EDITORIAL - Red alert

Whether we like it or not, nations are taking sides in the emerging international coalition to fight terrorism. The evil that scored a major victory in New York and Washington has a global reach, and the United States knows it will need international support for success in its battle against terrorism. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been unequivocal in its support for the military retaliation announced by the United States. Invoking a treaty provision, NATO said an attack on one of its members is deemed an attack on all. Several Arab nations, while falling short of outright support for military retaliation, have strongly condemned the attacks that have left thousands of people dead or missing at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.

The Philippines is a traditional ally of the United States and remains bound by the Mutual Defense Treaty. If the initial results of investigations in the US are accurate, the Philippines has had brushes with the same group behind the attacks in America. Osama bin Laden has links to the Abu Sayyaf fundamentalist group, which continues to hold several people, including two Americans, hostages in Basilan. One of the men convicted for the first attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, passed through Manila before his arrest, plotting the assassination of Pope John Paul II and conducting a test run of a plane bombing on a Japan-bound flight from the Philippines that left one passenger dead. The Philippines is listed as one of several countries where Bin Laden’s Islamic extremist group maintains a cell.

Even if the Philippines limits itself to the exchange of intelligence information with the United States on suspected terrorists, and even if the Philippine stays out of any American military action against Bin Laden and his sponsors, the Philippines will inexorably be drawn into what US President George W. Bush calls the first war of the 21st century. No one is sure yet how this war is going to be waged and who else, aside from Bin Laden, will constitute the enemy.

No matter what form this war will finally take, the world was changed permanently when those planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Philippines has been a target of Islamic extremist terrorism in the past, and it can be a target again. The government must be on heightened alert. Filipinos must also close ranks and be vigilant against those who rejoice in the slaughter of innocents, those who want to create a world of fear.