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Date Posted: 23:37:36 01/17/13 Thu
Author: IMRD
Subject: jan 14 news

http://manilastandardtoday.com/2013/01/14/will-moral-outrage-vs-rh-change-us-attitude-toward-aquino/


Will moral outrage vs RH change US attitude toward Aquino?
By Francisco S. Tatad | Posted on Jan. 14, 2013 at 12:00am | 916 views

4
Amid the silent rage against the foreign-sponsored Reproductive Health Act, there seems a clear danger that the political backlash against those who had railroaded the measure could extend far beyond President Benigno Aquino III and the pro-RH members of Congress, onto Aquino’s foreign patrons, notably the United States government. It could change the attitude of many Filipinos toward the US. Could it change the US attitude toward Aquino?

We shall watch and see.

At a time when the US is trying to retain its supremacy in the Asia Pacific, amid the shift of soft power from the West to the East, the consequences of such a change of attitudes would not be easy to calculate, especially on the US rebalancing effort or “pivot to Asia.”

The “pivot” is the most significant US strategic initiative to address an increasingly assertive China, which has used its territorial disputes with the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan to ruffle the otherwise tranquil waters of the South China Sea. China has published maps that incorporate the disputed areas as part of its territory, and has threatened to board and inspect all maritime vessels in the disputed areas of the South China Sea.

The “pivot” is supposed to be military in nature, and counts on the support of countries from Korea to Japan to the Philippines to Singapore to Australia. The US has deployed 2,000 Marines, ships and aircraft, including drones, to Australia, four littoral combat ships to Singapore, while Japan and Korea have their own range of ships, aircraft and weaponry.

This year Japan plans to spend an extra 180.5 billion yen on missiles, fighter jets and helicopters as an “emergency economic measure” on top of the regular defense spending for the year, according to the Japan Times. Japan will also allow the US to deploy an additional 12 of its tilt-rotor Osprey transport aircraft to the US Air Force’s Kadena base in Okinawa, bringing to more than 30 the number of Ospreys based in Japan, says the report.

Close to 20 Ospreys are already based in US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan, Okinawa, causing some protests from the residents there last year. The Osprey is a special aircraft that lands and takes off like a helicopter, cruises like a fixed-wing plane, and can be refueled in midair.

Still in support of the “pivot,” Japan is transferring 10 maritime vessels to the Philippines, which does not have enough ships of its own. Although Aquino is one of the first conscripts to the “pivot” idea, the Philippines has nothing of material significance to contribute to it, except for its safe harbor facilities for US nuclear warships and submarines, which are technically covered by the constitutional ban on nuclear weapons.

Such ships transfer is expected to significantly improve the nation’s maritime capability, after its last acquisition of a recycled coast guard cutter of the Hamilton class from the US, at the height of the Philippine-Chinese maritime standoff at Scarborough.

Aquino and Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario discussed increased Japanese-Philippine maritime security cooperation with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida on the latter’s recent visit to Manila. It should enable the two countries provide better support for the US “pivot.”

Some commentators, however, tend to belittle the “pivot” as more of a trade and diplomatic initiative, with very little military content. This is not a popular view, but it could gain some support if a wave of anti-Americanism were to erupt in this most pro-American country, because of the US government’s inexcusably interventionist role in railroading an unwanted and constitutionally questionable RH law.

This need not happen even in the worst of times. The Philippines is a former American colony where the most virulent type of pro-Americanism could not be cured by any call for “independent thinking” years after the country regained “independence” in 1946. But in one completely avoidable act, the Obama administration succeeded in converting any number of pro-Americans into anti-Americans.

Many Filipinos are convinced that without the US intervention, Aquino would not have been emboldened to ram the unnecessary and highly divisive Act through Congress, against the unified opposition of the Catholic Church.

But Aquino has apparently come to believe that it was the US, rather than the Catholic Church or the Catholic faithful assembled at EDSA, that was mainly responsible for removing Ferdinand Marcos and installing his late mother, Mrs. Corazon Aquino, as president in 1986. Similarly, it was the support of the Clinton and Bush administrations that kept Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in power from 2001 to 2010, despite persistent questions about her legitimacy and the various efforts to evict her from office.

Aquino may also be able to state with authority that it was U.S. Ambassador Harry Thomas’ premature recognition of him as “president-elect” in 2010, before the completion of the electoral count, that sealed his claim on the presidency and foreclosed all post-election inquiries into the integrity of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines which Smartmatic used in the elections. Aquino apparently believes that with American support he could walk over any law or institution without risking his office.

But the new opposition knows that majority of Filipinos are on its side, and will support any organized or sustained effort, if any, against Aquino and his foreign backers. For although Aquino won the vote in Congress, only 133 congressmen out of the total membership of 286 voted for RH. Seventy-nine voted against it, while 74 others chose to absent themselves to avoid following Aquino’s diktat. Fewer than half of the entire House of Representatives—less than the required quorum—supported the Act, despite all the arm-twisting and the vast resources that had gone into it.

In the Senate, where the celebrities proved wiser than the intellectual pretenders, the vote was 13 in favor, 9 against.

Aquino obviously realized that he stood not on solid ground but on very thin ice. Thus with uncharacteristic prudence, fearing a massive protest on the ground, he signed the RH Act into law in the privacy of his chamber, without the usual media coverage, or official audience.

Aquino and his foreign backers may have realized, after the vote, that the whole thing was one costly colossal mistake. The original argument for population control, as spelled out in the original 1974 US document—National Security Study Memorandum 200 or The Kissinger Report—no longer held: there was no longer any population explosion to be contained.

Outside of Africa, global population growth had begun to decline; the demographic winter had become the one unstoppable danger to many rich countries; and the Philippines’ robust and dynamic population, growing at 1.9 percent a year, had won the praise, confidence and hopes of the world’s leading statesmen, demographers and economists.

Imposing population control on the Philippines was more the product of ideological inertia, rather than of scientific thinking or analysis, after population control had failed everywhere, but its authors had failed to revise or withdraw their failed policies.

In their zeal to subjugate the last prolife and pro-family nation on earth, they violated even their own code. NSSM 200, which argues the need to impose global population control to protect “U.S. security and overseas interests,” directs the US President and the Secretary of State to “make a point of discussing our national concern about world population growth in meeting with national leaders where it would be relevant,” but warns against making foreign leaders appear that they are implementing population control at the behest of the US government.

“Successful family planning requires strong local dedication and commitment that cannot over the long run be enforced from outside,” says the Report. The leaders of poor countries should not see “developed country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.”

It appears that although the foreign operatives correctly calculated that Aquino would not mind acting as a tool of racial imperialism, they failed to consider that the Catholic Church, whose rights are usurped and nixed by the unwanted Act, may not take it sitting down.

Some have suggested that Aquino and his foreign patrons were probably guided by the fact that during the Commonwealth, President Manuel L. Quezon, a free mason, vetoed a law that authorized religious instruction in schools and which was favored by the Church. Quezon got away with it, without any massive protests.

If the suggestion is correct, they have completely misread the Church. The two cases are not of the same class. The law on religious instruction was an attempt to provide a positive good, but the veto aborted it. That deprived the schools of something good, but no moral evil resulted from it.

By contrast, the RH Act legislates a moral evil, as far as the Church is concerned. Therefore where Quezon escaped the Church’s wrath, Aquino and his foreign patrons have no right or reason to expect benign treatment.

It would not be surprising if Aquino is henceforth caricatured as a “running dog of U.S. imperialism,” absent a stronger phrase, and asked to vacate his office, and the U.S. government is excoriated in public places for seeking to inflict the worst of Western values upon Filipinos.

The campaign to propagate these values is global. The RH Act is their first “victory” in the Philippines, assuming it survives the constitutional challenge. In Costa Rica, a law that prohibits in vitro fertilization was recently struck down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as illegal in a ruling that redefines the moment of conception and says the embryo does not have the legal status of a “person.”

This has prompted Pope Benedict XVI in his New Year’s address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See to express dismay over the ongoing efforts to expand the legalized abortion and the destruction of innocent human life.

In the coming days, assuming the country is not overtaken by civil strife, passions are bound to heat up as some groups interpret the enactment of the RH Act as a signal for them to propose the legalization of divorce, abortion, and same-sex marriage, etc. Because the initiative is likely to come from the pro-RH groups, the new opposition may be expected to begin demanding that all foreign agents, masquerading as something else, come out in the open and disclose the identity and interests of their principals as well as their own.

The government has a right to know what foreign monies are coming from abroad and for what purposes they are used.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, every person who is funded wholly or in part from a foreign source in order to carry out an activity on behalf a foreign principal is considered a foreign agent, and may not lobby Congress or transact business with any government office or agency without first making a full disclosure of his or her interests and activities.

Thousands of foreign agents are operating in the country, pushing all sorts of programs for women and children in the countryside, working as columnists, editorial writers or commentators in the media, lobbying Congress on a range of issues. But not everyone if at all has complied with the legal requirement. In the committee hearings on the RH law in Congress, not a single committee ever asked any foreign agent whether he or she had registered as lobbyist with the Department of Justice.

In the absence of a Senate actively examining foreign policy issues, the new opposition could demand that Aquino make a full public accounting of his official commitments to foreign governments, particularly those with specific implications to national sovereignty and territorial integrity. That may not transform Aquino into a nationalist or a patriot, but it could make him a little less absurd. It could also compel the US and its Western allies to ask themselves whether their continued support of Aquino has been just and fair to the Filipinos.

fstatad@gmail.com

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