The war has begun: Now GMA declares we belong in the US-led ‘coalition’

The war began yesterday morning.

Tipped off as she was addressing the graduating cadets of the Philippine Military Academy in Baguio, our President GMA interrupted her speech to declare that we, the Filipinos, belonged to the US-led "coalition of the willing". Now, at last, she’s willing. (Last Tuesday, GMA had been "overruled" by her own National Security Council. What the heck, better late than never.)

It’s interesting that US Secretary of State Colin Powell pre-empted her by one day – would you believe? – by stating, when he rattled off the list, that "the Philippines" was a member of the coalition of the willing. He termed it the "Coalition for the Immediate Disarmament of Iraq." Yesterday morning’s front-page story in The STAR, thanks to the Powell announcement in Washington DC, dispatched by Agence France-Presse, even contradicted my column inside. It headlined: "RP Supporting US-led Coalition."

Powell must have been talking to Foreign Secretary Blas Ople, the kulog from Hagonoy, who’s undeterred "come storm, come rain, come snow, or the National Security Council". Ople from the beginning had hailed the RP flag to the mast – on the side of America which he had, years ago, strongly assailed as a fervent nationalist and a young would-be Bolshevik. (He’s still a nationalist, but no longer a Bolshie.)

La Gloria, our commander-in-chief, assured the graduating PMA class of 2003 that they wouldn’t be sent to Iraq, but to Mindanao. Does she believe they think Mindanao is safer? I suspect they’d rather go to Iraq, where it’s not Balikatan but the real thing. At least they’d get to ride into battle in air-conditioned Abrams tanks, or sleek Bradley fighting vehicles, or go over the humps in the latest-model Humvees, surrounded by 300,000 Americans, British, Aussie fellow fighters, some Spaniards, and even coalition Italian chefs. This is unlike Mindanao where both the politicians and the media sometimes join the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the "lost commands" of the Moro National Liberation Front, the Pentagon Gang, the Jemaah Islamiyah, and their al-Qaeda connections, in sniping at our soldiers, dragging them off buses to be "executed", bombing them out, and insulting them as bullies and "invaders".

Will terrorists attack in full fury now that GMA has belatedly confirmed we’re in the "coalition"? Sanamagan – they’ve been attacking us, anyway. At least now, we can ask the Americans, as Johnny-come-lately "allies", to lend us a few more bullets so we can shoot them, or night-vision goggles so we can see them in the dark.

It amuses me to see all the ululations of anger and indignation in the media, even in our own newspaper, against the "United States of Arrogance" (their spelling of the USA) asserting itself as the only Superpower and bypassing the United Nations. What insolent conduct! What bullying!

We’ll be called "lapdogs" and tutas of the US, the enraged critics fulminate. Susmariosep, whatever we do – even after our senators kicked out the US bases in 1991 – our enemies and the usual detractors will always be dredging up that hortatory sneer to disconcert or manipulate us, anyway.

Let’s face it. We’re comfortable with the Americans, even though we frequently disagree with them. Perhaps it’s the force of habit. Friends and allies, not colonial menials, can agree with each other and dispute with each other with equal ease, not intent on just scoring points or, as we say in our language, trying to make postura (a word debased from our Spanish heritage).

We fought side by side with the Americans, under the flags of both the US and our Philippine Commonwealth, in Bataan and Corregidor, and in the long and bitter guerrilla campaign against the occupying Japanese Imperial Army, which culminated in MacArthur’s "return" and our "liberation". We fought alongside the South Koreans and the Yanks in Korea. We were with them in South Vietnam – although reluctantly (and against my objections), since we disguised our army battalion as a Philcag, a Philippine Civil Action Group, in which a certain Major Fidel V. Ramos (later to become chief of staff, defense secretary, and subsequently President) was the administrative officer.

* * *

When they punch into Iraq (possibly the land invasion, by this writing, has already begun), the Americans might usefully remember, too, the lessons they learned here when the Filipinos waged a guerrilla war to fight them, tooth and nail, between 1898-1902.

I think most of the Iraqi army will collapse, many of their officers and men surrendering en masse in short order. The elite Republican Guards, on the other hand, may make a more stubborn and bloodier stand. Let’s see. In war, nothing is a given.

The Americans and the Brits, on the other hand, will have to recall events from their own past, in which carelessness or hubris led to disaster. Many in the Iraqi population will welcome the coalition forces since almost two-thirds of Iraq’s population are Shi’ite Muslims who were persecuted during the three decades of Saddam Insane’s rule. Their holy cities of Najaf and Karbala (as revered by Muslim Shias in Iraq as Rome is by Catholics) were cruelly marginalized under the bootheel of the Sunni-dominated Saddam regime. In the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the Shi’ites rebelled, but were put down ruthlessly by the Republican Guard (which had been left intact by the elder Bush’s coalition’s miscalculations) – with perhaps 300,000 insurgent Shi’ites slaughtered.

On the other hand, die-hard pro-Saddam and fanatic Muslim mujahideen may be lying in ambush for the "triumphant" coalition forces. Don’t forget what happened to the US Embassy in West Beirut on April 18, 1983. On that fateful day, a truck loaded with explosives rammed the embassy building, destroying much of the edifice and killing 63 people, including 17 Americans, of whom seven were CIA officers. The local Islamic Jihad was the prime suspect in that caper.

Following shortly after that were the truck-bombings of the US Marine base and the French military headquarters in West Beirut – which left 300 dead. In the case of the US Marines, a truck loaded with explosives rammed past the astonished sentries and into the main building – blowing to perdition hundreds of Marines while they were sleeping.

The coalition must beware of this manner of attack. Americans, sadly, have the tendency to underestimate their foes, over-confident as they’ve become (having forgotten their Vietnam experience) in their superior technology – like the missiles they’ve just been hurling by the score at Iraq from afar.

When they go in on the ground, on the stretch from Kuwait to the port city of Basra, they may – aside from biological or chemical weapons – be greeted by a few ugly surprises.

It’s interesting that Saddam, anticipating the coming assault, had divided Iraq into four military districts. The defense of Baghdad had been entrusted to his younger son Qusay – to the consternation and rage of elder brother Uday who has in the past few years been increasingly jealous of his younger sibling. (The fact is that Uday is four times more insane than his daddy.)

Don’t be misled into concluding, though he’s less nutty than Uday, Qusay will prove more moderate. Here’s what he declared just after Mr. Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address in January 2000, including them in the "war of terror". Admittedly, this outburst was prompted by a "leak" reaching Saddam that Bush had virtually sanctioned his assassination by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Qusay said to his father at that public gathering: "We know, and the brothers here all know that we have, with God’s aid, every capability and ability. With a simple sign from you, we can make America’s people sleepless and frightened to go out in the streets . . . I only ask you, sir, to give me a small sign. I swear upon your head, sir, that if I do not turn their night into day and their day into a living hell, I will ask you to chop off my head before my brothers present."

Those offspring of Saddam don’t believe in small talk.

Placed in charge of an equally vital military district, the port of Basra – which is one of the first targets of the coalition’s coming offensive – is "Chemical Ali", the heartless Minister of Interior (Saddam’s paternal cousin) Ali Hasan al-Majid – the man who had governed Kuwait with an iron hand during the short period Iraq had invaded and occupied it – poison-gassed the Kurds in their villages in 1987 and 1988 (possibly 200,000 Kurds perished), and unleashed the Republican Guards, thirsting to avenge themselves for their disgraceful defeat in the six-week Gulf War, on the Shi’ite Muslims who had seized control of Basra.

Their Russian-made T-72 tanks went on a rampage, with the slogan painted on their turrets, NO SHI’ITES AFTER TODAY!, assaulting the southern cities of Iraq, and reducing entire blocks to rubble as well with heavy artillery bombardments.

It was Majid who had personally put his foot on the neck of the prostrate, doomed son-in-law of Saddam, the "traitor" Hussein Kamel, and fired the coup de grace, a single shot into his head, in January 1996.

Majid had in his pogrom against the Kurds razed half of Kurdistan’s settlements, mustard-gassed scores of thousands and displaced half a million. In 1991 to put down another Kurdish uprising, the Iraqi Republican Guards had attacked them with artillery and helicopter gunships, sending almost one million refugees in panic to the Iranian and Turkish borders.

This Majid is the sweet guy who’s awaiting the 7th Cav, the 3rd Infantry Division, the 101st, etc. in Basra.

* * *

The Americans must not underestimate either the hatred they evoke in much of the Arab world. They must particularly look out for the Jordanians, whose population is about 58 percent Palestinian, the Palestinians themselves from the West Bank and Gaza (the militants of Hamas, the Al Acqsa Martyrs Brigade of Fatah, and other suicide-bombing experts), as well as Egypt, where the leaders of the Arab League are already threatening an even more furious jihad in retaliation for their invasion of Iraq.

Saddam, through clever maneuvering and a determined propaganda offensive, had managed since 1979 to project himself as the "champion" of the Palestinians against Israel and the Israelis’ Patron and Backer, the United States — which is why Jordan (remember, they’re mostly Palestinians there) even under their Hashemite ruler, the late King Hussein (father of the present King Abdullah) had supported Iraq during the Gulf War of 1991. Remember?

Saddam was able to seize the "championship" of the Palestinian cause when their former champion, the late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, had made peace with Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin by signing the famous Camp David accords on the lawn of the White House on March 26, 1979. The Palestinians were outraged at this "betrayal" by Sadat, and never forgave him – forgetting the fact that Sadat had fought Israel mightily for years, and launched the Yom Kippur attack across the Suez Canal which almost overwhelmed Israel only a few years earlier, in October 1973. (Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists within his own army at a military parade in Cairo on October 6, 1981.)

There was another victim of Palestinian revenge – the former Prime Minister of Jordan under King Hussein. I had been in Rome when the "Black September War" erupted in 1970. I rushed over to the area, but could only get as far as Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. The Allenby Bridge was closed, so I asked Gad Ranon, who had once been an attaché in the Israeli Embassy here in Manila, how I could get into Jordan to cover the fighting. He shrugged, looked conspiratorial, then whispered: "Go to the Golan Heights where you can sneak into the Irbid Peninsula." (The Golan, captured from the Syrians in the 1967 Six-Day War, was within sight of Damascus – and had paths leading into Jordan’s Irbid Peninsula.)

I got there on September 19, just in time to witness the epic tank battle in which King Hussein’s World War II Centurion tanks, manned by his brave Bedouins of the Arab Legion, crushed an attack by a brigade of 155 Syrian Soviet-made T-55s with such finality that more than a dozen Syrian tanks were destroyed and the Syrians sent fleeing.

It’s strange that Jordan should be so pro-Palestinian, since that PLO-Syrian attempt to seize power had almost succeeded in September 1970, during that bloody civil war, in overthrowing King Abdullah’s father, King Hussein. (Yasser Arafat and his PLO had been booted out of Jordan.)

Just as King Abdullah II’s great-grandfather, King Abdallah was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist on July 20, 1951, while praying at the Al Acsa Mosque in Jerusalem (the young Hussein was with his grandfather when the assassin’s bullets struck and was splattered with some of the old king’s blood), the Prime Minister of Jordan – who was blamed for presiding over the defeat of the PLO – was assassinated in Cairo.

When the Arabs vow to assassinate President Bush, therefore, he’d better be doubly cautious. Perhaps the Terror Alert should be upgraded in Washington, DC from Orange ("severe") to the top-rank of Red.

For, alas, America is reviled in the Muslim world – you better believe it – as the backer of Israel.

* * *

In her excellent book, The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein (W.W. Norton, New York, London, 2002), journalist and former CNN commentator on the Middle East Sandra Mackey (her other bestsellers were The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom and Lebanon: Death of a Nation) describes how Saddam took advantage of Sadat’s 1979 move to fly to Jerusalem and embrace the Israelis in a bold bid to secure peace, as a "defection of Cairo from Arab leadership" and a sell-out to the Jews.

He even revived the theme of the Iraqis’ . . . uh, ancestors having been the Babylonians who devastated the Israelites and brought them back to captivity and slavery in Babylon. Touching on the Arabized theme of Mesopotamia, whose ancient civilization was centered in the region of what is today’s Iraq, Saddam and his Baath party bragged, "From here (King) Nebuchadnezzar set forth and arrested the elements that tried to degrade the land of the Arabs . . . and brought them chained to Babylon!"

Former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam al-Chalabi (once more, not a relative of the CIA-sponsored Iraqi "exile" dissident leader of the same family name) told me the other day that Saddam had even rebuilt Babylon’s fabled palace on the very same site, about 100 kilometers outside of Baghdad. (He failed, however, to faithfully recreate the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon.)

"Under every brick and tile in the new Babylonian palace," Issam said, "Saddam had enscribed: ‘Rebuilt during the regime of Saddam Hussein’." At least he hadn’t written: "During the REIGN of Saddam Hussein."

Is the three-decade reign of Saddam coming to an end under the sledge-hammer assault of the Anglo-American-Aussie-Iberian juggernaut? Let’s see.

There’s so much "reporting" from the battlefield nowadays that everybody’s confused. It must be terrible to be a television newscaster. You’ve got to keep on talking to prevent televiewers from switching off, or to another channel, even if there’s no action.