There will be war / The Ledesma kidnap

A week ago in this space, we asked whether there would be war. Our hunch then was fifty-fifty. We felt that for all his fierce determination and almost a monomaniacal desire to destroy Saddam Hussein and Iraq, US President George W. Bush would be held back by world opinion. We guessed wrong. Last Friday, Mr. Bush virtually pulled the pin from the grenade. Addressing the world’s leaders assembled in the United Nations in New York, the US president laid it squarely on the line: "The just demands of peace and security will be met or action will be unavoidable."

Speaking in the same flag-waving rhetoric that inspired America and electrified the world a year ago, George Bush gave the UN just "days and weeks" to meet the deadline. Saddam Hussein was virtually ordered to take off his pants, his briefs, his shoes, and surrender all his weapons of mass destruction – or else. There was no ambiguity here. Or else meant America would go it alone, if necessary. America would pound the bejesus out of Iraq and capture Saddam Hussein dead or alive.

With its mighty war machine spanning the continents, this America can do. At its biding, the whole of Iraq can twist to rubble in days.

If I still had any doubts, these were reduced to a piffle by the announcement US Central Command would shortly send the bulk of its staff to Qatar in the Gulf. Qatar takes the place of Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm in 1990. This was when the elder George Bush used the Saudis to throw back the invading armed hordes of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Bush would have annihilated Saddam’s army if the US military contingent pursued and pummeled it all the way to Baghdad. But the elder Bush desisted. He said his mission was simply to disable the invading Iraqi army. And so Saddam Hussein went scot free after boasting he would triumph over this "mother of all wars" and annihilate the US.

Well, it is possible the younger Bush has now decided he has to finish this war once and for all, end "the evil regime" of Saddam once and for all.

Although a few US congressional leaders like Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Republican dissenter Sen. Dick Armey have thrown the gauntlet at George W. Bush, the overwhelming Congress majority will support the war against Iraq. It has always been thus. When America is at war, or about to declare war against a hated enemy, Congress pulls out all the stops. And breast-beating patriotism takes over. Full-throated, the American people will raise their firsts and hoist the flag over "this land of the free and the home of the brave". The only war that did not ring true with mainstream America was the Vietnam War and only because that war was very unpopular at home. Remember the Kent student riots?

Perhaps the strongest voice against the impending war was sounded by South African statesman Nelson Mandela. This man, whom all the world respects and admires as a hero for all time, said "the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace." That was a slap on Uncle Sam’s face.

Then Mandela sounded the alarm – often muffled and possibly concealed – when America goes to war. In a Newsweek interview, he said in the starkest terms possible: "It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush’s desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America." Bam! This was the all-powerful "military-industrial complex." No less than President Dwight Eisenhower during his farewell address warned against the greed and abuses of this "complex." It is an alliance that bonds the giants of American industry and the generals whose stake in war is seemingly boundless. There is a lot of glory to be had and fabulous profits. Mr. Bush and his immediate cohorts, principally Vice President Dick Cheney, have long been top bananas in Big Oil.

The Second World War might have ended in 1944-45. But official figures show that the total amount of money spent on war machinery in the immediate post-Second World War era totaled $166 billion. History also reveals depression-crippled America could only recover from its worst economic crisis when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spearheaded US entry into the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor.

In a trice, America became the flourishing "arsenal of democracy." It was thus that America’s economy boomed beyond the wildest imagination of John Maynard Keynes, the famous British economist who said only prodigious public works spending could extricate America from economic crisis. America virtually supplied all the top-of-the-line military hardware needed by the Allies in the Second World War. Just last May, US Congress approved a whopping defense budget of over $550 billion. You can guess just where all this money will go.

Isn’t America undergoing some kind of economic crisis today? Aren’t corporate giants like Enron and WallCom collapsing like dominoes because of a new revolting dimension of capitalist greed and abuse? And will not war in Iraq give corporate America a huge booster shot? And the military generals their bagpipe-rousing excuse for being – war? And medals galore? Anyway, that’s what Nelson Mandela seemed to be saying.

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That Friday morning kidnapping of the two children of Negros Occidental Rep. Julio Ledesma has raised the nation’s hackles more than any other kidnapping in this nation’s history. It was Crime Incorporated showing its ugly face in full public galore. It gave Malacañang and President GMA its dirty middle finger by staging the kidnap in broad daylight with an entire San Juan neighborhood looking on. Sad to say, it blasted to smithereens GMA’s recent boast her crusade against kidnap gangs had succeeded beyond expectations. Now, she said, she could concentrate her attention on the nation’s economy.

The presidential naivete has been brutally exposed. And now she should know better. Photo-ops are no substitute for an honest-to-goodness crackdown on crimes. She must post-haste stop these silly, pusillanimous photo-ops and withdraw to the philosopher’s den where the thinking brain replaces muscle as a tool of presidential leadership.

There is a shadow dimension to the Ledesma kidnap that adds to the national jitters.

There is the suspicion that powerful men are behind the kidnap. Otherwise, how could the kidnappers of Cristina Julieta Victoria Ledesma, 10, and Julio Carlos Tomas 5, be so bold, so daring as to pull their caper the way they did? Their maroon Isuzu Highlander with license plates WDC 549 was there for everybody to see. As well as their Starex van that blocked the Ford Mark III van of the Ledesma children. Not only that. The kidnappers with high-powered rifles raked nearby residences with murderous assault fire. I’ve been a journalist for half-a-century but I’ve never witnessed anything like this – so brazen, so brash, so cheeky.

What makes the whole thing the real stuff of melodrama is that Congressman Julio Ledesma is the fiancé of movie sexpot Assunta de Rossi. Their nocturnal dalliances embroider tabloid headlines almost daily. A widow with a roving hand faster than his roving eye, the congressman’s wife died recently of cancer. The male Ledesmas have come a long way since another Ledesma – was it Oscar? – married the stunningly beautiful Susan Magalona of storied aristocratic legend about 50 years ago.

But back to Friday’s sordid kidnap. Was it the work of a politician or politicians out to derail GMA’s presidential bid in 2004? Is this politician so powerful, so securely lodged nobody, not even the President, can touch him? Is it possible Philippine politics has already morphed into a Mafia or a network of Mafias with kindred ties to the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines? Do we now have a Don Corleone in the Philippines? A Charlie Luciano? A Joseph Bonano?

The danger is that as this goes on, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo may declare a "state of emergency". And if this does not suffice, she could declare martial rule. I kid you not.

I submit that much of the swagger, the bravado she displays in public is for show. The real GMA – without her coterie of police and military bodyguards – is normally shy and timid. She is not given to such phrases as "I will crush you!" and Isang bala ka lamang!

Her PR advisers and image-makers have provided us an ersatz GMA, brash, bodacious and blustery. This is supposed to make up for her diminutive size, her convent-bred character, her pigeon-fluttering lightness. Admitted, this may have been necessary to a point. But they have overdone it. Friday’s hideous kidnap of the Ledesma children has reduced this supercop image of GMA to laughable caricature. If she cannot solve the Ledesma kidnap in fast time, self anointed messiahs and saviors will come to the fore and threaten her presidency.

All this bodes ill for the immediate future. Add the FPJ factor and we’re really in for a roller-coaster ride without brakes. 2004, anybody?