What did he say that upset the Western diplomats that led them to walkout of his public lecture? He catalogued the deaths of 500,000 children, the powers broke international laws about human rights and still do, British and American policies that resulted in hundred thousand deaths and more before the invasion. "The result of the invasion is that many more people have been killed than Saddam ever has been accused of. Worse still, the powers that be which were supposed to save the Iraqi people have broken international laws on human rights," he said at a public lecture organised by the government-run Human Rights Commission of Malaysia or Suhakam. And he indirectly scolded the NGO for not commenting on these breaches of human rights. The double standards were clear among the Western nations, and all kept quiet. The opposition to the war in Iraq began in the West, but not on human rights and deaths of Iraqis, but of deaths of US and UK soldiers. It was only later, as an adjunct to the death of US and UK soldiers, that the other details of breaches of human rights regulations came about. Tun Mahathir continued: "At the time this was happening where were the people who were concerned with human rights? Did they expose the abuses of Britain and America? Did they protest against their own government? No, it is because they say the enemy are killed. That is acceptable. But their own people must not be killed. To kill them is to commit acts of terror."

Now it is turn of the US to sink in a quagmire of its own making; the very promise it gave the Iraqis when it invaded, proved to be false. Its grip on the country slips by the minute. The War on Terror terrorises it, though it is not viewed as such because it controls the war through its media and deliberate official control of information that seeps through. So its chief, President Bush, to the military commanders on the ground, from politicians and right wink think tanks, all praise the successes in Iraq. No one believes it. Least of all the Iraqis, and the rest of the Middle East. The leaders of the American run Iraq hold American or British or other Western citizenship, who had left Iraq because they could not stand the heat. The elections are yet seen as another US ploy to retain power through indirect means. Saddam Hussein, who had ruled the country since 1969 and never allowed religious differences to surface as it has under the American, and was was careful to align himself with the Arab Muslim, will soon go on trial for acts of state. will soon face trial for keeping the Kurds and Shia leaders more than 20 years ago. The US-appointed president, Jalal Talibani, a Kurd who has lived in the US and holds a US passport, has already said he is against the death penalty, and would leave it to the vice-president whether to allow it or not. This is an ideal cop out. Last week, the Iraqi regime hanged three thiefs, on the vice-president's say so. Meanwhile, the US has announced no plans for rebuilding Iraq it had first destroyed, and is destroying, while it annouces further plans to extend its control the Middle East by threatening to destroy all countries in the region which does not accept its view that it must control the Middle East.

THE 30 JANUARY ELECTION is not what is made out. It is not so Washington could leave Iraq in safe hands. It is not to usher representative democracy in Iraq. It is not to prove democracy is inherently superior to dictatorship. It is not so Iraqis can order their lives in conditions better than President Saddam Hussein could ever provide. It is not so the united Iraq under American stewardship would be stronger and everlasting than under Baathist rule. It is not so an Iraqi in a democracy could live his life better than he could in a dictatorship. It is not to elect leaders who would rebuild what Washington destroyed to destroy Saddam. It is not to end the total terror which the terrorists and renegades inflicts as thoroughly as Washington on the Iraqi. Nor is it to prove that Islam is terror incarnate if Washington so decides. But what the 21st century's Anglo-Saxon Don Quixote, known the world over as President George W. Bush, and his side-kick, Sancho Pancho, British prime minister Tony Blair, wants for Iraq.

He is not alone. The Jakarta meeting is the guerrila force to repair the tsunami damage and put in place a system to prevent it striking again. Like the Paris meetings in the 1970s which stopped the American-led tsunami in Vietnam. And the guerilla forces feebly attempting to stop the American-led tsunami in Iraq. You would notice that this tsunami strikes at nations least prepared: Grenda, Haiti, Vietnam. And it would not leave until its force is spent. The Indian Ocean ended when its force dissipated. The Vietnam War ended when the American military tsunami lost its force. It is this destructive force of nature and man that is ignored. The United States even toyed, in the 1950s, with tsunami bombs to create fake tsunamis.

Singapore has upped the ante in its relations with its neighbours, fully committed to an American presence and its surrogate in Southeast Asia for the war on terror. The presence of an American force in the island is viewed by its neighbours as proof it is immune from a regional attack on its borders.

They were there to see if Tweedledum or Twiddledee would lead the United States in this continuing war on islamic terror. There were six other candidates of whom only Ralph Nader was recognisable, but their cances of winning as as good as the lifespan of an ice cube on a hot plate. As you entered the Sabah Room, you were given the usual (and useful) booklet about the US presidential elections, a small American flag which, to prove globalisation works, was made in China and a ballot paper with the eight presidential candidates. The usual paranoid security checks, ever more stringent since 9/11– that shortform for Islamic terror now a global brand as widely recognised as McDonald's and Coke, and we were in. Groups of people hung about, often engaged in suitably 'intellectual' conversation about who would win, why the Americans are stupid not to vote Mr John Kerry, as they would if they were American citizens, the 'transparency' of US electoral laws, who would be returned for the Senate in Wyoming. These are Malaysians whose education and social and intellectual pretentions conditioned them to be Pavlov's dogs.

It is made the worse in this ubiquitous war on terror, in which Islam is the enemy. It is not, we are told relentlessly in the globalised television that we are all addicted to. Islam is not the enemy. Nor are Muslims. But you understand, there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. The Muslims do not accept this definition, that it is the Judae Christian principles imposed on them selectively and by Orientalists who insist the world should only accept Islam and Muslims within their narrow definitions. What this tells you is that if a Muslim challenges the might of Judae Christian civilisation, as Osama bin Laden did, then it is Islam that must be blamed. If a Muslim cuts off the head of an American, it is proof yet again of islam's backwardness; if a Judae Christian soldier leads an naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash or gets several to perform unnatural acts, it is the individual soldier who must be responsible, not the civilisation he or she comes from.

This month, Pak Lah ordered the Royal Malaysian Police to get to the bottom of the affair. A fortnight later, it turns out that there is more to the matter than we were told. But the police now say it began its investigations on 13 November, three days after the American CIA and the British MI6 intelligence services informed its Special Branch of SCOPE's role in this trade. But it said all along, in public, it knew nothing of it, that as far as it is concerned, SCOPE is clean, and all this is a deliberate attempt to damage the fair and good name of Malaysia. In other words, the Malaysian government led Malaysians up the garden path. It stonewalled until it could no longer. The flurry of information it released on 20 February 2004 was too little too late. If it had been released judiciously over the past three months, it was would have saved Malaysia from its embarrassing public relations fiasco. When the world was scrambling for information, Malaysia would not say anything. As more details emerged, silence could not be an option. Malaysian leaders and police officers cleared themselves, and commented cynically of this attempt by the US leaders and foreign reports to sully the fair name of Malaysia, which of course failed because they got it all wrong.

His nemesis widened the attack: mismanagement of and in Maika Holdings, the MIC-initiated and now Samy Vellu-owned and -controlled investment company. He called a meeting yesterday at the Mint Hotel on Kuala Lumpur's outskirts to discuss it. Several thousand disgruntled shareholders turned up. Meanwhile, a creditor has moved the courts to wind up Maika Holdings as it negotiates with a listed company for a backdoor listing on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange. American Express sues it and its chief executive - the son of the beleaguered MIC leader - for not paying RM142,000 in credit card bills. How did the land beside the MIC building in Jalan Ipoh turn up in a company controlled by Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu? And the new MIC headquarters that was to have come up there? This is but a taste of scandals to come.

Those who planned the invasion are not to be seen. The arrogance is now replaced with a helplessness. The constant pressures on American forces in Iraq, the daily attacks now double at 35 a day since the war officially ended, the heavy toll of men and machines, its crude terror and punishment reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's for innocent or minor infractions, the belief that it can do as it likes now that it occupies Iraq, is matched by a slow but sure escalation in which the global Muslim protagonist is slowly but surely taking charge. But the defiance is still iraqi controlled. No one likes one's country to be invaded and raped, none more so than a proud people like the Iraqi. In the twentieth century, Iraq was under British control for four decades, but with a constant deadly guerrrilla war throughout, its violent overthrow in the 1950s and the Baathist party controlled it as dictatorially and harshly as the British. Now it is a return to foreign rule yet again. Let us not forget that it was for centuries before the British under the Turkish Ottoman rule.

THE TENTH OIC SUMMIT IN Putrajaya (11-18 October 2003) has come and gone. Malaysia as host spared no expense to hold it in surreal surroundings. Twentyone heads of state and government - six monarchs, seven presidents, seven prime minister, one provisional head of government - turned up. But those who mattered - President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Col. Muammar Ghadhafi of Libya, for insance - did not. One unspoken fear of those who attended is if, and how far, they could cross the United States over itgs Middle East policies and still qualify for US aid and protection, and be invited to either or all of the White House, Camp David, or Crawford, Texas. Nothing was done at this conference which could upset the United States, now poised to bring into its orbit ironclad control of several OIC members. When it should have taken a strong stand - the US invasion of Iraq - it quietly acquiesced. By allowing the US-nominated provisional governing council from Iraq to take its seat, it implicitly accepted Washington's right to invade Iraq. The OIC representative in the UN Security Council, Syria, acquiesed with the Anglo-American proposal to bring a mercenary force to keep peace in a country they earlier invaded. Just as in 1991, when another OIC member, Malaysia, voted with an earlier Anglo-American proposal to have the UN invade Iraq. The OIC has given up the ghost in Afghanistan, where another US-installed president is in office and in much the same straits.

These two have five companies in all on this list, and involved in gambling and leisure. If the casino aspect of their companies are removed, they would not make the list in a hundred years. In this list are a handful of well-run companies - Public Bank, British American Tobaco, Courts Mammoth - but most are cronies of the Establishment. The Berjaya companies, RHB Capital, Leader Universal Holdings, Celcom, Hap Seng Consolidated, Malaysian United Industries, IOI Corp, YTL Corp cannot survive this list for long after the Crony chief, one Dato' Sri Mahathir Mohamed, retires by the year end.

The Anglo-American destruction of Baghdad is as bad, if not worse, than Hulegu Khan's in 1258. Then the Tigris waters turned black with the ink of its priceless libraries; today the skies of Baghdad are dark with the smoke from the burning libraries. It is this that will be remembered long after the United States has gone on to pacify other inconvenient states. It now appears there was a deliberate pattern in the looting, the destroy the past so the present could be rebuilt anew, so Iraq would be a culture without a past, like the United States, and thereby create a culture in Washington's likeness. Cultural destruction will remain in the people's mind long after the event that led to it is forgotten. In England, it is the destruction of the monasteries, and the destruction of its priceless treasures, is remembered than King Henry VIII, who ordered it. We have forgotten Hulegu Khan, not what he did. In fact, the worse destruction came later the 13th century, when his cousin, Timur the Lame, Tamerlene in the West, sacked Baghdad, but that is all but forgotten.

He made these remarks about press freedom as the second batch of Malaysian journalists sent to Iraq to report on the war there. He insists it is the first, ignoring the Star's own team of reporters in the Middle East. But it is the first in which the government sponsors. They would be there for a month. Tan Sri Khalil says if their reports favoured the west, like those from CNN or BBC, it did not mean the mission failed. They are sent there to "observe and write from the Malaysian perspective, what was really happening"? Does he know what he talks of? If the reporters are there to report from a Malaysian perspective, why does he mention they failed because their reports favoured the west? What then is the Malaysian perspective? That the Anglo-American attack on Iraq is wrong, and the Malaysian reports from there must reflect it? Or that if these reporters come to the conclusion that mirrors the CNN or BBC coverage, it is not the Malaysian perspective?

The Anglo-American imperialist adventure in Iraq is no different and suffuced with the same hubris. As Moscow in 1979, Washington in 2003, defied the world to invade a country to show it could. The neoconservative cabal around President George W Bush had been straining at the bit to march into Iraq for months before the aerial attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. And looked for excuses to march in. It defied the United Nations, and its claim of 49 nations backing it must be taken with a pinch of salt: many dare not reveal their support, a few heard of it when they read of it in the newspapers, some of them one would have difficulty of identifying on a map. When all is said and done, it is the United States and its sabaltern, the United Kingdom, that marched in. Nothing one has heard from their operational headquarters in Doha or from the House of Commons in London or the Pentagon says it is anything but.

But it is also of a man harassed: he faces inevitable challenge, not only against him succeeding Dr Mahathir, but from within. He surrounds himself with a coterie of advisers and business men who are there only so they can replace the cronies of Dr Mahathir and his coterie, and provide him with astute analysis of how well he does. One valued adviser proudly boasts to any who would listen that he speaks to Pak Lah daily, that if he does not call him, Pak Lah would. Perhaps it is true, but it is talk like that eventually turned the people against one Dr Mahathir. This man also says Pak Lah cannot be defeated, not even by the Hermit of Langgak Golf aka Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah. But it is wise if he would remember that pride goes before a fall. Or better still reflect on the Anglo-American predicament in Iraq.

THE ANGLO-American INVASION OF Iraq - in one irrelevant sense, no different from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait 12 years earlier - is lost even before it began. Fourteen days into the confidently predicted short, sharp blitzkreig, the 'shock and awe' of the awesome techologically wizardry of its electronic 'slash-and-burn' weapons of mass destruction turns the invading force into a 21st century version of Halegu Khan's siege of Baghdad in 1278. President Bush, like Genghis Khan's grandson, had no plans for Baghdad but to lay it waste as destructively, fearsomely, devastatingly. Halegu Khan's forces on the outskirts of Baghdad at the start of the second millennium AD is as precise as President George Bush's at the start of the third millennium AD. The Mongol hordes was as feared a fighting force then as the American forces now are. The aim is to lay waste, gobble what can be looted and stolen, and head on other fabled wealth of the Middle East, including oil.

THE ANGLO-American COALITION DEFIED THE UNITED Nations to lay waste Iraq, had no qualms of how right it is, was sure the Shias in the south and the Kurds in the North would welcome them as liberators, but seven days into the war cannot even capture small towns without heavy losses. More than a hundred soldiers have died, half a dozen captured, several missing and hundreds wounded in a reaction that shocked it. The US and UK had stepped up the propaganda months earlier, about the new Hitler in the block, how dowtrodden and fearful his people were, how they could not wait for an Anglo-American force, with or without United Nations support, to destroy the leaders, and how the Iraqis would come out to greet them as liberators and join them to defeat the hated dictator in Baghdad. So widespread was this believed by President George W. Bush and the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, that President Saddam Hussein was told bluntly he had better disappear if he valued his life. The propaganda ratcheted to a crescendo that when the bombing started, and the war began, the liberators found their way blocked by the very Iraqis they had come to liberate.

Washington's confrontation of North Korea is therefore one waiting to happen. The only surprise is that it is Pyongyang and not Japan that did so first, and Seoul is as restive as Pyongyang and Tokyo at the American presence. Underlying it is the Buddhist culture that dominates all three societies, and the belief the loser in any war is beholden to the victor. It is this belief that allowed General Douglas MacArthur to re-order Japanese society and the role of the Emperor without serious Japanese opposition. And North and South Korea are as quiescent as ever. (Washington toys with a latter day MacArthur in Baghdad once Iraq is brought to its knees, but what worked in Tokyo would not in Baghdad.) But the new generation, born after the military conflicts, do not owe any such loyalty, and act in defiance of the imperial power. The winds of change is clearly discernible. It is a time-bomb waiting to explode. Those born in Japan after the San Francisco treaty in 1953 which ended the war in the Pacific is about to reach policy making levels, and Washington negotiators already note a dramatic change in attitudes. A similar change is evident in North and South Korea.

She she threw her weight around, and a tantrum. There is no ifs and buts to it. She does this all the time. This time it landed her in hot water. All her gratuitous statements about how terrible the Australian police at airports compared to New York and Los Angeles comes to naught when the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, and the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, have complained how tetchy American immigration and police can be at airports. She claims she was treated like a terrorist. Her actions, in the profile of policemen all over the world, especially amidst the worldwide madness about terrorism, does make her out to be a terrorist or a drug smuggler. She is not. But the point is: why did she give throw her weight around and a tantrum at people who do not know, or care, who she is? She left a bad taste in the mouth and, if she likes it or not, fit it with a police profile of a terrorist.

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