22 Aug 2005 04:40:07 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Manny Mogato
MANILA, Aug 22 (Reuters) - A lethal mix of militant groups is emerging in the southern Philippines, a senior police intelligence official said, warning of attacks as foreign and local jihadists share resources, talents and capabilities.
The intelligence official, who declined to be identified, said foreign Islamic militants, mostly Indonesians, were building alliances with several homegrown Muslim rebels to survive government offensives on the southern island of Mindanao.
Since July, Philippine troops backed by U.S. aerial surveillance vehicles have been combing coastal and mountain villages in Maguindanao province for about 30 rebels from the al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group, who are thought to be operating with a handful of Indonesian militants.
"These militants are now crossing organisational lines to exchange and share manpower, expertise and resources," the intelligence official told Reuters late on Sunday.
"If governments in the region are cooperating to eliminate these threats, we are now seeing that terrorists are also sharing their 'best practices' to fight back".
A senior U.S. diplomat in Manila drew an angry reaction from government leaders earlier this year when he said Mindanao risked turning into "an Afghanistan situation".
The Philippine official said there were intelligence reports that Rajah Solaiman Revolutionary Movement, a group of radical Muslim converts, had merged with the Abu Sayyaf group led by Khaddafy Janjalani.
This, he said, had increased the threat of attacks in Manila because most of the converts were based around the capital.
Janjalani, long the subject of manhunt operations on Mindanao, is also thought to have developed close links with Indonesian militants belonging to different jihadist groups, including Jemaah Islamiah (JI).
A classified security report shown to Reuters said JI instructors had taught about 60 of Janjalani's followers how to handle crude bombs fashioned out of unexploded mortar rounds.
JI has been blamed for several of the deadliest attacks in southeast Asia, including the October 2002 Bali bombing that nearly killed 200 people, mostly Australian tourists.
UNDER PRESSURE
Philippine officials said foreign militants were forced to seek out other Muslim groups in Mindanao because the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the country's largest Muslim rebel group, which is in talks with the government, started pushing them to leave.
But they said rogue MILF elements continued to protect the foreign militants, allowing them to hide in a marshy area in Maguindanao province.
"We always believed the leadership of MILF is determined to cut its ties with these militants," said Rodolfo Garcia, a member of the government's peace panel negotiating with the MILF.
The government has said it will resume informal talks with the MILF within a month in Malaysia on a proposed ancestral homeland for Muslims in Mindanao to help end the conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people since the late 1960s.
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Iraq is not Vietnam, not by any stretch
August 22, 2005
The American left may like to reprise Vietnam, but they're badly wrong, writes Michael Gawenda.
THE New York Times columnist Frank Rich is the voice of America's late middle-aged baby boomers for whom opposition to the Vietnam War became the prism through which they would subsequently judge US foreign policy.
Rich, who was once the most feared theatre critic in America when he was initially on the Times, able to close a Broadway show with a lukewarm review, is now back at the paper writing a weekly column that has become a rallying call for opponents of the war in Iraq and the subject of vitriol from the war's supporters.
More than any other liberal columnist - Maureen Dowd, for instance, or Paul Krugman - Rich, who both opponents and supporters agree is a terrific writer with a withering wit and a talent for wounding sarcasm, challenges and ridicules the triumphalism of the neo-conservative columnists and their cable television fellow travellers who have been a remarkably successful cheer squad for the Bush Administration.
Last week, Rich declared the war in Iraq lost and over, based on a comparison of support for George Bush's handling of the Iraq war - 44 per cent - and Lyndon Johnson's in 1968 - 32 per cent. He even recalled Johnson tearfully declaring on television that he would not be a candidate for the presidential election that year.
"No president can stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him," he wrote.
Rich then goes on to catalogue all the standard anti-war stuff - the lies about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, the lies about the connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq, the neo-con determination to invade Iraq long before September 11, the botched occupation.
But it is Rich's use of the debacle of Vietnam to declare the Iraq war lost that resonates most powerfully with both the middle-aged opponents of the war and its supporters.
Vietnam was a defining war, not just for those who opposed it and declared victory when the last US chopper lifted off the roof of the US embassy just ahead of the arrival in Saigon of the victorious North Vietnamese army.
For the budding neo-conservatives, some of whom had initially been opposed to the intervention in Vietnam, and who would become a major intellectual influence during the Reagan presidency and later, of course, in the Bush Administration, Vietnam and, in particular, the nature of the anti-war movement, was their great awakening.
The Vietnam War was lost because America had lost confidence in itself, because the '60s cultural revolution, of which the anti-war movement was a part, had undermined American institutions and shared values.
For them, the lesson of Vietnam was not that the war was a mistake based on a fatal misreading and misunderstanding of Vietnamese nationalism and the historic antipathy between Vietnam and China that meant the war was always going to become a bloody aimless quagmire. Instead, never again meant that never again should the US fight a war that it was not prepared to see through to victory and that America's security depended on a confident and assertive, militarily unassailable, America.
All this explains why the claim that Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam resonates so powerfully with the ageing baby boomer left who despise Bush and his neo-conservative supporters, many of whom were once their comrades.
And to be confronted with the accusation that far from fulfilling their pledge of never again, the mistakes of Vietnam, at their urging, are being repeated in Iraq, enrages the intellectual architects of the Bush doctrine of a confident and engaged and dominant America spreading democracy and freedom, if necessary, by armed force.
In the wake of the reality as opposed to the fantasy of regime change in Iraq, the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives and their faith in American power and American exceptionalism that in part, came from their reaction to Vietnam, is over.
But Iraq is not Vietnam and the world of 2005 is nothing like the world of 1968. There are no lessons from Vietnam that can be applied to Iraq.
And the Cold War, which was the context and the pretext for the American intervention in Vietnam shares no similarities with the war on terror or the struggle against extremism or whatever you want to call it. None at all. It's time all those old baby boomers for whom the Vietnam War and those halcyon days of protest and love, was the most intense time of their lives, got on with planning their retirements.
Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq last year, camped outside the Bush ranch in Texas demanding to see Bush so she can demand that he withdraw all American troops from Iraq, has become a lightning rod for the US anti-war movement.
She has the sympathy, if not the support, of most Americans, but there is no mass anti-war movement in America. Most people do not support Cindy Sheehan's demand for an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq.
Even most opponents of the war, even Frank Rich, do not think that the US should simply get out of Iraq and leave Iraqis to deal with a murderous Baathist insurgency and imported fascist terrorists. This is not Vietnam.
Michael Moore is a discredited and marginalised figure, having had his 15 minutes of fame when Bush haters, during the presidential election campaign, hailed Fahrenheit 9/11 as a master work when they must have known it was little more than crude - if powerful - propaganda.
Unlike Vietnam, there are no Tom Haydens to lead campus revolts against the Iraq war and the "corrupt system" that produced it. There haven't been - and there won't be - collections in America or Australia for the Baathists and terrorists, as there were for the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is not Ho Chi Minh. Mick Jagger has written and recorded an anti-war song called Sweet Neo Con. Having read the lyrics, it seems unlikely to become the anti-war movement's anthem.
It is so bad that it might even encourage some of the old veterans of the anti-Vietnam War movement after they hear it, to stop banging on about the lessons of Vietnam. If that happens, Mick Jagger will deserve our thanks.
Michael Gawenda is United States correspondent.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/iraq-is-not-vietnam-not-by-any-stretch/2005/08/21/1124562744766.html?oneclick=true