So easy to trigger war

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
7/18/2007



MILF Eid Kabalu said, "We are also very much interested in the investigation. Who did the mutilation of the bodies of the Marines? Because never in the history of the MILF that they did such a thing." It seems that all parties to the on going “beheading” furor presumes the story is true but disagree on who could have done it. MILF chief negotiator Mohaqer Iqbal when asked over radio who could have done it answered, “Those who stand to benefit from it” and left it hanging there. “Qui bono”, as we asked in our last column; let us could the number of parties who benefit.

The CPP-NPA seems to be poised to reap some benefits from this as AFP Chief-of-Staff Esperon sprung the most unexpected surprise through this imbroglio: the sudden truce offered to the CPP-NPA. Clearly, it’s meant to free the AFP from a two-front engagement and allow Esperon to focus all resources on pursuing the “decapitators” which would in all probability lead to total war with the MILF. If the CPP-NPA benefits, could they be the one to have sneaked into the MILF-AFP battlefield during the encounter to behead the massacred Marines? It’s a ridiculous proposition.

Is the MILF going to benefit from this beheading incident? If the AFP succeeds in focusing its energies on the MILF then any supposed benefit for it would evaporate. Time and again it has been shown that the focused man and firepower of the AFP is capable of vanquishing the limited Muslim rebel forces – as in the case of President Estrada’s victory in the year 2000 that succeeded in taking all the MILF bases and its headquarter Camp Abubakar. But AFP victories are invariably reversed by political and diplomatic pressures and engineered crises, like Edsa Dos and Church-US-Malaysian-OIC coercion.

Will the AFP benefit from the firestorm of the Basilan beheadings? The AFP also last Round One and got a huge blackened eyes for it, revealing extensive leadership flaws that allowed the violation of agreements it had with the MILF, open its troops to a massacre, exposed the continuing anomaly of its dud weaponry and, now, compels it to give up its campaign against what it calls the “primary national security threat” or the CPP-NPA in favor of pursuing the “decapitators” – which shows the AFP leadership still can’t sustain a strategic perspective on it mission.

Esperon shows his myopia in military and national security matters by poising himself to run after the rabbit and not the fox, but the very immature response to the tumultuous popular and AFP (particularly the Marines) reaction to the “beheading” is setting the agenda of the AFP now and not the strategic issues. But then, when has the AFP been concerned with real strategic issues when it is allied to the very strategic threat that has been constant through Philippine history – the foreign colonizers and interlopers. Some beneficiaries from the Basilan beheading is certainly these foreign interlopers.

The greater the confusion in Mindanao by re-ignition of the passions of all out war the greater the influence of the foreign “mediators”, including those countries that have proven conflict-of-interest in involving themselves in our internal affairs – like Malaysia, or the OIC. The U.S. is in a enviable position, officially and formally allied to both the MILF and the AFP top brass, it can “mediate” while supplying arms overtly and covertly to all sides, and enhance its “social development” role in setting up baranggay schools in Muslim areas while fires of war burn the warring parties into crisp.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her cabal, particularly Bert Gonzales, gains “fool’s gold” as it is a golden opportunity for distraction from the other burning issues of her governance, the growing economic debacle as the export sector collapse under her “strong peso”, her growing lame duck malady and provides the popular emotional environment for their “anti-terror” law; but it’s fool’s gold as soon as the troops and the country realize they’ve been put in a new intensified cycle of “endless war” unwinnable under the economic and geolpolitical incompetence of the Gloria regime.

The Philippine oligarchs and their foreign partners are clear gainers from any turmoil in Mindanao that hogs the headlines and sidelines discussions of economic exploitation issues. What chance for media exposure does Nasecor’s campaign to expose the injustice of “automatic recovery” or rate increase power of Meralco and the IPPs now? Or the new “reconnection fee” increase petitioned by Meralco, or Meralco’s P 2.5-B overcharging already proven by Nasecor? The port operations of Gloria’s crony is also raising fees, and the Aboitizes are leveraging their use of GSIS funds for IPO’s.

“Let them kill each other off” I imagine oligarchs joking all the way to their banks; in war only the poor die while profiteers make hay. It’s so easy to trigger war, just a few beheadings – as they filmed “Muslims” do it and showed (enacted or real, no one can tell) the world to enhance the Kosovo and the Chechen wars, as Bush Sr. did (throwing babies into bayonets) to justify the Gulf War; or more sophisticated ones like the WMD lie, the Tonkin Gulf affair to bomb NOrthVietnam, the sinking of the Maine triggering the Spanish-American War, the Polish “massacre of Germans” preceding Hitler’s invasion; and beheadings in Basilan.

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