Will the world now think terrorists rule here? Once more, we're the weakest link

At this writing late last night, we still haven’t secured the "promised" release of hostaged Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz. I hope and pray the so-called "Khalid Ibn Al-Walid Squadron" – as the Islamic fanatics who threatened to "behead" poor Angelo call themselves – give him back safely to our government. We have paid dearly for his survival and his freedom.

Or have they double-crossed our craven, wishy-washy government? The Islamic terrorists have already beheaded one of the hostaged Bulgarian truck drivers, but this didn’t faze the Bulgarian government. The Bulgarians vowed to keep their 480-member military brigade steadfastly in Iraq. "Up yours!" seems to be the message dispatched to the Islamic butcher, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, from the Sofia government. The Bulgarians asserted that while they hope the second truck driver will not be murdered, they will never yield to "blackmail".

The South Korean government, angered by the beheading of Kim Sun-il, a South Korean worker, by the same Muslim fanatics last June 22, has declared it is sending a bigger force of 3,000 military personnel to Iraq. The Japanese, in response to the kidnapping of Japanese nationals, if you’ll recall, announced earlier they were dispatching more Japanese personnel, too.

In sum, in spite of their pain – indeed because of their pain – other countries are standing firm and vowing to fight, not surrender supinely to the terrorists. As for us, President GMA and our government turned tail – and ran. We blubbered on al-Jezeera television that we were pulling our contingent out.

Yesterday, our Department of Foreign Affairs was already busy supervising the withdrawal of our disgracefully tiny 51-member Philippine contingent – already termed, in timid, euphemistic words, a mere "humanitarian mission". "Rescuing" OFW Angelo de la Cruz by caving in to the terrorists’ demands may play well to some of the chauvinistic local media, the weepy soft-shelled segment of our countrymen (it’s almost boring to add, the usual Leftists), the knee-jerk anti-Americans of which stripe there are many, and, of course, his anguished family and his cabalens in Pampanga. Let’s trust we get Angelo back, safe and sound – but, in the short term, not even in the long run, we’ve put the rest of our 1.4 million OFWs in the Middle East, especially our 4,000 still in Iraq, and the 900,000 we have in next-door Saudi Arabia, at even greater risk. For the terrorists now know that they can abduct, hostage, and threaten to behead more of our Pinoys and Pinays at will, and the GMA government will give in to their further demands.

Sadly, the word is out that if we can’t cope with the terrorists in Iraq, we can cope even less with the terrorists and Islamic fanatics we have running amok in Mindanao (after all, the Abu Sayyaf and Moro rebels have been "beheading" Filipino hostages, priests, soldiers, and Americans down there, too). Can you imagine what this implies? That we’ve lost control of our country.

Think of the exodus this latest, disgraceful surrender is already generating.

We hang our heads in shame.

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Strangely, our La Presidenta remains out of sight, although she met Tuesday night with US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone Jr., who, incidentally, is one of Washington’s experts on Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, and the Middle East, fluent in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Italian.

Since none of my usual eye-to-the-keyhole type sources can tell me what conversation ensued, I won’t attempt to guess what GMA and Ricciardone said to each other. I don’t believe, though, that her former phone-pal George "Dubya" Bush, was happy about our President’s abandoning the coalition in Iraq in such precipitate fashion, just after he and the White House had praised her for standing fast against the terrorists.

I suspect all those tear-jerker photographs in our newspapers and pathetic TV sequences of the unfortunate de la Cruz’s distraught wife and brood of eight, the praying, candle-holding school children, the passionately voluble bishops and priests, the demonstrating Leftwing groups (they’re the best at mounting photo opportunity "mass actions"), may have stampeded GMA, who desperately longs to be the heroine of the masa and, she may think, the OFWs. She didn’t notice that last week, when she banned the departure of further Filipino workers and "recruits" for Iraq, there was almost a riot on the part of the frustrated would-be OFWs at the airport. Many both here and in the Middle East have been saying they’d rather risk themselves in that war-torn corner of the world than starve and see their families starve in Manila and in their home provinces.

That’s why Angelo, who was working in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, risked driving an oil truck to Iraq. It seems they had offered him and the others triple "risk" pay.

Would you believe? One of our government officials even snorted, "They don’t have to go abroad and risk their lives to make a living! They can plant camotes here at home!" That rings a bitter bell. When we were kids, to survive in the food-scarce postwar years, that’s what we planted – kamotes and kamoteng kahoy, the latter "cassava" which we ground into flour to make bread.

Is this to be the motto of the "new" GMA six-year administration? Eat Camotes Again?

One thing is embarrassingly sure. We’ve shown the world, even countries opposed to the Iraq war, that we’re a nation which doesn’t have the backbone and the courage to keep our commitments. We joined the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, confident we were going there to help topple the tyrant Saddam Insane, help the Iraqis rebuild and install a democracy – but abandoned our allies when the going got rough.

I lunched yesterday with a foreign friend who firmly supported his country’s vehement opposition to the United States "invading" Iraq, and he sadly remarked that giving in to the terrorists and withdrawing our "troops" (few as they were) had been a terrible mistake. I met other European friends later in the day, and they also believed it had been a blunder which would cost the Philippines much in terms of trust in its dealings with other nations. "Right or wrong," one of them put it, "you don’t abandon your comrades in a fight."

In sum, when a country commits itself to an alliance, it must stay the course. Our commitment to the coalition did not expire until August 20 – only a few weeks away from now. Our supercilious government might argue, "What difference does a few weeks make?" Every difference. For we surrendered to terrorists’ demands, and fled. Can we ever be relied upon in an alliance again? If someday we desperately need the help of "friends", will anybody come?

Worst of all, it’s clear that we can be jerked about by terrorists.

* * *

Yesterday morning, the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) rang me up from London to interview me on one of its worldwide broadcasts on the Iraq boondoggle. As soon as the interview began, my telephone conked out. The BBC rang me up again. After a few words, the phone conked out again. The BBC called on the overseas line again a few minutes later. In a few seconds, the phone went dead again. Was it the fault of the PLDT, or our overseas phone connections? Oh, well. I missed my chance to air my views. Late yesterday afternoon, The Strait Times called from Singapore. I was in the throes of my deadline, and couldn’t give an interview.

The other day, I got a call from Abu Dhabi television. "How’s your Arabic?" My interviewer from the UAE asked. I told her, alas, my Arabic – outside of a few lines – was non-existent. Once again, I missed an opportunity to become famous on Arab-language television.

What I’m saying is that, all over our planet, everybody wants to know why the Philippines is acting in this manner. And how we expect now to cope with Islamic terrorism or rebellion at home and abroad.

It did not help that all over the front pages of foreign newspapers yesterday were reports that (as The New York Times’ Paris-edited International Herald Tribune put it) our "Manila Peace Talks Face a Rising Threat."

The report said that "the links between a Filipino Islamic separatist group and the Southeast Asian terror network Jemaah Islamiyah are threatening the peace effort in the southern Philippines and could worsen the terrorist threat in Southeast Asia . . ." The stories were based on a worried report released Tuesday by the International Crisis Group.

The Crisis Group report described "the cooperation between Jemaah Islamiyah and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front as decentralized and often dependent on the front’s local leaders."

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The MILF keeps on denying that it has ties with the JI, but – the report points out – the MILF’s relationship with JI dates back to many of its leaders having trained alongside future JI leaders in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s.

"This relationship," the report pointed out, "deepened over the years, culminating in a series of terrorist attacks in the Philippines, including the December 2000 bombings in Manila that killed more than 20 people and the Davao City bombings in 2003 that killed 38 people."

The Crisis Report described the Philippines as "the weakest link" in the campaign against terror in Southeast Asia, noting "the relatively few arrests made in the country compared with other Southeast Asian countries, (and) the escape from prison of terrorist suspects and the allegedly questionable arrests made by Filipino authorities since the war on terror began."

The influential Financial Times, published simultaneously in Western Europe, US and Asia, also ran a story yesterday, headlined: "Crackdown ‘fails to stop militant group growing’ ".

The article, datelined both Jakarta and Manila, quoted the same Crisis Group, the think-tank whose Southeast Asia project director, Sidney Jones, is a leading authority on Islamic extremists.

The ICG report "criticizes Manila’s efforts to contain the JI threat," the FT said. In the wake of the Bali bombings of October 2002 which killed more than 200 people, and were attributed to the JI, "Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore had together arrested more than 200 suspected Jemaah Islamiyah members and rapid convictions in the Bali bombings did much to dispel complacency in Indonesia". The report pointed out that "in the Philippines, there had been relatively few arrests . . . .

Need more to be said?

Everybody knows about the terrorist training camps in Mindanao, from which terrorists are "exported" to other Asian countries. Yet, the MILF – with whom our government is so trustingly negotiating – swears it has "nothing" to do with them.

We’ve surrendered to terrorists in Iraq. This doesn’t instill confidence to friends or "investors" abroad that we can handle them here at home.

Worst of all, our own morale is now plunging to an all-time low. And Chapter 13 "bankruptcy" is staring our government, burdened with $62 billion in foreign debt, right in the face.