As they barrel to Baghdad, Americans should beware of a bloody guerrilla war like that waged by Filipinos in 1898

First, the bad news on the local economic "war front". It’s all over Bloomberg television news, and probably all over print media overseas as well, that the large and influential airport company, Fraport AG of Germany, has publicly "written off" its huge investment of 293 million euros, plus an additional 60 million euros, in the failed PIATCO Terminal 3 project at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA).

In short: Fraport has given up. What’s worse is that the German government, which is the biggest shareholder in Fraport, has literally written off the Philippines as a haven for German investment.

This development was easily foreseen and could have been prevented. This writer warned, several times in this corner, of the dire implications of such an adverse declaration on foreign investment in our country, particularly from the countries of Western Europe and the European Union. From now on, interest in the Philippines on the part of European investors will be not just zilch, but zero.

The PIATCO deal, from its inception, was fatally flawed. The Chengs, father and son, dominated everything in it despite their small investment. The Germans put up practically all the money – and now they’re left holding an empty can. (In the terminal project, Fraport’s risk was calculated earlier this week to be $383 million!)

The Fraport Chairman and CEO, William Bender, personally flew here to Manila for a "last minute" rescue attempt. Would you believe? According to reports, President Macapagal-Arroyo did not receive Bender or speak to him! Is this true? Susmariosep. I remember that the President kept on telling me a month ago that she would do something about getting the stalled Terminal 3 "operational", but she was still waiting for a Supreme Court decision on the case. If this is correct, the situation seems to be gridlocked. The High Court still hasn’t made clear what it has decided – or what it proposes to do. In the meantime, the mothballed Terminal 3 stands uncompleted and empty near the exit gate of the Villamor airbase, looking as desolate as an unused megamall. It is a monument to government ineptitude and inaction.

The Manila airport project was the biggest foreign undertaking of the giant Fraport AG, which belongs for the most part to the German State of Hesse. It has become Fraport’s "nightmare", the prestigious Handelsblatt newspaper recently asserted – and now, the project has been scrapped, with Chairman Bender and his Fraport executive committee being rapped by the shareholders’ supervisory board.

President GMA was right to have declared the PIATCO contract illegal and junk it – but, that having been done, she ought to have moved quickly to forge a compromise arrangement with Fraport (the biggest investor and loser in the failed deal). This would have provided the additional ad interim funding required to get the Terminal viable and in operation. The Chief Executive’s former Presidential Adviser on Strategic Projects, Gloria Tan Climaco (who resigned a few months ago) had proposed a special arrangement between the government and Fraport which made sense, but it was set aside.

Now what will the President do? Is the "access road", which the original PIATCO developers had failed to construct, under construction? Can, somehow, Terminal 3 be made ready under an alternative plan for "activation"? It’s imperative that this be accomplished soon – it’s practically the end of March. Is it true that a certain very powerful law firm with sticky fingers, whose key men are very well-placed in the GMA Administration, has for sometime had a moist eye on the project? Is this one reason for the delay and the obfuscation?

Is this why Bender was ignored, despite his five-minutes-to-midnight, almost desperate try to "mend" matters? The President, I know, has many worries on her mind (including the importunings on her to seek "re-election" after all – or was this the intention ab initio?) but she has got to snap out of her reverie and do something about the Terminal 3 impasse pronto. In these uncertain times, she cannot afford to herself be uncertain. This is a period which cries out for leadership, even more urgently, unselfish leadership.

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The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), as I write this, has announced that advance American units have already pushed through just 60 miles south of Iraq’s fortified capital of Baghdad, while another but smaller contingent is coming towards Baghdad from the north.

If this is so, the Americans and the British will have to make a difficult decision. They cannot root out the entrenched Republican Guards, and the even more battle-hardened and "loyal-to-Saddam" Special Republican Guards without hitting their positions with everything they’ve got – meaning, relentless aerial assault and missile bombardment, no matter who gets hurt, even civilians. Otherwise, they’ll get bogged down in terrible house-to-house fighting, building-to-building urban warfare, and get whittled down by sniper attacks and ambushes staged not just by the regulars but by the guerrillas and militiamen of the "Fedayeen Saddam".

It’s clear, knowing from the start that the US-Brit led coalition forces are leery of being seen as killing civilians, including women and babies, by the TV cameras of a watching world (as reported by 500 reporters "embedded" in their combat detachments and sending out "images" and reports by global satellite links, uncensored, every few minutes). Alas, war is war. There’s no skirting the growing realization that the back-to-the-wall regime of Saddam Insane and his ruthless sons, Qusay and Uday, have no compunction about using their own civilians as "human shields".

And, who knows? The 7th Cavalry, the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division, the 101st Airborne, and the British Forces (who’re more experienced in urban warfare, house-to-house, and even hand-to-hand fighting, having battled the PROVOS and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland for decades) may be closing in on Baghdad, or conducting mopping-up operations in the port city of Basra, but the war’s far from over yet. They may finally find unleashed on them Saddam’s so-called "weapons of mass destruction" – whether bio, chemical or who-knows-what.

Or was United Nations Chief Inspector Hans Blix right – that they can’t be found? It may be perverse for the American troops in the desert, or Britain’s 45 Commando and the Royal Marines, to hope those WMD’s don’t exist, but it’s certain (aside from suspected disappointment on the part of their senior officers) that the "coalition" footsoldiers and tankmen fervently wish they don’t exist.

Any such worrisome developments aside, the Iraqi forces protecting Baghdad are formidable enough. The backbone of the defensive line is provided by three Republican Guard divisions, each composed of 10,000 to 12,000 troops and hundreds of T-72 Soviet-made tanks.

The T-72 was first introduced in 1971 and was in continuous production in Russia up to the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

It first saw action in the Middle East, utilized by the defending Arabs in the Syrian and Lebanese armies against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, as well as in Afghanistan when the Soviet occupation forces battled the mujahideen, later in the Iraq-Iran war in the Persian Gulf, and in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The T-72, despite its 125-mm gun, 12.7-mm AA machine gun, and 7.67-mm machine gun (speed 60 km/hour), was never actually on a par with the M60, the Israeli-designed Merkava (which means "chariot" in Hebrew), the M1 Abrams (the workhorse of the current US offensive) the British Chieftain and Challenger, or even the AMX-30 – but it still, if manned by well-trained tank crews in close engagements, can give a good account of itself.

Fifty of these T-72 tanks tried to break out of Basra, Iraq’s second city and major port, the other day, but were blocked by the British – which gives you an idea of the power packed by the "invading" phalanxes.

The coalition has been bashing the entrenched Iraqis with guided JDAM 2,000-lb bombs delivered by B-52 bombers making a six-hour flight to the scene from Fairford Base in England; Tomahawk cruise missiles from Aegis Cruisers and Aegis Destroyers firing from the Gulf, the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea; AH-64 "Longbow" Apache helicopter gunships (like the one "downed", a peasant claimed with his rifle?); Harrier "vertical take-off" GR7 close support attack jets; and A-10 Warthog anti-tank aircraft.

What’s bothersome are the anticipated sandstorms expected to hit Iraq and Kuwait yesterday and today. These desert winds, called shamal or shimowa by the Arabs, afflict the Arabian peninsula in the Spring, and this year have arrived early. But precision-bombing from high above, guided by satellite-based global positioning systems, won’t be affected. Just to show you how complex the battle is, the Central Command (Centcom) has 50,000 "targets" identified within Iraq.

In sum, it appears that eight Republican Guard divisions – totalling 80,000 men – have encircled Baghdad to defend Saddam’s... well, "last redoubt". Of note is the 25,000-strong Special Republican Guard, which assumed a premier role as Saddam’s personal guard after the 1991 Gulf War, and has beefed up the fortifications of major installations in the capital such as government buildings and the remaining Presidential palaces.

The unit which had been resisting the Brits and Yanks in the hard-fought but now "subdued" al-Nasiriyah area was the 3rd Corps (with three Iraqi army divisions – two infantry and one armored), fleshed out mainly by conscripts – many of whom have now surrendered.

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Victory, however, may still not be assured in the long term even if powerful coalition armor, air superiority, and mechanized infantry gain the upper hand. It has already become evident that "Viet Cong-type" Iraqi guerrillas, called "Fedayeen Saddam", are in the field. This was acknowledged yesterday in an editorial in the London Financial Times under the subtitle of "US-UK Forces Hit Some Bumps on the Road to Baghdad".

The editorial said, "First, it is proving difficult to identify who wants to fight and who prefers to surrender. Some pre-war briefing gave the impression this was a simple matter of separating sheep from goats. As ever, it looks much messier. Well-distributed regime loyalists may be intimidating others into resisting and, as seen on Sunday, pretending to surrender to, or welcome the Americans and British before opening fire on them. Second, the speed of the push towards Baghdad is leaving the US-UK supply lines vulnerable."

The FT warned that "irregular warfare might be used against the Anglo-US occupation in the future."

The Americans, if they look back on their own history (indeed, their own "imperial" history of the past) ought to know better. This is how the Filipinos fought them after they thought their superior artillery, their better armed and equipped land forces had overwhelmed Filipino resistance.

Don’t take my word for it. In a recent book, From the Front: The Story of War, by Michael S. Sweeney (and a Foreword by David Halberstam), National Geographic Books, 2002, Chapter Three recounts: "It took a while for the American Army and Navy to learn the art of war, Philippine style . . . The Filipinos quickly took to heart what Americans always had known: Big armies beat small armies when both sides play by the big armies’ rules. So the rebels rewrote the rule book. They adopted a form of war that, while ancient in origin, initially baffled and enraged the Americans. Instead of confronting the superior enemy, the rebels wore civilian clothes, hiding in plain sight in villages, or melting into the jungles. They harassed the Americans with booby traps of poison arrows and sharpened spears. On the whole, they avoided confrontations unless they had surprise on their side. Over the next several months, during which the Americans captured the rebel capital of Malolos, Filipino snipers harassed the troops and withdrew."

This unrelenting guerrilla war bled the US occupation forces mightily. By the end of the so-called "insurrection", the author recorded, "American casualties numbered some 4,243 killed and 2,800 wounded. The Filipinos lost perhaps 16,000 in the fighting and another 100,000 guerrillas and civilians dead of starvation."

There you have it. Beware of the Feda-yeen – who can hit back painfully even in an "occupied" Iraq.