‘Little boy’ preps for war

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/30/2011



The raggedy “little girl” doll was all-too-willing a tool in the subversion of our country’s slow but fledgling popular democratic governance. For her almost canine devotion to her masters, she was rewarded with her share of the plunder by the US and the local oligarchy for nine years. But, as that raggedy doll became worn out and torn on all sides, she was amply thrown away, replaced with a “little boy puppet.” This dummy, with a wooden smile carved into a wooden face (perplexing everyone besides himself), has a wide eyed gape like the cowboy marionette of the 1950s puppet show, Howdy Doody, coupled with the jerky motions and hobbling gait of Jim Henson’s Muppets.

The past year, this little boy’s puppeteers made him over as a “hanging judge” to end 2010 with a bang. For the New Year, they are dressing him up as the “little drummer boy” and “little tin soldier” rolled into one, hobbling off to a new adventure of patriot games — even when the future of our people, our children, and grandchildren is not something to be toyed with.

Two of my recent columns raised the alert for the heightened geopolitical tensions being drummed up in the Eurasian front, centered on Syria and Iran, and in the Asia-Pacific front, on the South China Sea issue. “A creeping World War III” and “Useful idiot’s autocratic mission” are a wake-up call to the real and present danger of having a literally insane leadership in Malacañang — installed in the 2010 “Hocus-PCOS” elections, where technical shenanigans had been established and where the key to uncovering the electoral manipulation lies in the second software sneaked in. Yes, my friends, they do go to that extent to control our elections, with US software company, Dominion Voting Systems, at the core of that discredited AES of Smartmatic.

War does not just happen. It is painstakingly planned on a long-term basis. And it is seldom done so for reasons other than money. Since wars are utterly expensive in resources and lives, these are never initiated without a clear payback in mind. We see that in every conflict initiated throughout the millennia. In the latest one in Libya, the lion’s share of that country’s oil revenues now go to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) countries, leaving mere drops for the Libyans themselves.

The assaults on Syria are aimed at Iran’s oil, which, in turn, leads to the ultimate goal — aborting China’s rise as a world power. The personal assaults on Vladimir Putin by the plethora of “opposition” groups funded by Western NGOs (like George Soros’ Open Society, the National Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House) is meant to weaken Russian politics for the ultimate assault on its sovereignty and the weakening of the Russia-China alliance.

Meanwhile, in Asia, the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security (ANZUS) partners are aiming for the China Sea issue as the casus belli against China — this, despite perfectly sound arrangements having been forged by that emerging superpower with Asean to resolve their shared maritime territorial and resource issues through peaceful dialog and joint exploitation.

Thus, with an irrational element needing to be introduced, the likely “hero” would be a little boy blue with all his insecurities covered up by his love of guns, the company of his kabarkada cronies, all while exhibiting an incompetence that has caused the most dismal Asean growth rate the past year and presiding over troubles at home that are wreaking havoc on the nation’s institutions.

Here, the perfect chance to escape all these woes is by playing soldier and patriot, egged on by a Big Brother, who promises this little “useful idiot” a steady supply of disposed guns, warships, and planes for his war games. No surprise there really — for this little dummy now struts before his generals, declaring a shift of focus, from internal security to the defense of the realm. And as the little boy now has his toys to brandish, all it takes is to provoke an overreaction from the “enemy.”

That situation was very eruditely described in the Asia Sentinel, a prestigious Web magazine that features well-known Asian writers. In a Dec. 20 article there (“US Playing a Dangerous Asia-Pacific Game?”), Gavin Greenwood says: “On Dec. 14, Philippine President Benigno Aquino formally commissioned his country’s latest and most capable warship, a 46-year-old former US Coast Guard cutter. Renamed the Gregorio del Pilar after a young revolutionary general killed fighting American troops in 1899, the navy’s new flagship… along with many other small warships, form what military strategists like to call ‘the tip of the spear’… The significance of this ageing vessel’s deployment, however, is not its manifest inability to defend itself — let alone the Philippines — from almost any other warship afloat in the region but that such an attack could invoke the country’s 60-year-old mutual defense treaty with the US… The role of the Gregorio del Pilar may be seen as simply to remain at sea long enough to get in the way of a potential enemy — invariably seen as China — and introduce a layer of uncertainty over the consequences of any direct action against the Philippines or its state assets…

“By providing the Philippines with even the most limited means to confront an opponent at sea, backed by Clinton’s explicit signaling her government’s resolve to stand by its treaty obligation, Washington may have handed over the potential detonator for an armed confrontation with China to the crew of an elderly ship that had once borne the name of the first US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s caution that ‘when the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation’…”

Such a sword — in the hands of a little tin soldier boy imbued with a growing sense of insecurity over his domestic failures and the conflicts he has spawned, who is moreover nervous and fretful of the consequences of his rapidly disintegrating governance — can certainly come in handy, with Big Brother eagerly awaiting the consequences.

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