Enough's Enough
Barnes, Fred
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 19, NO. 4 / APRIL 1986 Fred Barnes ENOUGH'S ENOUGH Friend or foe, Marcos had to go. In light of what has happened to other countries where pro-American autocrats have...
...Every non-Communist nation in Asia has taken part in the capitalist boom, except the Philippines...
...There was freedom of religion, and the Catholic Church emerged as the linchpin of the opposition...
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...They thought his phony war record, his profiteering in office, and his crookedtriumph in the February 7 election disqualified him...
...media had done a job on the Shah and Diem and the others, too, and look what that led to...
...Does anybody think its billion people owe a heap of thanks to Mao Tse-tung for shaping up their lives beyond what was likely under Chiang Kai-shek...
...Only Ver didn't step down...
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...Recall the economic status of the Philippines in 1965, the year Marcos was first elected President...
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...Or going back a bit, folks in South Vietnam are certainly no better off for having traded in Ngo Dinh Diem for faceless Communist rulers...
...He was no great shakes, but compared to the Khmer Rouge he was a saint...
...Introduced by Language Expert Charles Berlitz...
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...He vowed to keep them, as long as American aid continued...
...She has been more foolishly sanguine about Communists than anyone since Jimmy Carter...
...But it's only a guess...
...I have my own test for judging pro-American autocrats, and Marcos didn't fare well...
...they know Aquino well...
...This fellow, now working in Manila, had no anti-Marcos ax to grind...
...I found that there's one thing more discouraging than thinking about the Philippines apes Marcos...
...Indeed they had, admitted American officials...
...Examples: the Shah and Diem...
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...2) Is he able to thwart Communists or others who would put the country in the Soviet bloc...
...Better yet, there is practically no anti-Americanism in the Philippines...
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...Her impression is that the NPA, renowned for its mass murders, is made up largely of militant liberals who are eager to negotiate a return to settled society...
...Thailand, with the same population problems, has a higher per capita income...
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...More important, though, was for Marcos to take the NPA seriously...
...A good example here is Lon Nol of Cambodia...
...Just start listening to the tapes, repeat the foreign phrases a few times and, believe it or not, you'll begin speaking like a native...
...his devotion to democracy had sharp limits...
...You can listen to Language / 30 while you're getting dressed, eating, driving to work, or even jogging...
...He's wasn't, and even if he had been, he's gone for good...
...The United States would suffer an immeasurable strategic loss in the Far East if it were forced to shift them 1,000 miles or more eastward...
...There was some free enterprise...
...military out...
...Question two: Could he whip the Communists...
...TWo decades later, it is an economicbasket case...
...tion fight between Marcos and Corazon (Cory) Aquino...
...Based on the U.S...
...But will Aquino really kick the U.S...
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...Unlike Iran, American diplomats have courted the opposition in the Philippines...
...The bottom line is this: The Philippines has a better chance of defeating the Communists with Mar-cos gone than if he had stayed...
...This question matters because if an autocrat permits no individual rights at all, he's created a totalitarian state and he's not to be tolerated...
...You won't have to set aside hours just for language study...
...The bases are crucial to the Filipino economy...
...Many still don't, and for good reason...
...Go to an army camp and you found soldiers lollygagging around...
...The opposition held one-third of the seats in the National Assembly...
...To pay for her hobbies and other extravagances, the Philippines borrowed lavishly in the 1970s...
...If there is a national sentiment in favor of dismantling the two American military installations, Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base, it didn't surface in the presidential campaign...
...Some ineffective autocrats who can't stamp out the Communist threat are preferable only because there is no democratic or semi-democratic alter-native...
...Now it is, and Marcos wouldn't do what is necessary to deal with it...
...Example: Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore...
...Given this grim history, my assumption had been that, even with his flaws, Marcos was better for the Philippines than whoever might replace him...
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...The NPA just wasn't a serious threat when he wrote his book several years ago...
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...In 1984, she signed a manifesto saying they "must be re-moved...
...She once said she'd be happy to have Communists in her government (she later recanted...
...She could turn out to be terminally naive...
...As I was flying to Manila in January, I read a book about the Philippines by American scholar David Steinberg...
...4) Is his regime the closest thing to representative government possible under the circumstances, there being no credible, non-Communist alternative...
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...Marcos took one seemingly helpful step after the election by firing General Fabian Ver, the army chief of staff...
...This year the country will be lucky if zero growth is 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 achieved, but given its high birth rate that still means a plummeting standard of living (which has already dropped by 30 percent in the 1980s...
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...But there was worse...
...Marcos ruined the economy in two ways...
...A yes answer to two or three is acceptable in some cases, or should be...
...In truth, he's crazy about her...
...In Nicaragua, it appeared that any successor would be a step up from Anastasio Somoza, but the Sandinistas have proved that this was not necessarily so...
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...DEPT...
...If they go, the Communist nightfall comes...
...Under Marcos, the Philippines had a freer press than most authoritarian countries...
...That issue was mentioned only when American reporters asked...
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...Only they'd been erected again in different fashion, and the result was the same...
...Let's start from the top: Was Mar-cos an effective ruler...
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...With political unrest building since the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benign Aquino, Marcos kept loyalists in the top echelons of the military...
...The continuation of Marcos's rule meant the capitalist resurgence that has swept through Asia and produced rapid growth (and a burgeoning middle class) would not reach the Philippines...
...Come to think of it, that's pretty much what happened to Marcos...
...The problem for American conservatives was that they didn't much like the democratic alternative to Marcos...
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...He didn't and his military budget showed it...
...It's that simple...
...Her speeches call for reasonably unfettered free enterprise with no monopolies, though she often 1232628...
...Go to the airport for a Marcos arrival and you found generals lined up to grin and wave at their leader...
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...If this happened in the United States, President Reagan would have been sent back to Rancho del Cielo rather than reelected...
...The people in the American embassy in Manila don't think so, and I don't either...
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...Marcos and his aides argued unrelentingly that the monopolies had been dismantled...
...Nor are Cubans in finer fettle now that Fulgencio Batista is long gone and Fidel Castro long entrenched...
...He zinged Marcos repeatedly, but not for failing to blot out the Communist NPA...
...And what about China...
...In 1984 its gross national product fell by 6 percent and last year by 4 percent...
...That's all that is required for us to stop thinking of Marcos as the only acceptable leader...
...Tiny Singapore spends more for defense than Marcos did...
...Instead of being a "stranger in a strange land;' you'll be able to converse freely with the natives in their own language...
...Okay, so he wasn't a Filipino version of Thomas Jefferson...
...His country was second only to Japan as a budding economic power...
...In any event, there was another way that Marcos hurt the economy—profligate spending...
...True, these were nothing td sneer at, especially Marcos's election heist...
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...While lining his own pockets, he ran the Filipino economy into the ground...
...Without the bases, without the strong American presence, the Philippines would be highly vulnerable—to the NPA, the Soviets, Vietnam, anybody...
...She's taller, bigger, and healthier than her husband, but that's not why he let her play with so much of the taxpayers' money...
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...It's been scientifically proven that we remember words we hear better than words we see...
...43,000 Filipinos work there...
...Most were inept, and the result was a de-professionalized military that couldn't shoot straight...
...Question four: Was there a non-Communist alternative...
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...In the Philippines, there was a democratic alternative...
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...Question three: Did he allow some rights...
...History has not been kind to these countries...
...For starters, there's the case of Iran, where a bad situation swiftly became breathtakingly worse once the Shah was elsewhere and the Ayatollah in power...
...3) Does he allow some human rights...
...Imelda took this as further evidence of liberation theology on the move...
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...It didn't look like it...
...Despite what you read, the bases are vital...
...Arabic Chinese Danish Finnish Dutch French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Russian Serbo-Croatian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tagalog (Filipino) Thai Turkish Vietnamese English For Spanish Speakers 1232768...
...It's thinking about the Philippines with Marcos still around...
...In a tour of the hinterlands of Mindanao, columnist Robert Novak found that the rule of government itself had melted away in the face of the NPA challenge...
...At least that's what I figured before I went to the Philippines in January to cover the presidential elecFred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...This is the single most important question...
...It consists of four questions: 1) Is the autocrat an effective ruler, particularly in bringing about economic prosperity...
...Aquino is no peach...
...In light of what has happened to other countries where pro-American autocrats have been ousted, it's discouraging to think about the Philip-pines now that President Ferdinand E. Marcos has departed...
...When the Marcos motorcade drove past a seminary before the election, the students waved yellow Aquino banners...
...Anyway, she erected costly edifices (a film center, a cultural center, and soon) in downtown Manila that were monuments to her ego and pretensions...
...And Aquino is not as good as Marcos was on the bases...
...The vestiges of representative government remained in-tact, though nine years of martial law under Marcos badly weakened them...
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...after that, her options are open...
...And it also meant that the Communist insurgency of the New People's Army (NPA), already a serious threat, would grow...
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...they wanted Marcos out, but for the wrong reasons...
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...The most egregious was the granting of monopolies to his friends and cronies...
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...government personnel who work overseas...
...Yes, Marcos did...
...If the autocrat can answer yes to all four of these, he has a pretty strong claim on his country and shouldn't be trifled with...
...That is not what I think anymore...
...My best authority on this was a supply-side economist I had known in Washington, a Reaganite with impeccable conservative credentials...
...When I told him that Marcos's chief finance minister had told me the monopolies no longer existed, my friend said simply, "He's lying...
...Actually, it's First Lady Imelda Marcos who was the biggest spender of all...
...O and listening comprehension each time you play the Language / 30 tapes...
...The business class in the Philippines backed her campaign passionately...
...There were noisy opposition papers, as the election showed...
...I believe my friend...
...Meanwhile, the NPA gained ground daily...
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...Marcos and his wife were forever muttering darkly about liberation priests...
...Remember, Language / 30 is a learning tool that works...
...And each cassette is introduced by world-renowned linguist Charles Berlitz, who explains the social customs and etiquette of the country...
...For sure, then, the wisest choice for Filipinos was to stay the course with Marcos...
...Moreover, they are critical to democracy...
...But Marcos could answer yes to only one of the questions—he did grant some rights—and it's far from the most important question of the four...
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...Malaysia's GNP is more than three times the Philippines...
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...My guess is that Aquino will realize this, just as she will figure out the NPA isn't part of the loyal opposition...
...Her chief economic adviser is Jaime Ongpin, the head of the Benguet Corporation, a mining concern...
...Naturally, American reporters didn't get it quite right...
...Now it owes $27 billion in foreign debt, and the International Monetary Fund has been breathing down its neck...
...But that doesn't mean he was close to being as bad as the American press characterized him...
...But you don't have to like Aquino to recognize that she represents a credible, democratic successor to Marcos...
...From the standpoint of both the American and Filipino national interest, that is surely for the better...
...The good news about Aquino is that she's keen on capitalism...
...And it goes without saying that the Cambodian people are not a happier lot for having lost Lon Nol and gained the genocidal Khmer Rouge...
...There were two strong political parties, Marcos's and Cory Aquino's...
...But totalitarianism wasn't Marcos's style...
...Now, she says she'll keep them at least until 1991...
...Even if he had, many more generals needed to go as well...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
