When are losers winners - and winners losers? That is the question on everybody's minds the day after yesterday's attempted coup in Manila.

In the first place, how do 30 soldiers walk out of a courthouse and over to the most prestigious commercial gathering place in the Philippines, close it down so firmly that it took three punches by an armoured personnel carrier to break through the glass front doors, and then elicit the eyes - and admiration - of the world for several hours of prime time?

In the days of the first Filipina president, Corazon Aquino, there were coup attempts upon attempts, because of her weakness, it was said. Today, there are coup attempts (and impeachment attempts) against the second Filipina president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, because of her strength. She said she would give no quarter and she didn't; she brought it to a swift conclusion.

But who won? Ask the journalists who were present in droves; Senator Trillanes, who garnered 11 million national votes in the last election -from a jail cell for his 2003 coup attempt - justified the surrender in order that no blood - journalistic blood - be shed. So he got a two-fer. He backed off gracefully, with enormous dignity, with their sympathy, and with a country largely sympathetic.

Of course, 30 mutineers couldn't hole up in a five-star hotel and hold off 1,500 well-trained troops. So why did they do it? Because they knew not only of the president's deep unpopularity, but because in doing so they called attention anew to her "ruthlessness", the Senator's word, and to the deep corruption at the highest pinnacles of power in the realm.

They wanted to show, and they did, that the president might command the officers in charge - after all, they've been rapidly rotated for their turns at the trough since they put her in power in 2001 - but that her moral force was gone; she had become, in the words of one highly informed source, a "husk".

Coup-making in the Philippines has now almost become a pastime, as it once was in Latin America and the Middle East. It's a way of making a statement. They will get more punishment than the push-ups their 1987 predecessors got, but she would not dare press too heavily against them lest a far larger uprising be ignited.

One smart leader

The immediate background is no longer the election which they allege she stole. Elections in that country are always settings for vote buying and stealing, so who knows?

A multi-million dollar contract with China for broadband had supposedly gone to the son of the republic's second most important person, Speaker Jose de Venetia.

'First Gentleman' Mike Arroyo allegedly and in full bulk pushed his fist in the younger JDV's face and told him to 'back off.' This one is for us, he was saying. As so much has been. At one point poor, Macapagal-Arroyo had to exile him - and their son - to their posh San Francisco holdings, so embarrassing had his alleged corruption become.

There has been worse. A respected Australian lawyer in a UN report has raised the most serious questions about the responsibility for almost 1,000 'disappearances' of leftist leaders in the past half-decade. Things like this do not happen by accident, nor without some form of presidential blessing - or at least acquiescence.

Macapagal-Arroyo is perhaps in a technical sense the smartest leader the Philippines has had since Ferdinand Marcos, and even her gestures show how closely she has studied his rule. She hasn't remotely seized as much power but the pattern is clear. She will not give power up readily. She grew up in the palace and she likes it there. She throws tantrums and shows a sense of entitlement that leaves observers gasping.

Can she get it back together, with a sense of earned entitlement? It is hard to see how. The lips of Trillanes said as much when he walked out, head high. She can keep him in jail - or she can put an end to the rampant corruption beleaguering the land with a personal example and recapture the high ground. No one doubts who would win a direct one-on-one contest between him and her.

But she understands power very, very well indeed. The economy is booming, at least for the elite, and the high military command is too deeply mired in corruption to force her hand. But the Philippines is a country where a truly ruthless president was driven into exile by a Catholic prelate, a police commander - and millions of plain folk in the streets.

She came to power with a family legacy, personal wealth and great smarts. She also had an almost guaranteed decade to make a truly wondrous mark as a leader. She has - legally - three more years to undo all the mistakes, and it is possible that this time she has learned her lesson. Don't count on it, but don't count her out.

W SCOTT THOMPSON, a presidential appointee in four American presidencies, is the author of 11 books on politics. He is adjunct professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Massachusetts.