The state of Iraq is falling apart, if it has not yet. This is the grim scenario that the world is witnessing today. In an unexpected turn of events, jihadis in the style of Al Qaeda and Sunni militants raising the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) have overrun a vast portion of the country.
The ISIS juggernaut has captured major population centers one of which is the second largest city Mosul, grabbed strategic industrial and military facilities, and moved with lightning speed within striking distance of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The cataclysmic events that saw also the big city of Tikrit, hometown of former President Saddam Hussein fell into the militants, accompanied by the meltdown of the Iraqi armed forces, happened only in June.
Why is it important for us thousands of miles away to keep an eye on these developments? We have our own problems, what do we care? We should for two reasons.
First, there are Filipinos working there. The safety of our very own nationals in the hapless though oil-rich land is an overriding concern. Seeing to it that overseas Filipino workers get out of there in one piece is second nature to our human instinct at self-preservation.
On the other hand, there is also the economic interest. The dollar remittances our OFWs send help keep us afloat. They contribute to our national survival and, if you please, to the yearly growth of our Gross Domestic Product. The instability in the large oil producing country will disrupt the inflow of a vital commodity to our shores, dollar currency.
If the situation gets worse, there will be a big problem. The precariousness of the condition of our overseas workers in the midst of war engenders national anxiety, besides the government having had to address the edginess of their families. This automatically sends everyone into a crisis mode.
Meanwhile, a vital lifeline from export labor will be cut off. The severance of that lifeline aggravates the fact that the repatriation of our overseas workers, as the Iraq government itself scrambles in disorder for the safest exit, is going to be a logistical nightmare.
Of course it is beside another telling effect: added numbers of balik-bayans to our unemployed labor force. Hundreds if not thousands of jobless will pour back to the country needing work that pays as much as they get in Iraq. That is quite a huge headache. And this is still just about Iraq.
Analysts predict the likelihood of the conflict spreading all over the region. The conflagration can spill beyond Iraq's borders and gobble up countries in the Middle East where the bulk of our workers abroad are stationed. The widening of the Iraq conflict to the whole of the region poses a hell of a problem for our export-labor-dependent economy.
Second, the cataclysm in Iraq is not far from what happened to us more than a century ago. It brings some historical flashbacks worth taking stock of. Those were when we lost a nation just as we were about to win a revolution against colonialism.
Nation building is for the native inhabitants of a country themselves to do. But purporting to teach how to govern ourselves, American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century took that away from us riding on our struggle to oust colonial rule. The Americans did not mind that our revolutionaries were already churning out a state by and for Filipinos, and we would be the first in our parts to declare independence from foreign domination. They took the chance of the weakening of a rival world power, Spain, to wedge in.
Since then, the country would not only lose nationhood and independence, but get stuck in prolonged underdevelopment.
The coming of the US forces offered self-proclaimed native leaders among the ilustrado (nascent landlord-bourgeoisie) class the opportunity to help themselves to the bounties that the new turn of events could offer. They have never really trusted the masses, and thought the struggle to liberate the country from superior aliens was nothing but an exercise in futility. They lost no time in betraying the anti-colonial revolution and capitulating to the new colonialist, the vaunted great North American nation.
Under the auspices of another foreign power, allied Filipino opportunists and traitors took over national leadership. But they did so as lackeys of the new colonial masters. They would repeatedly impose on the people the tragicomic irony of sacrificing national interest to an aggressor up to foisting on Filipinos its subjugating way of nation building deceptively for them.
Like in Iraq, under invasion by the US about a decade ago, the way was the way of war. It meant the Krag-wielding Yankees in the new American age storming a country that has just won freedom from foreign rule. It meant then US President William Mckinley's quaint dream about the "assimilation" of overseas territories to promote democracy, if by force of arms. The democratic dream ended up, as the emerging Filipino nation did, in the exploitation of one country by another country, the subjection of the latter by the former.
The same act of aggression was what would surface in Iraq more than a century later, three decades away from unleashing its genocidal bent on the Vietnamese people in the late 60s and the first half of the 70s. For this reason, Iraq's current existential bind does and must concern us. Like our being in constant war with ourselves, such traces back to the country's destabilization and molestation by an alien power.
What happened to Iraq, when George Bush ordered the American armed forces to bomb and shoot down the defenseless country, happened to us around 1900 when the Yankee contingents swarmed in on the Philippine isles and started shooting at Filipinos, expressly to pacify them. Whatever euphemism is used to deodorize the putrid act of war, it is nothing but naked foreign intervention.
Victory would be snatched by imperialism professing to teach self-government, just as our freedom fighters were winning a revolution for self-determination, Because of the intrusion, the continuation of the Filipino nation that had been united by revolutionary struggle was aborted. The paradox was that the violence was presented as something that had to be done to introduce the new democratic country to nationhood and democracy. Over the years, such propaganda has not changed, in Iraq 2003-2011 as was in our land when the forces of foreign aggression crushed our people's aspiration for independence.
Once more, the self-professed champion of democracy and nation-building took it upon itself to occupy the defiant nation of Saddam Hussein and remove its existing government. The United States emblazoned into the posters of the aggression the rhetoric about wanting the Arab state to get rid of a dictator and have the citizenry savor western freedom.
The initial reasons for the war was Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction and his links to Al Qaeda. These turned out to be pure deception. The pretexts and the democratic rhetoric could not for long hide the fact that the adventure was truly to inject American enterprise into the Muslim heartland, and cash in on its coveted oil wealth.
But after the US's Coalition of the Willing barged in and executed Saddam, his bombed-out country entered an era of social fragmentation and endless antagonisms. The war mission would be rephrased over time, from getting rid of fictional WMDs and Al Qaeda to nation building. Ironically, the US succeeded in smashing what was holding the country together against the challenge of radical Islamism, Baath Party rule.
After a previous unholy alliance to bring war to the US's arch enemy Iran, alliance partner Saddam would himself be targeted for standing in the way of America's Middle East ambitions. But in his removal, the victim would be the whole of Iraq. So much for American-style nation building and exporting of democracy.
Saddam's elimination opened the floodgates to what the US and its allies had feared, the flow of jihadi groups and militant fundamentalist sects aiming to gain foothold on a piece of territory where they can finally hoist the dreamed-of Islamic state. Was the reverse karma? What else? Eleven years since the US invasion, the country would be bristling with lethal weapons in the hands of deadly Islamic radicals and its American-sponsored institutions attacked at will by them.
To sum up, the US got what it manifestly aimed to prevent. It unleashed an endless war that rived Iraq along sectarian and ethnic divides and weakened its defenses against Muslim extremism. The US aggression, instead of bringing security, destabilized the nation. Destabilization paved the way for the influx of Al-Qaeda-type militants poised to rule the country.
This is a lot to think about as President Barrack Obama positions the recent US pivot to Asia. While the US economy and military establishment still reel from the fallout of the war in Iraq, America would begin refreshed military, political and economic overtures to our region. The experience in Iraq could only send shivers at what the much ballyhooed pivot bodes. Are we in for another destabilizing intervention?
America is intensely training its sights on the emerging markets of the east. Not the least is the Philippines which has become a fast rising economy, mainly because it has began to wiggle out of the constricting imperialist impositions of the past and explore new economic relationships particularly among neighbors. Let there be no mistaking it, the enticingly fresh attention is for America and its exclusive interests alone.
Do we need a reinvigorated and larger US presence once again? We need that like the Krag that once decimated our forefathers.
The renewed turbulence in Iraq urges us to review history, specifically at the time when the powers of the northern hemisphere were reshuffling the division of the world into each one's sphere of interest, a time when foreign intervention postponed our independence and subjected us to a new type of colonialism. Did we progress because of foreign intervention, or despite it? Weren't our chance of a new Filipino century just embroiled in subservience to alien dictates, protracted insurgencies, self-defeating social conflicts, and a state busying most of the time with suppressing its citizens rather than making the country progressive?
The Filipinos did not sacrifice so many lives in the fight against Spain. But they would pay a cost of 600,000 lives in the resistance to US imperialism, as with Vietnam more than half a century later. As if that experience was not enough, the nation would lose more in the internecine uprisings against the tyranny of the new ruler, when the Japanese declared war on the US and besieged the country for being part of the American lake, and in the latter nationalist struggle of the awakened middle-class, the intelligentsia, the workers, and peasantry.
Wherever it goes, the US brings the curse of war, the slavery of nations, and the stench of death. This was so before. This is still so now. And tragically other peoples, not the least the Iraqis and we, pay the biggest price.
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