What were they thinking?
Covert operations done by one or several countries within the borders of another occur quite regularly. These may involve acts of surveillance and espionage, law enforcement and anti-terror operations, or, just like in the movies, black ops involving takedowns and assassinations. There may also be relatively low-intensity human rescues of endangered nationals.
And that is precisely what the Philippines recently did in Kuwait. The springing by Philippine embassy personnel of distressed Filipino workers from the houses of their Kuwaiti employers is neither new nor unheard of. Senator Panfilo Lacson said he himself heard stories of similar rescues of distressed Filipinos by Philippine officials in the past all over the Middle East.
What made the Filipino caper in Kuwait different is that the daring rescue, dutifully recorded on camera, was foolishly uploaded on social media, where it went viral. What were the Pinoys thinking? This was supposed to be a covert operation. This was not supposed to be bandied about on the internet as if this was some trailer to a Philippine-made movie.
As a result, an angry Kuwaiti government ordered the expulsion of the Philippine ambassador to that country. And it also recalled its own ambassador from the Philippines. An earlier apology made by the Philippines over the incident did not seem to matter. Now we have a full-blown diplomatic crisis that could potentially put more Filipinos in that country, about a quarter of a million of them, in danger.
And all because our Filipino officials just could not restrain the urge to put everything on the internet. Again, what were the Pinoys thinking? This is no different from the inability of the Philippines to restrain itself from once bragging about a Coast Guard cutter donated by the United States, calling it a warship and sending it on a mission that was supposed to be civilian law enforcement in nature. Sending a "warship" angered China and the rest is South China Sea history.
Now Philippine officials are squirming about the Kuwaiti reaction. What they do not realize is that everything is of their own making. How soon have they forgotten that only a very short while ago the Philippines enjoyed the high moral ground over Kuwait as a result of the murder of a Filipino domestic service provider, a crime so gruesome it sent the Kuwaiti government reeling in the international backlash.
So battered had been the Kuwaiti image at the time that the Philippine government exploited the situation to the hilt, publicly chastising that country and humiliating it with threats of a massive pullout of Filipino workers, the implication being that the whole nation might collapse without Filipino labor. All through that entire episode, Kuwait bore the heat in silence. Whether it was in sincere atonement or it was just biding its time, we did not know at the time.
But we just had to press our luck. And we just had to be foolish and unthinking about it. Bad as it was already that the Philippines had to embark on a rescue mission involving private Kuwaiti homes at a time when Kuwait's domestic labor services were reeling from controversy, it was worse when Philippine officials had to post their caper on social media. What were they thinking?
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