Why announce a poison pen letter without first investigating it?

In my years of reporting – including covering the police beat and the National Bureau of Investigation – I haven’t seen the like of it. Sanamagan: How can a "rank-and-file" employee identifying himself only as "Mike Blah" write a two-page letter to Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez (dated May 24) accusing Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap of allegedly "masterminding" the killing of Tacurong City journalist Marlene Esperat, then have the DOJ Secretary release the letter for publication by all the news media?

Isn’t it the unbending rule of law to investigate first, secure irrefutable proof, then make an announcement? The Blah letter may contain a lead to who masterminded the Midland Review crusading columnist’s murder – or it may be only blah-blah, maliciously hurled at that. Who is Blah? How could he be privy to the plot? Did he "overhear" the kill order being given?

The astonished Secretary Yap himself got only a fax copy from DOJ Secretary Gonzalez. Angrily, he retorted: "This is a thrash letter, not even a sworn statement!"

If proof positive and serious evidence doesn’t come to light in the next day or two, what can we call this sudden very much publicized accusation? We all await the "proof", but at this moment, from where I sit, it smacks of character assassination. No matter what happens next, even if he’s subsequently cleared, poor Yap’s name has been irreparably smeared.

The fact is that there was a multi-million peso fertilizer scandal in the Department of Agriculture. This surfaced during the last Presidential elections, and involves a number of ranking DA officials. If you'll recall, I even indicated in this corner that former Agriculture Secretary Luis "Cito" Lorenzo Jr., has been canned, despite his success in making the country self-sufficient in rice and corn, owing to his refusal to authorize or authenticate certain aspects of that politically-profitable fertilizer scam. Cito was given a consuelo post as Presidential Adviser and Chairman of the Land Bank, but this was short-lived – and now, having finally resigned, is completely out of the government.

It was fast work on the part of then newly-installed Philippine National Police Chief, Director-General Art C. Lomibao, to have instantly taken over the inquiry into Marlene Esperat’s cruel murder, at our urging, to quickly solve Phase One of the first journalist's killing during his watch. In just weeks, Lomibao's sleuths and policemen had collared the triggerman and the look-outs, then closed in on the "brains" behind the assassination. Let the police finish their job, then, without grandstanding or premature announcements.

Sure, the late Mrs. Esperat had included Yap, who was then administrator of the National Food Authority (NFA) among the officials she charged with graft before the Ombudsman. But Yap ordering a killing? It’s beyond belief.

Of course, we’re all pushing for the unmasking of the mastermind behind the murder of a fellow journalist. But for someone to give such an "order" with somebody like Blah eavesdropping? Susmariosep! That’s even more unbelievable.

As we used to say in Ilocos Sur, where such things continue to happen with uncomfortable frequency despite the end of the ferocious saka-saka days: Nobody could be that stupid.

"Murder will out," the English bard William Shakespeare once said in an unforgettable and oft-quoted line. But one two-page letter seems too flimsy and ridiculous a scrap of evidence on which to pin the blame for a murder. Unless there’s more convincing proof a great injustice has been done.

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The offensive launched by 1,000 US Marines, sailors and soldiers yesterday in the city of Haditha in Iraq’s Anbar Province was obviously intended to bag the troublesome guerrilla leader, Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and smash insurgent bands whose operations, including almost daily suicide or car-bombings, and ambushes, have slain more than 620 people since the new Iraqi government was installed last April 28.

The other week, a similar massive American sweep was conducted in towns bordering Syria to mop up mostly "foreign fighters" who have been infiltrating into Iraq along the 380-mile long border with that militant state – which has just broken off relations, by the way, with the United States.

Although there was a "report" on the Web that al-Zarqawi had been "wounded", this is not being given credence even by the Americans. How do you corner an elusive guerrilla leader like the 37-year old Jordanian who is already a legend among jihadis for his ruthlessness, including the beheading of a number of foreign hostages including American engineer Eugene Armstrong who was taken hostage in Baghdad last September? Zarqawi’s militants are even believed to have been the ones who captured Filipino OFW Angelo dela Cruz and threatened to behead him, "forcing" President GMA to withdraw our very tiny Filipino contingent from Iraq.

What’s interesting is that Zarqawi used to be a petty criminal in Jordan, described as "a simple, quick-tempered and barely literate gangster." He later joined the foreign fighters who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s (along with the Abu Sayyaf’s late Abdurajak Janjalani) and rose to prominence, although not on par with al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, as one of the "Afghan Arab" leaders. He was arrested in Jordan shortly after his return, and imprisoned there for seven years, accused of plotting to overthrow the King and establish an Islamic caliphate. After his release, he fled the country and, after a period of asylum in Europe, resurfaced in Iraq.

His group is considered mainly responsible for the kidnappings, bomb attacks and assassinations in Iraq, including the merciless attacks on Shiite Muslims (he’s a Sunni) whom that fanatic denounces as "US collaborators" for having voted to elect the new Iraqi government and now dominating it, although they elected a Kurd as President.

The frustration of the American military in Iraq, for all their high-tech and powerful weaponry is a classic case of using a baseball bat to swat a fly. In truth, the tactics of guerrilla warfare have not changed since the Chinese military genius, Sun Tzu defined them three centuries before Christ. Sun Tzu’s 13 essays on war have become a textbook, under the collective title of "The War of the Flea." In sum, the great tactician’s primer on how a flea can sting a giant to death was taken to heart by China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong, coupled with battle-strategies of the Taipings, that strange Christian sect in China which had almost toppled the Manchu Dynasty between 1850 and 1864.

We should know how effective guerrilla war can be from our own experience in the Philippines, when our revolucionarios, just having defeated the Spaniards, were compelled to fight the Americans who we had believed had come as our allies but stayed to conquer. Our hit-and-run tactics bled the US forces, although they finally prevailed. Our fighters killed more Americans than were slain in the Spanish-American War. In that war, only 379 American soldiers and sailors had died.

By 1902, when the Philippine-American war was formally declared "over", no less than 4,234 Americans lay buried in the Philippines, hundreds more died at home of diseases contracted during the campaign, 2,818 had been wounded, and the cost of the "war" had come to $600 million.

In short, the US had thought they had acquired the Philippines on the cheap by a fast-break Treaty of Paris signed with Spain on December 10, 1898. Article III of that sneaky Treaty signed the Philippines to US sovereignty. In a codicil, the US agreed to pay Spain the amount of $20 million. The inevitable cry went up that the Americans had "bought" ten million Filipinos at two dollars per head. The Revolutionary Government of our Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo protested that the Filipinos had already overthrown Spanish rule and the Spaniards had no right to turn our archipelago over to the Americans.

The nerve of them: the American government of President William McKinley even called our soldiers insurrectos, subsequently bandidos.

In the end, for all their own heavy losses, overwhelming American might decided the contest. Sixteen thousand Filipino "rebels" were mowed down by body count. (The actual total may have gone over 20,000). More than 200,000 Filipino civilians were dead, either from gunfire, starvation or disease. Even the carabao population was a casualty – reduced in number to one-tenth. Alas, there were no television crews, or CNN, BBC and Fox News, to cover the horror, rapine and famine of that give-no-quarter four year struggle.

Before the US launched their invasion of Iraq, I said in this corner, in three columns if I recall, that the US, Britain and the "coalition" would certainly win the battle to oust Saddam Hussein, but they should prepare for the more terrible guerrilla war which would follow. I reminded them of "the Philippine experience."

Well, that’s what is happening now.

* * *

This is what this writer told the Command and General Staff College last Monday at the Officers Club House of Fort Bonifacio.

They had assembled two "classes" of officers completing their nine-month course – one from Fort Bonifacio (Army) and the other from Camp Aguinaldo (Armed Forces in general) – for my lecture. It was a great experience, especially during the open forum following my "speech", with all the probing and intelligent questions coming from the majors, commanders and ICDRs CGSC classes 43 and 44.

It’s clear these are officers destined for promotion to higher rank, probably a future Chief of Staff among them. For curiosity’s sake, I looked into their "student profile", and found that 16 held Masters’ degrees, 71.43 percent of them had "Baccalaureates", and two were lawyers.

Aside from the Philippine Army, Philippine Air Force, Philippine Navy, Tech SVCs, Coast Guard, and Reserve offices in the Staff College, there were five "foreign allied students", one from the Indonesian Navy, one from the Pakistani Navy, one from the Indian Army, one from the Malaysian Army and one from the Malaysian Air Force.

Some of the queries concerned the Vietnam War and what the US had learned from it. What had gone wrong in Vietnam? Did 58,022 Americans die in vain? Was America’s "intervention" an awful blunder?

Having covered that war, its details remain fresh in my memory. But let me recall an article I wrote for MANILA magazine in 1985, on the occasion of the April 30th, tenth year anniversary, of the Communist victory and the taking of Saigon in 1975, which I had entitled, Is the Philippines Going the Way of Vietnam?

In that piece, I had reported how the leading American dailies from The New York Times and Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times had been rehashing old memories and analyzing "mistakes". TIME magazine and NEWSWEEK had run cover-page play-ups, in imagery and painful photographs, about "The Legend of Vietnam". My old professor, Henry A. Kissinger and the late President Richard M. Nixon, separately, published post-mortems on the tragic, painfully botched war. "Who me?" They had said in effect. "It wasn’t my fault."

My old colleague, Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times, was more sanguine in the piece he did for the Times’ Sunday magazine. Headlining his article, "10 Years Later, the Vietnam War Burns on the American Mind," Lelyveld quoted Paul Melhercik, who was one of the think-tank on the war: "What we learned in Vietnam is we can’t fight other people’s wars."

A lesson forgotten, I suppose – since the Americans are now asking themselves in puzzlement: What are we doing in Iraq?

* * *

One of the most pertinent questions thrown at me during the Fort Bonifacio "forum" was: How come, after the Americans left, the Saigon government was unable to fight off the Viet Cong and fell in 1975?

To begin with, the Americans didn’t "lose" that war technically. In 1970, they simply gave up, packed up, and left. They blamed us in the media. We journalists had brought the horror of that war, with American boys dying right and left, and thousands of civilians being killed, by way of vivid television images right into the living rooms and bedrooms of America. We newsmen had free run of the place (we were losing photographers and journalists, too, in the fighting) and we told it like we saw it.

The American public recoiled at the TV image they got. Americans were alarmed at the vivid newspaper reports of the bitter fighting, and the attrition in civilian lives.

In March, 1969, at the peak of the American involvement, no less than 540,000 Americans were fighting in Vietnam. They learned, sadly, that "good intentions" and 8,000 raids by B-52 bombers, trying to zap Viet Cong guerrillas in the jungle with 500 to 1,000 lb. bombs, could not prevail. Imagine a Superpower humbled by barefoot or used-rubber-tire-soled battalions in black pyjamas!

And the ultimate lesson was this: that not all America’s vaunted air and naval power, her Marines on the ground and her paratroopers dropping from the sky, or airborne by helicopters, and every clever weapon and technological device – even that awful "Agent-Orange" – could succeed in propping up a corrupt and venal regime. You cannot call any country "a bastion of freedom" when its officials and officers are crooked and their people are not truly free.

Abandoned by their US backers, the South Vietnamese Army and the Saigon government, after a few years of faltering combat, collapsed with a suddenness that caught even the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong by surprise.

Two years ago, I went to Hanoi to visit the redoubtable Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, organized the 1968 "Tet" offensive, and masterminded the final push to Saigon in 1975. General Giap, to my surprise, looked very much like Yoda in Star Wars and was a very small man, grey in his 90s and wizened by age. But his mind remained brilliant and his wit unbridled as we talked of the war, and even of how he had devised a means of "downing" those formidable B-52s. That fascinating conversation in his home will remain one of the most remarkable experiences of my career as a newspaperman.

Giap’s strategy was simple, straightforward, and "innocent" in retrospect. He won by sacrificing men (and women) in the attack until he simply blasted and wore the enemy out. The "secret" was in getting men and women to make the courageous sacrifice of their own lives. That’s how Giap did it.

The irony of it all, is that the Vietnamese have made peace with America in a manner that China and Japan never will. They’ve welcomed the Americans back (and their dollars) with open arms – and, apparently, in all sincerity. Their economy is being subsidized, to a great deal, by the investments and money sent home by their own version of Balikbayans, the former 1.3 million "boat people" who fled the Communist take-over or escaped during the persecutions of the postwar Pax Hanoi, and prospered in the US and the West. Their billions of dollars sent back to the "homeland" and their returning children are now a strong support of Vietnam’s still-struggling but rising economy.

The Russians, who have almost as many proverbs as the Chinese, have a saying: "A bad peace is better than a good war." This may be true. However, how can even a "bad peace" now be secured in Iraq.

The Vietnam experience gives us hope, in retrospect, that this may – in time – be possible.