Monday, March 24, 2003
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OP/ED
READING TWO ROMBLOMANON COLUMNISTS
The War on Iraq


PENMAN/The Philippine Star
By Butch Dalisay

On this week of war, my thoughts go to many friends in the United States- in California, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York and New Hampshire, among other places- who must be profusely distressed and embarrassed by the invasion their government has unleashed on a country whose leadership it happened not to like.

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How easily we forgot that America caused us so much suffering and grief barely a century ago, during a war that claimed, by some estimates, half a million Filipino lives; and we were, as I often remind my American fiends, their first Vietnam.

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And now with American bombs, falling on a small impoverished nation that could have been Vietnam or us- in another time, many of us can't even bring ourselves to see the patent injustice of the thing, of Bush's brazen arrogance in imposing his will on the world, against a global wave of protest and indignation.

Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com

EAST&WEST/People's Journal
By Julius F. Fortuna

We no longer want to discuss about the morality of this war because that has been talked and written about. The propriety of war seems to vanish when it starts.

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The United Nations has spoken. But the coalition of the willing, led by the United States, Great Britain, and Spain, have decided to put the law into their hands. They think that it is their perfect right to carry out the provisions of UN Resolution 1441 on their own accord.

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The issue is the post-war complications and diplomatic picture. Questions: What will now be the status of the United Nations which has been looked up to as the arbiter of conflicts? What will be the relations between the Islamic nations and the West? Will the arms race be stopped or will it intensify?