Of all the companies and countries clamoring for a piece of Iraq's reconstruction, one is virtually certain to be invited: the Philippines.
No matter which companies ultimately win contracts from Washington to rebuild Iraq's roads, airports, hospitals or other infrastructure, officials in Manila expect to supply thousands of Filipino laborers to them. "I'm confident that if they're looking for skilled workers, they'll come to us," said Patricia Tomas, the Philippines' secretary of labor and employment.
Inexpensive skilled labor is one of the Philippines' most lucrative exports. Faced with record unemployment at home, where the average income is just over US$1,000 a year, about 7 million Filipinos choose to work overseas.
Whether they work as doctors, nurses, maids or nannies, the US$7 billion they send home to relatives each year is one of the country's most important sources of hard currency.
Analysts and economists in Manila hope the country will soon be able to count on income earned in Iraq. About US$2.5 billion of the Bush administration's US$80 billion war budget has been allocated for rebuilding Iraq, a task that could cost as much as US$100 billion. Last month, Washington awarded a US$4.8 million contract to rebuild the port at Umm Qasr to Stevedoring Services of America, based in Seattle. And Bechtel, based in San Francisco, is said to be a front-runner for a contract to rehabilitate the country's vast oil industry.
The exclusion of any foreign bids has sparked protests from Britain, America's main ally in the war, and coincided with a determined bid by France and Germany for greater participation in the clean-up after a war they opposed from the start.
Smaller members of the "coalition of the willing," meanwhile, are quietly positioning themselves for their share of the spoils. Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia, for example, hope that sending chemical-weapon specialists will entitle them to contracts. South Korea intends to send 700 medical and engineering workers to smooth a return by its big construction companies to a market they abandoned after the 1991 Gulf War.
The Philippines has yet to make an official offer, but President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo told local reporters last week that her government was prepared to send peacekeepers, doctors, nurses, engineers and construction workers.
Responding to criticism that joining the US-led coalition might expose the Philippines to further reprisals by Muslim insurgents in the country's south, a spokesman for Arroyo tried to highlight the economic advantages, saying coalition members were assured of getting "first crack at the development efforts."
In the previous Gulf War, the Philippines sent medical teams to Saudi Arabia to treat the wounded. When the war was over, Filipinos poured back into Kuwait, first to help extinguish oil well fires, working for companies like Bechtel, Brown & Root and Blount. Afterward, they found jobs as domestic helpers, waiters and mechanics.
And not only in Kuwait. From just 500,000 before the 1991 Gulf War, the number of Filipinos working in the Middle East -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain and Israel -- tripled by the time the first missiles flew into Iraq last month.
But as war grew imminent, Tomas' department suspended the deployment of Filipinos to the region and made plans to evacuate those still there.
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