All-out war won't work, but still...

The brother of a justice department official reportedly was arrested last week for fuel smuggling. Can Customs men withstand pressures to go easy on the well-connected lawbreaker?

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Politicos in faraway Manila are screaming all-out war in Mindanao to retaliate last Tuesday’s Moro separatists’ massacre of 19 soldiers. As if it’s so easy. On the other hand, peaceniks are waving reported Army operational lapses to dismiss the ambush killings as an isolated incident. Either way, it’s what a leading rabbi once deplored: extreme reaction to an extreme action.

All-out war won’t work. To begin with, the Army would be hard put to pull it off. It lacks battle ordnance. Like, howitzer and rifle shells purchased during the past admin are defective. The 41 soldiers waylaid in Al-Barka, Basilan, had to reload M-16 magazines while trying to repel the attackers and retrieve the wounded. The Army cannot just unleash tanks, fighter-bombers and gunboats without risking civilian lives and property — and being taken to task for it. It’s even short of fuel. Air cover for the beleaguered troop came three long hours after the firefight began at dawn, and reinforcements arrived only at dusk because helicopter and truck gas tanks were empty. Most of all, all-out war would cost grave casualties to both sides. Better to win the peace. But it shouldn’t mean letting the Moro Islamic Liberation Front break the truce and commit atrocities at will.

And fine, the operational lapses need investigating. The brass must find out why half-trained scuba fighters were deployed on a land mission in unfamiliar terrain. Why was only one platoon, instead of a company of three, dispatched to serve the arrest warrant on the MILF deputy base commander in lawless Al-Barka town? Why did they march out of camp with inadequate magazines? Why were reinforcements late? One might even add that it was right to sack the Army spokesman for speaking his mind out about suspending the ceasefire, againsts official policy. Even Gen. “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf, at the height of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, had to be scolded by then-US defense chief Dick Cheney for opining that they should have let him capture Baghdad. But all this can and should be done quietly, internally.

More important is that the MILF be exposed and made to account for violations, not only of the truce but also of international conventions. Like, why did it stage a sneak attack four long kilometers away from its Al-Barka base? Why did it execute six captured soldiers? Why did it let the wife of one of its slain members hack the bodies of the executed captives? Why, in July 2007, did it let that deputy commander behead the 14 wounded and slain Marines, also in an ambush in Al-Barka, which is why there’s now an arrest warrant for him? Why does it recruit child soldiers and use landmines, against United Nations sanctions? Why does it ally with Abu Sayyaf terrorists and pillaging “lost commands”? The government has powers — not only military — to make the MILF answer for all this.

  It is perilous to let pass the atrocities committed by the MILF in the name of Islamic liberation. The separatists will be emboldened to exploit all the more its built-in advantages in a truce to promote armed conflict. Ambuscades will go on and on. Barely two days after the massacre in Basilan, the MILF struck three Army patrols and police stations in Zamboanga Sibugay, also in Western Mindanao, killing eight servicemen. Were not those sneak attacks meant to distract the Army from pursuing the Basilan attackers?

 Worse it is to belittle our fighting men’s sacrifice of life and limb, by blaming on them the lapses of some of their superiors. The belittlers would do well to ponder this: had it not been for our soldiers, wouldn’t the MILF have captured Mindanao and probably Manila by now?

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Pyrolysis was billed in the ’90s as the cutting-edge technology to safely dispose of used auto tires. Without using oxygen it breaks down the old rubber to yield oil, char and steel. So efficient supposedly was the process that the gas it produces as by-product can be used to fuel the tire pyrolysis plant and generate extra electricity for the surrounding community.

But tire pyrolysis proved to be the opposite in the barrio of Ecanto, Angat, Bulacan. There, residents swear, the plant owned by influential outsiders emits choking foul odor, and soot that blackens their waterway and trees. What makes the situation particularly deplorable is that a succession of three environment secretaries in the past two years already has ordered the closure of the plant. Its environment clearances to be put up and to incinerate the tires have been revoked. And yet it keeps reopening and operating as if there’s no law to be obeyed. What gives?

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