on the military means to combat terrorism—which, in the Philippines at least, feeds off the desperation rampant in the poorest parts of the country, which happen to be in Muslim Mindanao where the Abu Sayyaf has taken root.
There’s a term for that in these parts, which in English translates to being sauteed in one’s own fat. It’s also a process that can worsen rather than solve the country’s problems with terrorism—which suggests how well thought out the “war on terror” is.
Of course the civilian and military bureaucracy clapped the loudest when Bush told Congress about US support for AFP modernization and urged it to allocate part of the funds needed. Assuming the US delivers (it still has to make good on a pledge to provide the Philippine Air Force with rebuilt attack helicopters), it will mean money ripe for the picking and quick channeling into certain bank accounts. Given the rampaging corruption in this country, what’s likely is that AFP modernization will go the way of other plans—meaning the money will be spent, with the project only partly, if at all, completed.
The pledges of help to the Philippines and the government are in short as problematic as they’re in the future. What’s in the present is Mrs. Arroyo’s reward, by way of Bush’s implicit endorsement of her candidacy in 2004.
“The medium is the message,” Presidential Chief of Staff Rigoberto Tiglao said, quoting Marshall Macluhan, and suggesting that the visit itself was the endorsement. But in case no one else noticed, Tiglao’s Malacanang cohorts also took the greatest pains to remind us that in addition to the visit itself, Bush also said in so many words that he’d like Mrs. Arroyo to stay on.
Indeed Bush minced no words in praising Arroyo as the kind of leader the country needs, and whose “courageous and principled stand” in the war against terror has gained the respect of the American people. Bush could not have sounded more like a patron pleased with the way his client has been doing things in his behalf, and indeed even warned the armed forces that its duty is “to fight for freedom, not to contend for power.” That warning, we can all be sure, will be taken seriously by an institution created by the US at the turn of the century, and which, by orientation and tradition, is the most pro-American community in this country.
Mrs. Arroyo has done her bit for the empire, and the empire is grateful. Bush’s expressions of gratitude, his warning against further coup attempts, and whatever form of support that gratitude will take in the next few months, are bound to have an effect on the outcome of the May 2004 exercise. By next year as in years past, who the country’s President will be shall have been already decided in Washington.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, October 21, 2003)