Dear Ms President

Conrado de Quiros Philippine Daily Inquirer Asia News Network Manila

First off, I must say again that I share the country's sense of relief, even enthusiasm, over your decision not to run in the next elections. Coming as it does a month before the second anniversary of EDSA People Power II, it offers a good opportunity to look back at the events of the past, and quite possibly yoke the direction of the future to the spirit of that past. At the very least, while your decision may not solve all the problems of governance, or indeed dispel the charges that have been hurled against your official and personal family, it offers breathing space to reaffirm old ideals and stoke public trust anew.

And so while your people are slinking away one by one-this is the best time to know who your friends really are, they were never the people who threw faint praise your way-I am compelled by the weight of your choice, whatever the circumstances it was made in, to fly to your side. It is in this light that I beg you to reconsider your position on the American-sponsored "war against terror," particularly given U.S. undersecretary of state John Bolton's visit to this country to solicit, or conscript support for the impending American invasion of Iraq. Your position in the past has been to bind the nation to uncritical support for the American cause, indeed to rally our neighbors behind it. That position can only bring incalculable harm to us.

Not the least of them physically and immediately. The situation of the five Filipinos who were wounded in a terrorist attack in Israel must show how vulnerable we are to acts of violence abroad. The five of course were not the express targets of the suicide bombings, they were accidental victims, or to use an ugly phrase invented by the Pentagon, "collateral damage." That may not long remain so if we adopt a belligerent attitude toward an Arab country that not quite incidentally has been host to a sizable number of Filipino workers abroad. That attitude deliberately invites ill-will toward Filipinos not just from Iraqis but from Arabs generally.

At the very least, that could result in discrimination against our nationals. Why should the Arab countries want to hire a people, however talented, whose government openly displays the most hostile attitudes toward them? At the very most, that could make the Filipinos in the Middle East targets for terrorist attacks. Support for the American war turns them into combatants, or fair game. For let us make no mistake about it, an American attack on Iraq will not be seen as anti-Iraq, it will be seen as anti-Arab, or worse, anti-Muslim. The surveys showing widespread antipathy toward America in the Muslim countries since George Bush Jr. started rattling the saber against Saddam Hussein, including Turkey, the staging ground for the war, give unmistakable proof of it. We have more than three million overseas workers, a great many of them in the Middle East. What we should be doing is joining the rest of the world, not least of them the Vatican, in bidding the madness at Washington to stop.

But far more than the physical, there is the incalculable moral harm support for the American war in Iraq will wreak upon us. I can only hope you have not come to believe in your own press release -- dished out by the same people who are abandoning you now -- that the ASEAN and APEC communities are deeply impressed by your pitch for the world to pitch wagons around George Bush. Any Filipino who has visited an ASEAN country lately will know that Bush cannot count on any support for his war against Iraq among the people there. Indeed, he will know that Bush cannot count on any support for his concept of "war against terror" among the leaders there.

The impending war on Iraq is immoral by any standards-such as any war can be moral -- save by the ones known only to George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Ariel Sharon. It is not merely that there is no evidence to bolster Washington's case against Iraq, as the head of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency has reiterated recently. It is not merely that Iraq is being accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction by a country that has enough weapons to destroy the planet a thousand times over. It is also that a war on Iraq will mean the slaughter by "smart bombs" of tens of thousands of men, women and children whose only crime is that they have not very smartly ousted -- or assassinated, as several American officials have openly suggested -- their leader.

To support that war is not to take the side of the good. It is to stand at cross-purposes with humanity, in all the senses of that word.

I agree, Ms President, that we have a long and abiding friendship with America. (Though that should never blind us to the violent origins of that friendship or to its often lopsided nature.) I agree that we should treasure and keep that friendship. But only with the America of the founding fathers. Only with the America that Mark Twain and other libertarians tried to defend from fellow Americans who believed in civilizing the world with a Krag. Only with the America that the antiwar protesters of the 1960s and 1970s tried to defend from fellow Americans who wanted to keep the world safe with napalm. Only with the America that Americans who now cry out, "Not in our name," want to defend from fellow Americans who want the world to run rivers of blood to fight terrorism.

Not the America of William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, not the America of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, not the America of George Bush, father and son.

Ms President, your decision to not run again has earned you much goodwill from us, the citizens. I pray you do not fritter it as easily and prodigally as George Bush did the one America got from Sept. 11.

I wish you the best of luck.