THE UNITED STATES IS losing badly in Iraq. It does not release news of any kind from there. In the past, before the reality struck in, one could not escape from Iraq, which it saw as evidence it is winning, whatever that means, the war. The government there is bothered about bird flu, as if that is the most important thing amid the mayhem the US has caused, is causing, in that country since it invaded it in 2003. The citizens have become the insurgents, and more join them daily as they see their life more hopeless day by day. There is the occasional talk from Washington of cutting down troops, but the aim of the invasion, based on false reasons like Iraq's nuclear capabilities, was to set up a permanent base in the Middle Eat in Iraq. That alone will make sure the continued insurgency. The Sunnis, in power since 1920, accepts that it will never rule Iraq again, so it will destroy the country, probably more viciously, than the US Armed Forces have done.

Singapore thinks it is a Chinese island surrounded by a hostile Islamic sea, and first patterned itself to Israel in the Middle East, and then a United States outpost in the region. It remained afraid of Malaysia, and became globalisation's South-East Asian centre. It ignored its traditional entrepot trade with its neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, and thought it had a march on its neighbours by being as Western as possible. Mr Lee had a plan, and has faithfully followed it, but he has created a capitalist soceity with a communist heart. The people who carried this out kept their mouths shut and made themselves rich and western. The second generation of civil servants knew the value of keeping their mouths shut, and doing what they are told. It brought in the US Armed Forces into the island republic so that it assumed a Malaysian attack on the island republic would be an attack on the United States. But it could also be the other way. In any case, if the past is any guide, it would harm Singapore more than Malaysia. The US leaning towards Pakistan has not prevented India from attacking it.

ASEAN was founded in 1967 to make sure Indonesia and Malaysia never went to war again. I was on holiday from Reuters in Saigon, and had gone to the 'wrong' room in a restaurant in Bangkok where the officials met. There was Mr Thanat Khoman, foreign minister of Thailand, who brought them together; Col. Benjamin Loudevik Murdani, who was then deputy head of Garuda, the Indonesian airways, later became the first diplomatic head for Indonesia in Malaysia, and went on to be a lieutenant general in the Indonesian Armed Forces; Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie, now Tun, but then secretary-general of the Malaysian foreign ministry. In return for my silence, the three of them told me of these behind-the-scenes talks. Later on, the Indonesian vice- president Adam Malik, who I had known since the early 1960s and who is dead now, filled me in the details. If Indonesia and Malaysia lost control of ASEAN, it would be a dead letter, as now. It was originally the foreign ministers who met, but now it is a meeting of presidents and prime ministers. The Summit should look at South East Asian Regional Conference, which is not allowed to succeed because India, its leading member, plays politics with other members.

President Bush's reign should also be the end of America as a great power. President Bush diverted more money to rebuild the south than it has in iraq, which it first destroyed and now tries to wriggle out of rebuilding it. He, as commander in chief, allowed the US Armed Forces to use Depleted Uranium bullets in Iraq. The US does not announce in advance that its troops are using DU bullets or its navy ships are using nuclear weapons. But it obviously does. It has withdrawn USaid from those countries who are not prepared to vote against any attempt to bring the US to the International Criminal Court. It has signed an agreement with North Korea not to make nuclear weapons in return for American recognition and aid. All the time, US forces in South Korea carry DU bullets and other weapons of mass destruction. It is reverse side of globalisation. There is an assumption that globalisation should only be good. But the good is only for the Western powevers, as China is finding herself. But Osama bin Laden, who may be dead but is kept alive by the United States, and the Arab Muslim revolt in the Middle East is the reverse of globalisation. The US has got countries around the world to decry the Arab nations and Al-Qaeda and the Arab attack on New York. It is President Bush and the Western countries that now shiver in their pants. President Bush had a great role in this. And for which he will rue in his retirement.

The second problem for the West is that Bin Laden, not George Bush, that dictates developments in the Middle East. The US has no policy in the Middle East. It wanted to control it by a perception of its threat. But threat perceptions work only when it is put into practice. To US military was praised as the best in the world with its aweson and most modern of weapons that the enemy has no chance. To equal the threat, Saddam Hussein's Armed Forces was likewise praised to be a worthy enough threat so that the subsequent killing fields, once the war broke out, could justify the slaughter. So it did. But it was not thought through, and its target dismissed as irrelevant, when it clearly was not. The speed with which it destroyed Iraq militarily in the early days of the war was not two years ago was not matched by the speed of controlling Iraq. More serious, it could not establish its presence. The bumbling stupidities of the civilian US power of the military government, for that was what it was, only made it worse: it allowed the Iraqis, a proud people who resent being colonises, to confront them.

Contrast that with the Chinese and Indians. They are cut off the education mainstream, and survive on their wits. Their children are educated at their expense, and those who graduate know they have to cut their own path. The biggest employer in Malaysia – the public service, the Armed Forces, the police, statutory bodies and government-linked companies, amongst others – employ only Malays, the occasional non-Malay employed for decoration. So the Chinese cut their own path, survive with a panache, and all but find their place in the private sector. The Indian fares even worse than the Malay because he survives at the mercy of the MIC leader, Dato' Seri S. Samy Vellu, and he is not interested in them unless they owe total allegiance to him and MIC.

The original plan included weapons training, but that was ruled out not for fear of teenagers trained in weapons running wild but that there were no safe depots to house them. When a group could raid with ease and seize weapons from an army camp under tight security near the Thai border, how secure could an ill-protected armoury be? The three-month training makes no sense. Nothing short of a year would. The Armed Forces should have taken over the training, but that cut out those who make much money from it. So, it is half-baked trainers, ill-paid and often not at all, are at the cutting edge of brainwashing and shepherding impressionable Malaysian youngsters into blind support for the BN. The aim is the Malay youth, who show their contempt for UMNO openly, but the other racial party leaders also face the same contempt from their youth. So, the programme is multi-racial.

It is Dr Mahathir's belief in his own confidence that led him to chose Dato' Seri Anwar as his deputy. In the mid-1970s, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed Major-General Zia-ul Haq as Pakistan's Armed Forces commander, superseding 13 generals ahead of him. The two clashed, the general had Mr Bhutto arrested on trumped up charges, the courts helpfully convicted him for murder, and he was hanged. The parallels are uncanny. Dr Mahathir is in Mr Bhutto's shoes now. However, one looks at it, Dato' Seri Anwar is in the ascendant. The UMNO-led BN government in the centre and in the states are in near rigor mortis, forced to look over their shoulders to second guess what he has in mind. When he is in the country, they are frightened of his tours and walkabouts; when overseas, they tremble at the international black eye he gives them as surely and clearly as the now disgraced former IGP, Tan Sri Rahim Noor, gave him within hours of his detention in 1998.

But it reflected the yawning divide between the theory of press freedom and the practice of it. The governments, journalism schools, NGOs and many practitioners opt for the theory to put the practitioners in a strait jacket. Since since they have the upper hand, they have their way. A free press is the last institution anyone in authority and power wants. This is universal. That great bastion of the free press, the United States, denies it in Iraq and elsewhere when it can, with official sanction. It does not matter if the nation is a democracy, dictatorship, theocracy or run by the Armed Forces: press freedom is defended so long as the media will sing their tune. Shackles are put on the press, ever more so in recent years than in the centuries past. The press, radio and television, by and large, is an appendage of governments or commercial organisations. In Malaysia, every major newspaper, radio, television is controlled either by the government or by the private sector.

THE DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, Lieut.-Gen. Dato' Wan Abu Bakar omar, proved by his own words why he should be removed forthwith. In an irrelevant television and print interview with Bernama yesterday (19 April 2005), broadcast on all TV channels and reported in the newspapers today, he proved why military intelligence, at least in Malaysia, is an oxymoron. He ignored totally Singapore's breach of our national security, to which the Armed Forces, the police forces, the intelligence agencies, the prime minister and deputy prime minister, were complicit. Instead, he attempts to divert attention to an irrelevant operational episode in the unchartered waters in the Sulewesi Sea when a Malaysian and Indonesian warship grazed each other.

A brilliant spin which the defence minister and the Armed Forces accepted with alacrity. Naval ships rarely travel alone, and its security is always tight. No ship can come near one without being warned. And it has better security when its guards are at rest than the the best security the Glenn Braveheart could provide. if it had instead said it was to provide security for unarmed merchant ships, its role at least would make sense. But when the Utusan Malaysia last week reported the Glenn Braveheart anchored outside port limits, all involved, including Glenn Marine, had explanations that not only bordered on the ludicrous but contradicted each other and made no sense. It is an embarrassing breach of national security.

My next encounter with him was in 1965 when I was on a week's holiday in Bangkok from my assignment in Vietnam, and bumped into him, Benny Moerdani (the later Indonesian Armed Forces chief but then Garuda airways manager in Thailand) and Thai foreign minister Thanat Khoman.

Sangkancil discussed and commented on issues with a vigor until after the 1999 general election, when the Barisan Nasional (BN) won with non-Malay support. The non-Malay, the intellectual, the moderate, the non-theocratic Muslim were set upon by these religious vigilantes, so powerful that no one would challenge them. They hold every government department to ransom that senior officers have to comply or find their careers cut short. The non-Malay is kept in his place, and told, often enough, he ought to return from whence he came. We had an Armed Forces chief who encouraged this fanaticism in the forces. The BN government is held hostage, too, and unwilling to confront these bigots and vigilantes.

It was one-upmanship all the way, with officials and politicians unwilling to give way or even explain their point of view. The aim was to best the other in a hammerlock, and to show their citizens he could be trusted to represent their interests to the world outside, especially their hated neighbours. It was essentially to carry their citizens with him that the visits went on. International law and ASEAN practice were thrown out the window. It did not always succeed. Indonesia's six decade civil war in Aheh could not give way to conciliation after the tsunami and earthquake. It is the rebels that have the upper hand there because it is on the ground. The Indonesian Armed Forces is not about to give way: it lost at least 25,000 of its soldiers in the tsunami.

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