Who will China blame for stirring up a hornet's nest in the South China Sea?

First word

SOONER or later, it will just be a matter of time before Chinese spokesmen and their hired propagandists come around to blame the Philippines for stirring up a hornet's nest in disputed South China Sea waters.

Whenever China needs someone to point to for an untoward turn of events in the dispute, it invariably picks the Philippines or the United States as the culprit, saying that things have been carried too far.

This is absurd and comical because the facts are well-known, as evinced by the headline news reports in June.

Who else but China instigated on June 17 the attacks on Philippine vessels and patrol boats that resulted in looting and the loss of a finger of one Filipino coast guardsman.

Who but the Chinese command issued the orders to the China Coast Guard (CCG) to arrest anyone for trespassing on alleged Chinese sovereign territories?

Who but Chinese troops and bureaucrats are now scrambling for cover as the US Seventh Fleet and the Philippines' allies come out to make a concerted show of their interest in deterring Chinese aggression and in preserving stability and freedom of navigation in the SCA and West Philippine Sea?

One of the greatest and funniest editorial cartoons ever drawn and published was in a South African newspaper during the great upheaval that knocked out the apartheid regime. The cartoon showed a white commander of the apartheid armed force telling a sea of black people, "You are under arrest." The black faces are all over the newspaper page.

I believe an analogous cartoon can be drawn of the Chinese coast guard, placing the US Seventh Fleet under arrest for trespassing on alleged Chinese sovereign territory.

Picture worth a thousand words

A picture or image, it is truly said, is worth a thousand words. This saying, according to the American Dictionary of Idioms, was invented by an advertising executive, Fredd R. Barnard. To promote his agency's work, he took out an ad in Printer's Ink in 1921 with the headline, "One look is worth a thousand words," and attributed it to an ancient Japanese philosopher. Six years later, he changed it to "Chinese proverb" — "a picture is worth ten thousand words," illustrated with some Chinese characters.

The attribution in both ads was invented. Barnard simply believed an Asian origin would give it more credibility.

We might say that with the hornet's nest now stirred up in the South China Sea and in our exclusive economic zone (EEZ), events have located the blame where it belongs.

Compulsory military service

The ultra-expensive Philippine military has raised among my readers a second point for wonder. They wonder, as I do, under the program, the Filipino Defense Department and AFP have not considered and recommended the establishment of compulsory military service among our very young people, both men and women.

With our population now standing at 118 million, with the majority 18 years of age and under, the country has a vast potential source of recruits for the nation's armed forces.

Many countries today have either a conscription policy or a national service program to beef up their armed forces.

According to the book "Start-up Nation" by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, "about thirty nations have compulsory military service that lasts longer than 18 months. Most of them are developing or are non-democratic, or both. But among First World countries, only three require such a lengthy period of military service: Israel, South Korea and Singapore.

"For Israel, the threat to its existence began before it had become a sovereign nation. Beginning in the 1920s, the Arab world resisted the establishment of a national Jewish state in Palestine. They sought to defeat or weaken Israel in numerous wars.

South Korea has lived under a constant threat from North Korea, which has a large standing army poised just a few miles from Seoul, South Korea's capital.

And Singapore lives with memories of the occupation by Japan during World War 2, its recent struggle for independence, which culminated in 1965, and the volatile period that followed.

Singaporean national service was introduced in 1967. 'We had to defend ourselves. It was a matter of survival. As a small country with a small population, the only way we could build a force of sufficient size was through conscription,' explained Defense Minister Teo Chee Hean. 'It was a decision not taken lightly, given the significant impact that conscription would have on every Singaporean. But there was no alternative.'

At independence, Singapore had only two infantry regiments. And they had been created and were commanded by the British. Two-thirds of the soldiers were not even residents of Singapore.

Looking for ideas, the city-state Defense Minister, Goh Keng Swee, called Mordecai Kidron, the former Israeli ambassador to Thailand.

'Goh said they thought that only Israel, a small country surrounded by Muslim countries, could help them build a small dynamic army,' Kidron said.

In response to Goh's plea for help, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tasked Lt. Col. Yehuda Golan with writing two manuals for the nascent Singaporean army: one on combat doctrine and the structure of a defense ministry and another on intelligence institutions. Later, six IDF officers and their families moved to Singapore to train soldiers and create a conscription-based army.

Along with compulsory service and a career army, Singapore also adopted elements of the IDF's model of reserve service.

Every soldier who completes his regular service is obligated to serve for short stints every year until the age of 33."

This is not the end of the story. All three countries continue to evolve. They have become highly developed and modern dynamic economies.

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