News Analysis

On Bush’s coming visit to the Philippines
Growing Political Isolation Binds Bush, GMA

Himself nursing the scars of unjust wars he has unleashed, U.S. President Bush is meeting the Philippine president who faces political uncertainties on account of continuing threats from, among others, a coup d’etat, an armed forces plagued by demoralization and mutinous tendencies as well as investigations into alleged graft cases and money laundering involving her husband.

By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat.com

Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo with U.S. Pres. George Bush during her U.S. state visit last May 

U.S. President George W. Bush, Jr. is set to visit the Philippines on Oct. 18 on the eve of the opening of the next APEC summit meeting of heads of state in Bangkok. His most trusted ally, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, will welcome the visiting U.S. president with the highest VIP treatment symbolizing the “special relations” between the two countries.

The latest reports show however that Bush is flying in at the Clark development center in Angeles City, Pampanga around 50 kms north of Manila and will stay in the country for just eight hours before proceeding to Thailand. He will most probably just meet Macapagal-Arroyo at Clark and finish whatever agenda the two heads of state will tackle without even bothering to go to Malacañang in Manila for formal ceremonies. Tight security has been planned for the Bush visit since June, topped by iron-fist measures against anti-U.S. imperialist protesters.

Even if brief, Bush’s meeting with the Philippine president, who is also the country’s defense secretary in a concurrent capacity, is not just his way of reciprocating Macapagal-Arroyo’s two state visits in Washington. The U.S. president, whose latest popularity rating in the United States has plunged to 50 percent – the same rating that was registered just before 9/11 – is coming to the Philippines as he begins to suffer political isolation at home and in many countries throughout the world.

American forces are in deep trouble in Afghanistan and Iraq – the two countries that in recent years received the most ruthless military attacks ordered by Bush in his campaign against “global terrorism.” Both countries are besieged by continuing strife and, particularly in Iraq, U.S. occupation forces are on the defensive amid urban guerrilla warfare poised against them. Bush’s credibility has been damaged by his inability to show evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Baghdad and more so, in the light of increasing suspicions that he deceived the world as he went to war against Saddam Hussein and that he may have allowed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to happen to gain the moral ascendancy for unleashing wars against “enemy states” and thereby consolidate U.S. global hegemony.

But the growing unpopularity of Bush and the government he heads is a symptom not only of the unjust wars but also of America’s belligerent free trade and investment agenda that it is ramming down the throats of developing countries at the WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico. There, as well as in many countries worldwide, the anti-globalization movement is pushing the U.S. and other pro-WTO hardliners to either guarantee more effective reforms in favor of the developing world or junk the WTO altogether. Reminiscent of Buddhist monks who burned themselves to death in protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1970s, last week’s suicide of a South Korean peasant activist in Cancun portends of the heightening of anti-globalization and anti-U.S. war struggles throughout the world.

Support

Bush’s visit in the Philippines is intended to show to the world that his government still enjoys strong support in the third world as he expects Macapagal-Arroyo to reiterate her unflinching support for the U.S. war on terror and the special defense ties between the two governments. Macapagal-Arroyo, who serves as Bush’s spokesperson in Southeast Asia, is expected to clear the way extra-constitutionally for more U.S.-initiated war exercises and greater U.S. military interventionism even if she has come under pressure by nationalist groups to reveal everything that she – both as president and defense secretary – is expected to commit to Bush during the visit. Bush needs her show of support as he gears for what is looming to be a third wave of attacks against the other members of the so-called “axis of evil” using both diplomatic and military threats.

But Bush is also meeting a president who faces political uncertainties on account of continuing threats from, among others, a coup d’etat, an armed forces plagued by demoralization and mutinous tendencies as well as investigations into alleged graft cases and money laundering involving her husband. So alarming have these problems evolved that Church leaders including the new head of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) have warned that the country is under a “revolutionary situation.”

That Clark, once the site of the U.S.’ largest airbase outside the American mainland, will host the Bush visit and meetings only animates the degree by which the “special relations” between the two governments are defined today. The Philippines has become once more the U.S.’s strategic military post in Southeast Asia even as its government is using U.S. support to put an end ferociously to the Marxist and Moro revolutionary struggles under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Like what he does in the U.S. where he uses military platforms – camps, warships and other military facilities – whenever he beats the drums of war, Bush will use Clark to push for the escalation of the war on terror not only in the Philippines but in the whole region.

It will be the ritual of war hawks, with the chief watching his marionette dance. Bulatlat.com

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