After Iraq: the world
May 18th, 2004
Except for those who have relatives among the 600 or so workers, and the members of the Philippine “humanitarian” mission in Iraq, most Filipinos don’t give a hoot about what’s happening in that country.
The few who do are concerned with the safety of their kin and the loss of the dollars they’re getting from George W. Bush’s crony corporation Halliburton, and from the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority, the US’ cover for its colonial occupation of that country which has been footing the bill for the 51-member Philippine mission. When asked about what they think of the torture that went on in Abu Ghraib prison, most Filipinos would probably react in the same way one woman did over Philippine prime time television: so what, they’re all murderers, anyway.
The subtext to this reaction is the prevalent sense among the vast majority of Filipinos that whoever the United States is at war with—or is currently attacking/invading/occupying/ destroying—must be terrible people. This premise is in turn based on the assumption of the essential virtue—so self-evident only the truly evil would ignore them—of the lone superpower, and beyond that, of the West.
Among OFWs returned from the Middle East, the Arab is generally described as at best a fair employer, and at worst a vicious exploiter. Although hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have worked in the Middle East, its culture has had very limited influence in the Philippines, except for the occasional convert to Islam.
While Filipinos may not have worked for them, Westerners and Americans are on the other hand almost reverently admired and respected. This is probably because Filipinos come from a culture in which white superiority is assumed. Christianity is after all not only a dominant force in majority Philippine culture. Mistrust and antagonism towards Muslims is also rampant in it. The use of the English language, compelled by the United States colonial government in the first decades of its rule, and a hundred years of political and economic dependence, have also turned most Filipinos into outposts of US influence.
Reverse racism is at the core of this influence: the sense that their former colonizers are probably superior to them, and certainly to other colored races. It is this racism, rooted in the country’s colonial experience and semi-colonial status, that has also developed among Filipinos the parochialism summed up in the view that there are only two countries: the United States, and the country of one’s birth, in that order.
The current expression of this parochialism is a determined focus on domestic events—the elections at this particular point—and profound indifference to what’s happening to the Iraqis. And yet what happens in Iraq is likely to be the key to the planet’s future: whether, as predicted by the US historian Gabriel Kolko, the 21st century will be another century of war as the 20th was, or whether it will be a century of relative peace for all nations including the Philippines.
The answer to that question will depend on whether the Iraqi resistance can succeed in driving the US occupiers out of their country.
The US invasion of Iraq was the first of other possible US interventions as it attempts to maximize the opportunity for total world domination afforded by its being the lone superpower left.
The United States had attacked Iraq independently of the “war on terror,” and for a host of other reasons, among them to secure a major source of oil resources, Iraqi reserves being the second largest in the world; and to establish a substantial US military presence in the Middle East.
The weak Saddam Hussein regime was also an easy target, the downfall of which the US thought would help remake the rest of the Middle East in its image, and what’s more, earn for US troops accolades as liberators.
If the invasion and occupation of Iraq had worked, there are indications that the fascists now in substantial control of the US government would eventually focus their attention elsewhere, attacking next Iran and North Korea, the two other countries George W. Bush had described in 2002 as comprising the “axis of evil.”
From there, say even US analysts, the US could attack, and force “regime change” in, such other countries as Syria and Cuba. US military action against these and other countries would take place under the authority of the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes on possible threats to US security, and would be in keeping with the goal of establishing US dominance worldwide on land, sea, air and, eventually, space.
After Iraq: the world. The invasion of Iraq was only the first step in a grand design that could keep the world destabilized and at war for the next 100 years. Unfortunately for the demented dreams of Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, et.al., human beings have a habit of resisting occupation, sometimes even at the cost of their lives. While the US has realized its two goals of securing Iraqi oil reserves and establishing a substantial military presence in the Middle East that it hopes to make permanent, Iraqi resistance has turned out to be more widespread, resilient and better organized than US military planners had thought.
Because the resistance was threatening to undermine not only what it set out to do in Iraq and the world, US defense planners allowed and encouraged the use of extreme methods—i.e., torture—to extract information from suspected members of the Iraqi resistance it had captured. From the standpoint of these fascists—there is no other word to describe them—every means was justified to achieve what they believe to be the noble purpose of “bringing democracy to Iraq” (read—assuring US global dominance).
It was for the purpose of dealing the Iraqi resistance the military blow that would crush it that the abuses that have been exposed at Abu Ghraib prison were not only permitted, but more likely, authorized at least at the level of the US Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone.
But Rumsfeld himself, says the New Yorker magazine’s Seymour M. Hersh, may be culpable.
“The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few (US) Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq,” said Hersh in the May 15 issue of the New Yorker.
The operation was known by several code names, among them Copper Green. It “encouraged physical and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.” In effect, said Hersh’s informant, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, interrogators and prisoner custodians were authorized to “grab whom you must,” and “do what you want.”
The result was prisoner abuse, described by the report of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba as “widespread” and by the Red Cross as “systemic.” US officials have of course tried to get the public in both the US and the rest of the world to believe that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of only a few depraved soldiers, specifically the seven who have been charged with mistreatment of prisoners.
Interestingly, the scandal is not only threatening to expose some of the Bush government’s highest officials for the fascists that they are. It is also exposing the brutal and ignorant mindset of such people as Republican Senator and Bush partisan James Inhofe, who, during the testimony of Taguba before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was “outraged at the outrage” over the abuses. Inhofe also described the prisoners—90 percent of them arrested by mistake, says the US’ own intelligence officials, and described by Hersh’s CIA source as “cab-drivers” and “someone’s brother-in-law”—as “terrorists,” and “murderers.”
Above all this, however, is the possibility that the intentions of the US fascists to launch other wars have been stopped on their tracks by Iraqi resistance. That could be the one piece of good news in the midst of the brutality and violence now besieging Iraq because it could mean drastic reevaluation by the would-be masters of the universe in the US government of their plans for total world conquest.
But focused on their parochial concerns, smug in their firm conviction of American righteousness, and hobbled by their failed understanding of the world, it’s an event in the making most Filipinos have not even noticed.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com)