U.S. plot to oust Duterte? The idea must have come up
ON EACH crisis in the world -- potential, incipient or raging -- the U.S. State Department has hordes of strategists who come up with all sorts of ideas on how to cope with it.
The current buzz, elevated to the status of legitimate news by a Manila broadsheet, is that former U.S. ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg has drafted a blueprint that would evict President Duterte before he could finish his term.
Goldberg has already been replaced but any ambassador, besides the army of planners at Pentagon, can put this thoughts in writing on how to protect U.S. interests, especially that he had seen the Philippines up close.
Is there such thought? It would be remiss for the State Department, or any of its layers of bureaucracy, not to have thought of it and prepared for the worsening of the crisis.
How far has idea gone? That’s what the stories so far don’t indicate. It’s not known how it has escalated from thought to plan, from plan to blueprint and plot.
There’s no evidence that it has even reached the level of the national security board, then to the state secretary and the president.
In other words, for now it’s just a thought, put into some document, and the story has leaked. Assuming it’s true and not a home-grown concoction.
The U.S. has denied there is such a plan and it can say so with an honest face. Even if the idea came up somewhere in bowers of Pentagon or in any of its embassies, it’s not yet a plan of the U.S. government or even of its top echelon.
Yet the U.S. couldn’t say it had not meddled with PH affairs in the past. The CIA role in the election of then president Ramon Magsaysay and the ouster of martial law leader Ferdinand Marcos is documented.
These are different times, though. If practice has not changed, methods have.