The Philippines began withdrawing its 51-man contingent of troops in Iraq in an effort to save the life of Angelo de la Cruz, a truck driver abducted outside Fallujah by terrorists.

* The Philippines began withdrawing its 51-man contingent of troops in Iraq in an effort to save the life of Angelo de la Cruz, a truck driver abducted outside Fallujah by terrorists. It's not as if the Filipinos don't know better: They face a merciless jihadist insurgency in the Muslim areas of their own southern islands. The Filipinos also undoubtedly know of Rudyard Kipling, who addressed his poem "The White Man's Burden" to the United States at the time it wrested the Philippines from Spain. That would be an uncomfortable memory. But Kipling, who was a diverse poet, has an even more uncomfortable thought for this occasion: "And that is called paying the Dane-geld; / But we've proved it again and again, / That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld / You never get rid of the Dane."