Quicker than you could say ``Angelo de la Cruz,'' seven more foreign truck drivers were kidnapped in Iraq before the newly freed Filipino hostage was even home.
For two weeks, the drama over the Filipino truck driver fueled debates over whether the Philippines should meet the kidnappers' demands and withdraw its 51 troops three weeks earlier than scheduled to save de la Cruz's life.
Monday, as the Philippine troops pulled out and word of the hostage's release spread, three Kenyans, three Indians and an Egyptian were threatened with beheadings, in that grim and increasingly familiar communication out of Iraq.
De la Cruz's sister, Lydia Ghazzawi in Pacifica, his eight children and the throngs in his province of Pampanga in the Philippines may have been celebrating, but official Washington was dour. Such capitulation will only encourage more kidnappings, the White House asserted. Bay Area radio disc jockeys played the sound of chickens clucking in commentary about those knee-buckling Filipinos.
I don't buy it. Not the kidnapping argument or the chicken accusation.
Do we really know what's right and what's wrong for everyone in this ever-changing, boundary-less war? If the Philippines had said, `No way,'' would it have caused the kidnappers to seriously reconsider their strategy? Will it lead to more kidnappings? I doubt it made a big difference.
I'm still wondering why we're importing drivers when there must be truck-driving Iraqis.
We can second-guess and complain as bitterly as we want about so-called friends, special relationships and foreign aid, but no country's leaders do something blatantly against their interests or to threaten stability at home. We are not all one big, happy coalition family. We have overlapping -- but different -- interests.
Angelo de la Cruz became Everyman in the Philippines -- every man worth saving -- but not just because he was kidnapped and Filipinos are kidnap-squeamish.
Like parts of Latin America, the Philippines is all too familiar with kidnapping. Kidnap for ransom, kidnap for religious rebels' gain. Kidnap for ransom of well-to-do Chinese-Filipinos has been such a common phenomenon that it got its own shorthand -- KFR -- in the acronym-happy Philippine media. The Arroyo government has gotten good marks for cracking down on an estimated 21 KFR syndicates. With controversial U.S. military help, it has also been trying to combat Islamist terrorist groups.
So many Filipinos were upset about de la Cruz's plight because so many of them have sought work overseas themselves, or now have family members doing so. Huge numbers of poor Filipinos have exported themselves all over the world in desperate efforts to feed their families.
The Philippines relies so heavily on its overseas workforce -- from Hong Kong to Japan to the Middle East -- that their remittances constitute 7.5 percent of the country's gross national product and the government has a department charged with overseas workers' welfare.
Washington may have wanted Arroyo to hold the course for three more weeks, but many in the Philippines were already seeing their president's next move as a test of whether their leaders really cared about the poor or were willing to expend a countryman to accommodate the geopolitical interests of the U.S.
Looking at the tableaux of the most recently kidnapped men, broad-faced, working-class fellows standing behind their hooded abductors, we in the U.S. may see one thing, but the people from their home countries see something else: the price of supporting someone else's ill-conceived war.
There are many things that terrorists will throw at the United States and its allies in the future. Yet we still seem to think we have all the answers. And that it gives us the right to criticize.