Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin, Jr. unwittingly said something at odds with what his boss, President Rodrigo Duterte, has been saying since he came to power in 2016.
US intervention
Trump’s Duterte card
The White House has confirmed that President Donald Trump has invited President Rodrigo Duterte to visit the United States. The invitation has provoked criticism from human rights groups, among them Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has been unrelenting in its condemnation of the toll in lives of Mr. Duterte’s “war” on drugs. It is widely presumed that Mr. Trump supports the Duterte approach, which could be the basis for a meeting of the minds of the two unconventional heads of state.
Mamasapano: turning a disaster into an opportunity
Re-investigating the January 25, 2015 Mamasapano incident, as President Rodrigo Duterte says he’s planning to do, would seem to be unnecessary at first. But that first impression soon yields to the need to address a number of questions in the public mind that until today remain unanswered.
Beyond the fear of losing their jobs
About the Middle East and Libya many Filipinos have one fear, and that’s the loss of their jobs as the region and that country fall apart, besieged by the violence of contending sectarian groups and the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
That, together with paeans to their bravery, was the subtext in the expressions of concern over the Filipino peacekeepers’ repatriation last week from the Syrian Golan Heights, peacekeeping under UN auspices being, like other jobs in the Middle East, relatively high-paying at around P45,000 a month.
Lords of destruction
Then US President George W. Bush. His Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His Vice President, Richard Chaney. His Chief Political Adviser, Karl Rove.
These were some of the lords of destruction who engineered the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But they were not the brains behind it but merely the executors. For a look at the theoreticians and ideologues of unabashed imperialism, one has to go to a document called Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which was prepared by the neo-conservatives of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).