Why Filipino troops should stay in Iraq

THE MOUNTING violence in Iraq, which has threatened to spiral out of control in the past two weeks, has forced all nations which have contributed troops to help with the US-led occupation of Iraq to seriously consider pulling them out.

The Philippines has contributed a contingent of 53 soldiers and police, who are deployed in south-central Iraq under Polish command. The original contingent of 96 Filipinos arrived in Iraq last year, but 43 of these were medical workers who eventually asked to be sent home because they didn't feel safe in Iraq.

Many critics of the war in Iraq in the Philippines have called for the withdrawal of Filipino troops,
including Senator Manuel Villar, chairperson of the Senate foreign relations committee, who said this week that Filipino troops should be brought home as they were not welcome in Iraq.

I beg to disagree. Although some disgruntled groups of Iraqis may not welcome the presence of foreign troops on Iraqi soil, I'm sure that the vast, silent majority is glad that foreign troops are keeping some semblance of security in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. It is a well-known fact that Saddam kept the nation, deeply divided along sectarian and ethnic lines, together with his brutal rule. The outbursts of fighting between Iraqi factions that have occurred since the toppling of Saddam last year are perhaps only glimpses of what could happen if a power vacuum were allowed to occur in Iraq.

As President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has rightly pointed out, only those who actually volunteer to serve in Iraq are being deployed there, and there is a line of Pinoys ready and eager to serve in Iraq. In any event, the Filipino troops are not engaging in any direct combat against Iraqis, instead providing general security to the area in which they are assigned. It is true that these troops have been exposed to danger, with 12 Filipino soldiers slightly wounded when their camp was attacked by suicide bombers in February, but this is to be expected until Iraq is fully stabilized and ruled by an elected Iraqi government.

American mistakes in Iraq

The US occupation of Iraq has been a rocky one and one riddled with several mistakes. The main one seems to be the decision taken last year to dismantle Saddam's military. In the mistaken belief that the whole military structure was infected with diehard Saddam loyalists, the US decided to scrap all the Iraqi troops and start afresh. Soldiers were dismissed but allowed to keep their weapons, which to any observer was a patently foolish thing to do. Hungry and without a regular paycheck, what ex-Iraqi soldier wouldn't lob a grenade at American troops for a few dollars to feed
himself and his family? The US should have kept the bulk of the Iraqi military intact, retraining them and paying each soldier 100 dollars a month. That would have kept them loyal to a central authority, and Iraq would have its own military in place when the Americans hand over some of the power on June 30.

The other major problem facing US administrators in Iraq is one of legitimacy. The US-backed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) has so far had little power and has become detached from the Iraqi public. As one Iraqi poet wrote recently in The Guardian of London, although the IGC is made up of former victims of the Saddam regime, they move around in US-provided limousines, talk on US-provided cell phones, and hardly raise a peep when the US unleashes excessive violence against Iraqi civilians such as witnessed in the attacks on Fallujah during the past week.

Reading the horrifying accounts of American violence against Iraqis on the website www.occupationwatch.org is a stomach-churning experience. But I caution you to take its reporting with a pinch of salt, as its reporting is hawkishly anti-American. On the other end of the propaganda spectrum, is the reporting of the Iraqi occupation on US television which is surprisingly sanitized and provides Americans with a lopsided and incomplete picture of the war in Iraq. The deaths of American soldiers are reported in minute detail, with pictures and stories about those killed in Iraq. In contrast, the deaths of Iraqis are usually reported as mere numbers or as crazed terrorists out to get America.

Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite television stations have been repeatedly accused by US government officials of providing biased and anti-American reporting on Iraq, which I have to agree with. The relentless broadcast of gory pictures of dead Iraqis whose bodies have been mutilated beyond recognition by bombs and grenades, has become a standard practice on
these two channels. While the US TV networks completely sanitize their pictures of Iraq, the two
Arab networks revel in the gore and mutilation of war. A balance should be struck somewhere between both extremes.

While many people are rightly suspicious of the America's real intentions in Iraq, especially after US President George W. Bush's claims of Saddam stockpiling weapons of mass destruction turned out not to be true, one cannot but root for the establishment of the Arab world's first democracy in Iraq by next year when free elections are scheduled to be held. The US has crafted a bill of rights for all Iraqis, which will come into effect on June 30, the first such guarantee of personal freedoms in the Arab world. Dictators throughout the region are obviously fuming at the example a free and democratic Iraq will set.

But I am not completely oblivious to the fact that the US intends to stay in Iraq for decades to come, controlling it through the 14 military bases it is building there. President Bush would of course say that America needs to stay in the Middle East to defeat the poverty, terrorism and anti-American sentiment in order to keep America safe from possible future September 11-type of attacks. This is a complete turnaround from the traditional US foreign policy of having cozy relations with non-democratic regimes in the area just for the sake of keeping oil supplies
flowing to hungry American consumers.

Iraq strategically straddles the Middle East, has vast reserves of oil and is blessed with plentiful water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The US desperately wants to protect Israel from possible Arab aggression and also wants to check Iran's geopolitical ambitions. The September 11 attacks on the US, combined with Saddam's ruthless madness, provided the Bush administration with the perfect excuse to invade and occupy Iraq. Now that we're stuck with it, we might as
well make the most of it.

Comments or questions? E-mail the author at manilamoods@hotmail.com.