This article was originally published in the Sept. 28.
2002 issue of FORUM, the official community newspaper of the University
of the Philippines System.
We commemorate this September the
expulsion of the US bases. But we celebrate with a sense of frustration
at the betrayal of our victory.
We fought so hard and for so long to free our country from
American military bases -- those hated symbols of our continuing
subjugation. Eleven years later, G.I. Joe is back, strutting around
with his deadly toys. Humiliating is the fact that it is our own
government that has invited him back.
In the past, the Americans had to coerce our government to grant
them basing rights. They took advantage of our dire need for postwar
rehabilitation, our grave lack of funds to rebuild our country from the
damage inflicted by the Americans themselves. Those of you who are too
young to remember may not be aware that it was not Japanese but American
carpet bombing that leveled Manila, Cebu and other cities to the
ground. The Americans used our desperate situation to extract from us
the onerous RP-US Military Agreement.
It is not so this time around. Our government all too eagerly
volunteered to join George W. Bush's "war against terrorism". A
gladdened Washington lost no time accepting our government's offer. It
immediately deployed American troops in the guise of training our
admittedly incompetent soldiers to fight a band of kidnappers in Basilan
and Jolo. Since the Abu Sayyaf proved to be an easy nut to crack,
another justification for continued American presence had to be created
-- that of branding the NPA as terrorist.
This puts us in a worse situation than
before. Under the RP-US Military Bases Agreement, American troops were
confined to Clark and Subic. Now, they can move around wherever the NPA
is operating.
It gives us little comfort that the American intrusion is
supposedly just for training. Let us not forget that American
involvement in Vietnam also started as a training exercise. President
John F. Kennedy initially dispatched a few hundred American troops to
teach the soldiers of Ngo Dinh Diem the art of torture and the science
of killing communists. They did not expect the Vietcongs to fight back
with exemplary courage and skill. When the so-called trainers started
going home in coffins, the American media responded with an outburst of
patrioteering. To impress those ill-clad and emaciated Vietcong
guerrillas of American might, Lyndon Johnson escalated the war, sending
hundreds of thousands of conscripts to Vietnam. But they continued
losing one battle over another, until the American people themselves
clamored for an end to the war. Bill Clinton and a thousand other young
Americans fled to avoid being drafted to the army.
Now George W. Bush, a Texas cowboy in the White House, is out to
redeem America's pride. With no more Soviet Union to serve as a
countervailing force, he is bullying other nations with impunity. He
orders the Palestinian people to replace Yassir Arafat. He threatens
Saddam Hussein with another military assault. In the Philippines, he
only has to dangle a package of financial aid to elicit the obedience of
a morally and economically bankrupt government.
For an imperialist power, a global enemy is a necessity. If it
does not exist, it has to be invented. Half a century after the defeat
of fascism, the global enemy was communism; now after the Cold War, it
is terrorism. The principal driving force of modern imperialism is no
longer the quest for natural resources and foreign markets; it can
obtain these through the IMF and WTO. All other countries are just too
willing to host American investments. All other countries have opened
up their markets. But modern imperialism cannot live in peace. It has
to maintain an enormous war economy to absorb the surplus. And it can
only justify the massive military expenditures by inventing the global
enemy.
Osama bin Laden came to the rescue of Mr. Bush. Before the Sept.
11 incidents, the political fortune of Mr. Bush was sliding down faster
than the dollar. The American media --always on the look out for
someone to ridicule -- focused on his intellectual vacuity and
ineptitude. With the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers and the
Pentagon, the Texas cowboy in the White House fond a hate object around
which to rally the American people and justify the massive military
expenditures.
America's "war on terrorism" is a great historical irony. Its
prime targets were themselves creations of the United States. Osama Bin
Laden, Mulla Omar and Saddam Hussein were erstwhile allies of America.
The CIA provided Al-Qaeda and the Taliban with funds, weapons and
military training to fight the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The
Pentagon also built up the army of Saddam Hussein as a counterforce to
Iran. America has a despicable record of abetting terrorism. It
continues to sponsor terrorist attacks on Cuba.
September 11 has another meaning for the peoples of Latin
America, especially the Chileans. Sept. 11, 1973 was the day the
American-sponsored coup d'etat deposed the democratic government of
Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet, one of the most
ruthless terrorists in history.
As we celebrate the Senate rejection of the RP-US Military Bases
Agreement, we also mourn the return of G.I. Joe. Quoting a line from a
popular song of the anti-Vietnam War Movement, we once again ask the
question, "When will we ever learn?""
