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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (53321)	7/10/2004 2:05:53 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 793731

What is your thinking on the Philippines pulling a "Spain" and caving to the headchoppers in Iraq because of the Philippine hostage? There are a number of factors at play here. One of them is domestic political opinion. It’s generally understood that the Philippine presence in Iraq is a tradeoff for US aid and support in Mindanao. Some people are asking why this tradeoff is necessary, since it is already in the US interest to resolve the situation in Mindanao. Some of the talk of a pullout is probably just a negotiating ploy to get more back in exchange for token support. Arroyo was just re-elected, of course, and has little incentive to risk her US ties - which translate to substantial aid - by giving in. There are a number of subordinate politicians who will want to make a noise about it just for the attention. The official Philippine presence in Iraq, of course, is miniscule: around 50 military personnel. There’s been no significant talk of pulling them out. The debate is over the deployment of contract workers: there are over 4000 in Iraq already, and more want to go. There’s a fair bit of concern over their security, though a lot of it is hot air: Filipino domestic helpers are routinely raped and killed in the Middle East, but there’s been no effort to pull them out. People need the money, and the risk seems acceptable. What seems odd to me is that they need to hire Filipinos in the first place. The guy that got snatched was a truck driver. Are there no Iraqis qualified to drive trucks? Why aren’t they hiring locally? Seems to me there’s a story there that we may not be hearing. All in all, I don’t think anyone will be pulled out, though the current freeze on deployment of new contract workers will probably continue until the flap dies down. There’s an interesting precedent for all this, of course. During the Vietnam war, when the US was desperate to have a few token 3rd world forces involved, Marcos kept a small Filipino contingent. He also threatened to pull them out any time someone got nosy about corruption, or his habit of killing dissenters. It proved to be a very effective form of manipulation.