Philippines Trip 2002

It took five decades for this country to rid itself of American military presence. It took President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo just one year to bring it back.

...That puts us right back where we began, to the days of American troops and not very unlikely American fighter planes and warships. Salonga himself warns that the Americans are not going to leave even after the Abu Sayyaf is routed. That is not what they are here for.

...Why? Because of a small band of kidnappers who happened to have taken a couple of American hostages? The AFP reckons the Abu Sayyaf is down to only about a hundred armed men, as a result of demoralization, defection and decimation. You need American troops to deal with something like that? And as Father Nacorda et al. have revealed, the only reason the Abu Sayyaf continues to thrive is that the AFP has made them junior partners in the lucrative kidnap industry. Yes, junior: the Abu Sayyaf does all the work while the generals just sit back and get their cut.

Which brings me to one truly bizarre argument I've heard over the past week. We need the foreign troops, says one, precisely because our AFP cannot be counted upon to do the job. The exact parallel of that argument is saying that we must arm the populace because the cops are useless in preventing crime. Which is an argument for jumping from the frying pan into the fire. The cops are useless, abolish the PNP, don't turn the country into a wild, wild West. The AFP is useless, abolish the AFP, don't turn the country back into a colony.

I've always said that America's war against terrorism won't remain a reason to punish the people responsible for Sept. 11, it will turn into an excuse to push American global policy more aggressively than ever before. American media and popular culture have already been furiously preparing the ground for it, a spate of Hollywood movies offering blithe moral underpinnings for American action in foreign soil. The presence of American troops in Basilan proves it. The United States had been eyeing the coast of Dadiangas as a replacement for Subic long before Sept. 11. Wearing the mantle of the war against terrorism, it should find every excuse, or pressure point, to get it. Salonga is right: Those troops aren't likely to disappear along with the Abu Sayyaf.

Unless we protest it, of course. Which brings us back to Ms Macapagal's monumental perfidy. This country spent much blood, sweat and tears trying to rid itself of American military presence, the one thing that has debilitated us more than anything else in the world. And whose monstrous effects are visible in the toxic wastes the Americans left behind in Clark and Subic. I do most earnestly propose that she put up an alternative presidential residence in the areas in Clark where the toxic wastes are, in solidarity with her fellow Kapampagans. ...

It took Claro M. Recto, Lorenzo Tanada and Jose W. Diokno a lifetime of struggle to rid this land of its greatest plague, which was the presence of foreign troops on its soil. It has taken President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo one moment of whim to bring it back.