If war breaks out, we’ll bleed badly

There’s every sign that the US will invade and occupy Iraq in the very near future, perhaps before the end of the year. There is also every sign that if this should occur, the Philippines as a nation will sustain a hundred knife wounds, perhaps a thousand. Let me elaborate. When and if America strikes in Iraq, the international economy will reel like a drunk. If the war should be short, swift and surgical lasting only two, three months, the impact on the world economy, though grave, would not be crippling. But if the war should drag on, casualties mount, and American body bags should number in the thousands, and Iraqi collateral damage through air bombardment should be extensive, then all hell could break loose.

First, the oil-producing Arab countries will certainly retaliate by raising prices. They will sharply reduce production, and in all probability declare an oil embargo on countries allied with the US war on Iraq. The Philippines cannot escape this embargo since our government is back on the laps of Uncle Sam tootling its love and loyalty.

Second, if America cannot limit the war to Iraq, and this war should spread to the Middle East where Israel and Palestine have a dagger at each other’s throat, then the US will be fighting a war on two fronts. The US, of course, will fight on the side of Israel.

Third, world trade would slump radically as markets shrink everywhere, particularly the US market. Asian economies, particularly the Philippines, will be hard hit by fast dwindling exports to America.

Fourth, there is the strong possibility Islam as a religious force will rise against America. And belch thunder. This would further validate Prof. Samuel Huntington’s prediction about a "clash of civilizations" replacing the 20th century clash of ideologies. If there is anything 9/11 (September 11, 2001) proved, it is that mainland America is vulnerable to enemy attack. International terrorism, against which the US has declared "total war", could inflict germ warfare on American society, mobilize suicide commandos in a number of American cities, bomb bridges, communications and power facilities.

But it is the repercussion on the Philippines of this impending war that scares and even terrifies me no end.

Our ramshackle economy is ill-prepared for such a war. If the US market for our exports should narrow to a slit, many factories and business establishments here would have to close or retrench massively. If, perchance, oil-producing Arab countries should include the Philippines in its boycott list, prices of prime commodities and almost everything would soar beyond the average Filipino’s reach. The peso-dollar exchange could worsen to 1-60 or 1-70. In a worse scenario, gasoline and oil products would have to be rationed. Car pools would have to be resorted to. There could be a rush towards the purchase of motorcycles and bicycles.

But the scenario that really raises my hackles is war spreading to the Middle East.

We have 1.2 million Filipino workers in this region. If their security can no longer be assured, or if they are thrown out of their jobs Filipinos will be returning home by the hundreds of thousands with nothing to look forward to. Nothing could be more frightening.

Joblessness will be a plague. Unemployment may soar from the present 12-13 percent to 20-25 percent or more. Mass hunger could then set in and with mass hunger possibly widespread starvation.

We remain haunted by that grief-stricken mother who strangled her two of her children to death because she could not feed them anymore. Then, I am afraid what happened in Nicaragua, Argentina, and Venezuela in the late 80s may happen here. Largescale looting, riots, other social disturbances erupted. The poor and even the middle-class ran amuck, swooped on food bins, warehouses, supermarkets, shops, stores and even private houses in ritzy enclaves. Subdivisions we call them here.

When babies can no longer suckle milk either from their mother’s breasts or elsewhere, when thousands of families can no longer feed, clothe and nurture themselves with any kind of human decency, they will explode. Maybe this is the social volcano I had warned of so many times in this column, a citizenry in violent outrage because it can only take so much and no more. Do I paint a bleak picture? Yes, I do.

I do hope this will not happen in the wake of the impending Iraqi war. But what can we do? What can the government of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo do? We are hostage, as all nations are, to the turns and tides of history, this time a war that not only grazes our collective skin but could turn us around like a crazy top. As it is, our security situation is already critical. Communist guerrillas maraud more frequently in the north, Muslim insurgents crouch in Mindanao, ready for war. There are more bombings today than at any time in our history, more kidnappings, more salvagings, more theft and more crime. More and more American combat troops will come in the coming months. The Philippines has been designated by the US as its "second front" in the war against terrorism.

The US invasion of Iraq could light up the political, economic and social gunpowder here.

What if the CPP-NPA should mount a guerrilla offensive in Luzon? What if the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front), in sympathy with their Muslim brother in Iraq and the Middle East, should launch a jihad? The GMA government would then be fighting a war on two fronts, a logistical and strategic nightmare. Its budget badly depleted, the government cannot afford the cost of waging two wars. The economy would collapse. Unless, of course, American troops join in and convert the Visiting Force Agreement (VFA) into their political flagship for largescale military intervention in the Philippines. That would be the surest recipe for disaster. For both countries.

Scenario-building is like ghost-hunting. A lot of things add up. A lot of weirdo figures huddle forward like an advancing fog with hooded heads, bared teeth and the low hiss of impending disaster.

And so we come to another scenario. If what we have just depicted should happen, there will be no elections in 2004. Elections can only be held if there is a modicum of national security in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. But if social turbulence should erupt, our political system will crack up. And if it cracks up, the center of political of republican gravity in the Philippines – Malacañang and Congress – will slump to its knees, or disintegrate. A vacuum will form. Power, the raw, gnarled power of a disturbed, debilitated, almost deranged society, will slide over to the left and the right.

And yet the Philippines, and America for that matter, cannot, can never accept communist dominion in the Philippines. For that is what Joma Sison and his ideological troubadours chant by day and by night. The communists can ride the wave of unrest in the Philippines maybe much better than anybody else. But the doors and drawbridges to republican power will never open to them. History has passed them by. They are selling old wine in old bottles in radically transformed society they no longer understand.

Which, if we follow this line of thinking, leaves us no recourse but to accept this: That if the center collapses, only the right can take over power. Meaning, of course, the Armed Forces of the Philippines with the police in tow. Again here, we may be headed for an impasse.

While it is true the military may and can take over, they do not have the credentials to rule effectively and with any measure of popular support or respect. So not ours the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, the peaceful post-Cold War political grove of Francis Fukuyama, the sylvan dreams of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who sought a return to Nature where equality reigns before man is corrupted by society.

It has long been this writer’s contention that the Philippines is going through a phase in its history, better still a grim struggle to locate itself in a world governed by knowledge and twirled to ever productive heights by education, science and technology. Here we have been left far behind by our neighbors such as China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, and now comes India. Possessed of a different culture rooted in Asia, they gunned their countries to perform the "Asian economic miracle" which saw the Philippines stuck in the mud.

We borrowed the form and the gaudy trimmings of American and European democracy while our neighbors learned the latest in their science and technology. Our neighbors kept and muscled their discipline even more, cranked up their work ethic to unheard of levels. They harkened to the needs of nation and community, while we Filipinos reveled in individual freedom taught us by America. To boot, we were harpooned by a religion that commended the virtues of resignation, patience and fatalism. And so a mother does not direct her outrage against society and instead strangles her two children in her grief, a primitive coping mechanism best exercised on the slope of an erupting volcano to mollify the gods.

That is what I am afraid of.