The Menace of Manila

President Ferdinand E. Marcos has blandly asserted that if he gets enough U.S. financial aid he can within a year lick the Communist-led insurgency that threatens the Philippines. This assessment is wholly at odds with views now held at the highest levels in Washington. For months American officials have been expressing concern about the mounting strength and appeal of the insurgency, an appeal that has spread as economic and political conditions in the Philippines have deteriorated. Now they are openly voicing their alarm.

What ails the Philippines? In a word it is Marcos-ism. For fully half of the 40 years that the Philippines has been independent Marcos has been in authority, first by election and then by using strong-arm tactics that have left the courts, the press and the democratic opposition subverted, coerced and enfeebled. During these years the Philippines has become a textbook case of how corruption flows from executive power unrestrained by balancing institutions. Huge fortunes have been amassed by the Marcos family and its cronies. Favoritism has eroded the professional ability of the armed forces. Economic mismanagement has brought the nation near bankruptcy, while millions in the provinces who were already poor have been impoverished even further.

It is under these conditions that the insurgency has come to flourish. Marcos says the guerrilla forces now operating in most of the country’s provinces number no more than 12,500. U.S. officials put the figure as high as 16,000, while in a new report the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence estimates the total of full-time guerrillas and part-time irregulars at 30,000. The State Department worries that within three to five years the insurgents can achieve a strategic stalemate, meaning that the point will have been passed when they can be defeated. Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.), chairman of the intelligence committee, sees that time coming in as few as two years, and with it the loss of any chance for a reinvigorated democracy in the Philippines.

Marcos has rejected all domestic and American calls for serious reforms. Whether the next presidential election that is scheduled for 1987--or that Marcos says he may call earlier--will even take place, let alone be free, is open to doubt. For now there is no reason to think that Marcos and those around him are prepared to yield power.

Even the president’s death--and Marcos is known to be seriously ill--could leave the political situation essentially unchanged if those elements in the military that have benefited so greatly under the Marcos regime seek to maintain control.

The United States doesn’t want to see democracy buried in the Philippines. Neither does it want to be booted out of its two most important bases in the Western Pacific, at Clark Field and Subic Bay, by a hostile successor regime in Manila. Without Subic Bay, the South China Sea and its vital shipping routes would fall under the domination of the Soviet navy operating from Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. The political shock waves of a forced U.S. pullback from the Philippines would be felt from Australia to Japan.

Marcos claims there is really nothing to worry about. There is plenty to worry about, beginning with Marcos’ refusal to face reality.