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.

But the Malaysian government, which BN heads, does not allow the Opposition to unite. When the National Justice Party (KeADILan) merged with the Malaysian People's Party (Parti Rakyat), it would not allow the new party to be called KeADILan. It has put a string of obstacles in its path. It remains in limbo. When the Opposition parties decided to form a coalition, it would not allow it. Indeed, it is hostile to any attempt. It wants the Opposition to stay disunited, for it believes that that would make it impossible for it to form a government. This presumes that what it prescribes is the only solution. As the Anglo-British occupying power in Iraq finds out, the opponents would find other ways to paint them into a corner. The BN is frightened of a Malay-based multiracial party as KeADILan join forces with the multiracial but Chinese-based Democratic Action Party (DAP) and the Islamic based PAS. Each has its own power base, but in this equation it is PAS that would provide the leadership.

Which is why it is wrong to compare this conflict in Iraq with Vietnam. The US went into Vietnam in the Cold War in which it backed the South Vietnam government against the Soviet-backed North Vietnam. it was a war of proxies of two superpowers. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is as unilateral as British intervention in Iraq in the 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs. In Vietnam and Indochina, the US came to defend Democracy against "godless" Communism. In Iraq, it invaded to throw out a dictator it once supported, bring back colonialism, and prevent Iraq from every becoming a threat to Israel. Let us not forget that Iraq, with Syria and Lebanon, were the most sophisticated and modern Muslim societies in the Middle East. Lebanon still is but under the weight of internal conflicts amongst the three dominant religious groups - Christianity, Sunni and Shia Muslim. The US invasion had as a long-term design a similar conflict amongst the three major groups in Iraq: the Kurds, the Sunni and Shia Muslims. Syria is in its sights as Iran already is. The Muslim is clear in his mind he is the target. Washington is alone, and is made the lonelier as its allies are told in no uncertain terms to stay away.

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.

This contradiction between policy and practice, always present at UMNO general assemblies, was more pronounced this year. No one wanted to bell the cat, and talked of everything else, in the vague Malay way of going for the jugular, which in the end meant, to those not in the know, there was no bell and no cat. In the presidential speech, Dr Mahathir cried wolf yet again, this time more clearly and more pronounced, of what he sees, rightly in my view, of the Anglo-Saxon plans to shackle Malaysia. But few understood what he meant. In any case, matters of foreign policy or plans are well beyond the average UMNO member. The ministry of foreign affairs is not important in the UMNO scheme of things, and it is usually given to a minister who can safely be dropped. When the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, held it, he was not on the strong wicket in UMNO he now is. UMNO in fact devalued Dr Mahathir's thesis by distributing the Malay translation of Henry Ford's rant in the 1920s about the Jews, and republished recently, called 'The International Jew'.

THE OLD MAN WAS IN FINE FORM. He did not disappoint. As always. He let loose his feelings, in this, his penultimate speech at an UMNO General Assembly. The end is in sight. The UMNO president went into it with all hands flailing and warned UMNO and Malaysia of the perfidy of the Anglo-Saxon powers, which he did not identify but any who did not identify them as the United States and the United Kingdom is better off in a lunatic asylum. What a speech it was! He did not mention or refer to his deputy, who takes over from him in four months, by name or title, though he did his nemesis, now confined to his wheelchair in Sungei Buloh prison, offhandedly, and gave few any doubt he would hold office until the day he retires. It put paid to the belief of some of his cronies and aids that without him the country, and they, would suffer irreparable damage. If persuasion and hectoring was not enough, there were the copious tears, when he talked of the future of the UMNO he destroyed.

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.

WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THE JUST-CONCLUDED XIII NAM Summit? Let us forget the predictable view that it went smoothly, the clockwork precision of the conference, the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed's brilliant handling of it, how the world is about to lose a statesman of undoubted presence, the gathering irrelevance of yet another talking shop, the media falling over each other to tell the world how parochial it is, the tightest security arrangements for a conference in Kuala Lumpur in a long time. Malaysia, as host, moved heaven and earth so all would go smoothly but unconcerned about the issues. Jordan was to be host but begged off amidst Israel's bloody occupation of Palestine and the Anglo-American push to destroy President Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Malaysia stepped in, spent RM1 billion it could ill afford and as if there is no tomorrow.

The NAM summit is next week. The US-UK-Australian lurch to war is stopped in its tracks, more because the UK and US, principally, undermined their own case, and threatened Europe with dire consequences if they did not go along. Germany, France and now Belgium baulked. There is Anglo-Saxon talk of NATO's and EU's irrelevance, and of the US punishing both and Belgium with a cutback in US aid and help. What caused it is the veto the three countries used so NATO would not yet come to Turkey's aid, should Ankara is under attack if war breaks out. The US defence secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, sneered at the Franco-German-Belgium veto, adding the majority supported the Turkish demand. He spoke too soon. The US has cast its veto on more than 50 UN Security Council resolutions, often with a minority of one against and 15 for, especially when the resolutions were against its client states, like Pakistan, Morrocco, Israel, Egypt. That was considered right because it is Washington which does it. It is wrong when others do so. Washington believes what is allowed Zeus is disallowed the cow.

He is upset Qatar would not hold an informal OIC summit from amongst NAM mebers to discuss Iraq. Why should it be Qatar? Why not Malaysia? Especially since Malaysia would host the next OIC summit in October. But Dr Mahathir wanted to make a point that does neither NAM nor OIC any good. If he thought it reprehensible about US-UK-Australian plans to attack Iraq, he should have taken the lead in NAM for a strident resolution against the war plans. Why should it be the OIC? Is not Iraq a member of NAM? Should Iraq be a Muslim nation before OIC would be involved? Iraq is not attacked because it is a Muslim country, but because the Anglo-Saxon coalition wants its oil. When Muslim nations support only Muslim countries, they lose the support of others who see the problem in non-religious terms. The toothlessness Dr Mahathir talks of is there precisely because the numerous talking shops narrow the areas of their concern, with its members prepared to make deals with whoever is the top dog elsewhere in the world.

Mr Hitler challenged the Anglo-Saxon worldview of the world, and the world went to war; Marshal Stalin's Iron Curtain led to the Cold War of a half century. Both forced the Anglo-Saxon world to re-examine its beliefs, and fight to retain their supremacy. The genocide in King Leopold's ownership of the Belgian Congo, which set the pace for colonising Africa, and far worse than the Pol Pot horrors in Cambodia seven decades later, sped the colonisation of Africa in conditions akin to slavery. What Mr Bin Laden has done is as traumatic and dramatic: He challenges the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world through globalisation, and split the Western alliance in ways none could have imagined.

The Great Game is alive and well, with Afghanistan still the pawn. The Taliban, and Mr Osama bin Laden, once had no stronger backer than the United States, but she shifted her loyalties to the Northern Alliance when she could not have its way and after four jetliners caused so much havoc in the United States three months ago. Now she mounts an Anglo-Saxon war machine, with an arm-twisted international coalition behind her, causes even more disruption, damage and deaths, insists she alone is right, and her cause just.

The NA is not involved in hosting terror groups, the Taliban is. Because the Taliban, with armed forces like Mr Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group, the Pakistan "occupying force", and receive "orders and instructions" from Pakistan "fanatics". The Taliban, therefore, are "criminals in accordance with the provisions of the Afghan criminal code (1974). Further, "they have committed high treason and they would be tried and punished "in due process of law inside Afghanistan." At least, Malaysia at least knows why the Anglo-American aerial bombardment goes on relentlessly: it is to ensure the Taliban is brought to justice under the AFghan criminal code. Why then is the Pentagon and Whitehall briefings ignore this important fact in their daily briefings? What are Washington and London so queasy of bringing into power these paragons of human rights and justice as the Islamic state of Afghanistan claims it is?

But it loses the propaganda war as surely as it must the ground war. Even US news reports hint at how tough the Anglo-Saxon coalition campaign would be, once ground war starts.

But more died than the Taleban's claim of 300. No one keeps records out of the main towns, and Afghans do not live in well-ordered towns and villages but in the very hills and wasteland that Anglo-Saxon vengeance is directed.

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