A big, ugly mess / The killing in Iraq

Just about a week ago, the Lady of the Malacañang Manor lifted her sword and pompously declared "all-out war" on drugs. At first blush, we were impressed. No less than President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was now atop her stallion bellowing damnation and possibly death at the enemy. This column had long urged her to do so. We even suggested weeks ago that ex-Manila mayor Alfredo Lim head a special force to undertake the job. At second blush, we are impressed no longer. The raised presidential sword turned out to be the eskrima I wielded as a boy – a blade made of bakawan. The presidential stallion turned out to be Rocinante, the flea-bitten mare of Don Quixote tilting helplessly at the windmills.

At third blush, the president’s appointed drug warriors are wrangling among themselves as to do who really is the anointed anti-drug czar. Barbers or Lim or Avenido. Credit is being grabbed even before the war is launched, the first battle fought, the first drop of blood drawn.

In retrospect, the president’s anti-drug war was fatally flawed from the beginning. In any war, secrecy is the glue that holds the campaign and every component together. You don’t need the master Sun Tzu to tell you this. An enemy warned or forewarned is an enemy that can escape, hide, change plans, fortify its defenses, disappear. I wouldn’t be surprised at all – considering all the hullabaloo – if the country’s top drug lords and racketeers have already hotfooted it abroad. They are now waiting for the sound and the fury to subside before they return to the Philippines.

Again, for any war to succeed, battle plans would have to ensure the enemy has been infiltrated, its face or many faces sharply profiled, ample evidence surreptiously gathered, their fronts and safehouses already pinpointed. Fred Lim’s announcement he would resume his "spray-painting" campaign on houses of suspected drug-pushers is absolutely passé, and ridiculous. This won’t work anymore. Get them, grab them, hit them where they hurt most, the balls, arraign them, convict them, let them all rot in the calaboose for the rest of their lives.

If only we could duplicate what Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has done in Thailand. Without much ado, his government waged a silent "take no prisoners" war against drug lords, exterminated about 3000 (due process of law went to hell). Oh lawdy, lawdy, the drug problem in Thailand has disappeared. Here, we talk too much, preen too much, vaudeville too much. We wake up tomorrow with more drugs in the market, more Filipinos suckered, the nation blighted even more.

I would have expected GMA to organize, without too much fuss or any publicity, the Philippine equivalent of Elliot Ness and his Untouchables.

The Untouchables were nine young, zealous, outstanding police officers. They couldn’t be bribed at all and that made all the difference. Each one fought and when any died, he died on his sword and that was what made Al Capone shiver. Chicago’s top mobster could buy anybody in town, politician, mayor, judge, alderman, councilor, police. But not the Untouchables, certainly not Elliot Ness. He was only 26 years old when tapped by the Department of Justice to get Al Capone, who had eluded everybody else. Ness had no fear. He looked Capone in the eye, insulted him to his face, even as the gangster’s plug-uglies readied to drill him full of bullets.

Do we have anybody like Elliot Ness in the Philippines? Like the Untouchables? With the entire government standing by in full support?

I am afraid not. I well remember Lady Margaret Thatcher’s aside to me when in 1996 she said apropos Congress’ move then to legislate an anti-terrorism bill. Britain’s Iron Lady said the legislation was doomed. And it was doomed, she said, because "I understand your police force is inept and corrupt." You cannot expect this police force, she added, to implement an anti-terrorism campaign when they themselves have broken the law or are in league with professional crooks and criminals.

What Margaret Thatcher said then is even more true today.

Where will Sen. Bobby Barbers and Fred Lim and yes, PDEA chief Anselmo Avenido get the "untouchable" lawmen to go after the drug lords? From the police, that’s what. That’s just the problem. Most Filipinos fear or distrust their own police. And many Filipinos today claim, or will even swear, the police are the main source or distributors of drugs, particularly shabu in almost every Metro Manila neighborhood. And that’s what came out during the Senate hearings more than a year ago when Mary "Rosebud" Ong and other witnesses blew the whistle on police with larceny in their hearts, shabu inside their bulging backpacks, and millions in their bank accounts.

The name of now Sen. Panfilo Lacson was prodigally mentioned in those hearings as allegedly being the shadowy figure behind the multibillion-peso drugs racket when he was Philippine National Police Chief.

So, Mrs. President, are you really serious when you say you will go after the "rich and famous."? How much of this is commitment, how much bunk and baloney? You have waged so many "total wars" against crime, against graft and corruption, against poverty and oppression. They were so many spangles in the sky, a reverberating shower of promises. But they landed on earth like so many blown and busted fuses. No big criminal was ever arrested.

I am afraid, Mrs. President, that just like your previous pledges to stamp out crime, this one will again go the way of Don Quichotte – urong-sulong and finally the bugle blare of retreat, and the melancholy tremor of taps.

* * *

President George W. Bush’s boast that the United States had liberated Iraq, opened the high road for democracy to take root, given this nation the historic opportunity to spearhead unprecedented progress in the Middle East is running into big trouble. Iraq is certainly not free. It is a militarily occupied country. America, Britain and other powers will presumably remain three or five years more before the yoke of occupation is removed.

Not a day passes that firefights do not occur between hostile Iraqi forces and US and British troops.

This is far from the Iraq that invading US troops expected. The scenario underscored jubilant Iraqi throngs embracing American and British doughboys, plying them with kisses and flowers for having overthrown the bloodthirsty dictator Saddam Hussein. The pledge was that the invaders would not stay a day longer. The Iraqis would forthwith regain control of their country. The nation would be reconstructed. Aid would come in abundance, financial and economic aid. A kind and generous America would see to that.

Well?

Just two days ago, Iraqi townspeople killed six British soldiers in Majar el Kabir, Southern Iraq, and this time occupying authorities cannot blame loyalist troops of Saddam Hussein. What happened was that the townspeople were furious at the British troops that searched private residences for weapons and even "intruded" into women’s rooms. The latter is considered a gross violation of Muslim privacy.

Already for about a month or so, about 30 American soldiers have also been killed, mostly in and the environs of Baghdad. US officials claim they have traced the violence to residual troops loyal to Saddam Hussein or members of the dictator‘s Ba’ath Party. Whatever, Iraq is not well. The US government should have expected that a people, bathed in their own civilization for thousands of years, would not easily kowtow before the Yankee jackboot.

If America’s intention is to rebuilt Iraq in its image, then it might have to wait for generations and still not succeed. Democracy, human rights, free trade, the traffic of corporate giants, the battering of nation-state walls, women stripped to the bikini, open mouth kissing, the fugitive slurp and sweep of money by the billions may be okay in America. They may not necessarily be in Iraq whose Islamic culture disdains and even rejects the material modernity of the US and the West.

There is every sign that things could get worse and not better.

Iraq’s power and oil infrastructure, now under the authority and control of US occupying authorities, has been the target of attacks, probably by Iraqi saboteurs. If this should get worse, Iraq’s oil resources, second largest in the world, could become a curse instead of a blessing. The US government had intended massive oil proceeds would be diverted for the reconstruction of Iraq. This may not materialize as Iraqis seek to regain control of their destiny and continue to harass the occupiers.

America is now beginning to realize it has to pay a big, steep perhaps even a violent price for imperium.