This would mean the foreign company is going to be involved what for centuries were in local hands. Even the British in their colonialism did not touch that. In this new world of globalisation, which the National Front government enthusiastically supported, mainly to beat PAS's policies to make life for the rural folk better. But this has now come to its head. Globalisation it supported would result in foreigners controlling what the government does not. Malaysia will produce goods cheaper than the West can for items made there, it would improve its balance of payments, but it would not be in control of the country. This is done in secret, because the only publicity allowed, in its newspapers, actually its public relations arm, is its version of events and policies. The New Straits Times only carries what the Prime Minister and his people say or do; even the deputy minister, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, is ignored, except when he supports his boss. But this cannot last. It will be a matter of time before the truth emerges.

The newspapers used to carry reports about China, where it was said it was victor's justice in the courts. You do not hear that now. China after all keeps the United States from being like Iraq. The poor in the United States look to China, even if they do not physically, for goods the United States cannot provide cheaply. But everything is for sale in the United States. The IBM branch of personal computers is now owned by a Chinese corporation. In this race for profit, Washington now feels the heat from its own people. The Dubai purchase of rights to operate US ports is now challenged in the United States. But what is important is that the Americans and the British are afraid of competition from outside Europe and America. It now is working out a strategy to contain China in its backyard.

It is money that makes the world go around. No where is this clear publicly than in the United States, and now Iraq. It is so in other parts of the world, but the world is told it is more important in these two countries. The publicity surrounding the release of Jill Caroll, a Christian Science Monitor reporter, from a Iraqi group, was a piece of good news for the United States in an otherwise bleak Iraq. Both the US government and the Christian Science Monitor was emphatic that no ranson was paid. We are told to believe it, when we know any problem they have is solved by money. Journalists, especially American, are prime candidates for kidnap in Iraq, as it is in Afghanistan, even Pakistan. This is why they stay in their hotel rooms in Iraq, or in the so-called Green Zone, where the US and its allies are coccooned in apparent safety. To show that Iraq is in control, people like the US secretary of state Condileeza Rice and British foreign secretary Jack Straw visit Iraq often to show that all is well.

There is an oddity here. The MIC was originally founded in 1946 to fight for Indian independence. Its founding president, Mr John Thivy, became India's ambassador to the Vatican. The MCA was founded in 1949 of Koumintang supporters to be a counterweight for the Malayan Communist Party, which was aligned to the Chinese Communist Party. It was only in 1952 that the non-Malay was allowed to be citizens. In the local elections of that year, UMNO and MCA stood as a coalition. The MIC joined it in the fight for independence, mainly because the British had said Malay would not get independence unless the three major races – Malays, Chinese, Indians – jointly had asked for it. But in the 60 years since, the MIC leader saw his place in government as a career, and manipulated elections so that his rival is disqualified, or is reduced of his support.

Mahatma Gandhi in India forced the British to hand over the government to the Indians, and that helped in the decline of the British Empire. It took 90 years – from Mangal Pandey objecting to using lard-encased bullets, which also got the Muslims to side with the Hindus, in 1857 to Mahatma Gandhi in 1947. He had the genius of hitting the establishment where it mattered, not the carrots the British threw to divert his campaign. He refined civil disobedience. He called it satyagraha, and his movement hit at the guts of the British rule of India. He realised early that the British wanted opposition limited to the non-essentials of its rule. He was clear in his mind that that was unimportant.

The country is ruled from the fortified Green Zone, named by the Americans for the area from which Saddam Hussein ruled. They do not leave it except under heavy escort, and are more worried of evading car bombs and ambushes than knowing the country and its problems. To make matters worse, the Americans and the British have taken their proteges to task, and there has been open fights. They have demanded that the local authority does not touch them, this is resented by the population at large, and so those officially linked with the Americans stay put at the fortified zone. Not that this helps them. The insurgents have make their way into the fortified zones where they are, and created havoc. The Americans have stopped telling the world they are winning, in fact gives out news only when it puts them in a good light. The media once used to carry daily reports of their success, but not anymore.

THE SADDAM HUSSEIN TRIAL, like Slobodan Milosevic's, is political but conducted in Baghdad as a legal trial. The motto seems to be: First the trial, then the execution. It is presumed the defendants have no no case, so it is presumed by the prosecutors. And are shocked when the strong defence is made. They are tried under laws that did not exist at the time at the time the officences were allegedly committed, and became laws only after he was overthrown. The British. in its imperial glory, would have hanged them all before they were faced with scenes now shown to the world, if they thought they would get into the mess the Americans are now. But it is the Americans who rule, and they believe in the Queensbury's Rules even when fighting a war. The procedures of the court have not been fixed. Every hearing of the trial has been a slanging match between the judges and the defendants over whether the court was legal. The witnesses are allowed to make their statements in absentia. The witnesses are afraid to show their faces twenty years later, and when it clear Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants are history.

THE PEOPLE'S ACTION PARTY created Singapore out of its image, the work of its long-term leader, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. It dismantled the British superstructure in the island colony and put in its place the sinews of a modern administrative state. But in doing so, it created a whole colony of beavers, who worked hard, kept their thoughts to themselves, and did what they were asked to do. Those who did not follow the general trend were severely dealt with, and that included recalcitrant journalists and overseas magazines, The officials assumed a persona of their own, believed they could do no wrong, and looked down upon the people they negotiated with, if they were Malaysians, and got the edge over them by slick public relations. The general feeling in Singapore is that the country across the causeway is their's for the kicking. The one time they clashed over water, in which Singapore assumed it was theirs and did Malaysia a favour by giving it treated water, it took Mr Lee Kuan Yew to see his counterpart, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, in 1986, and gave the Malaysians the upper hand in relations with the island republic.

DAT0' SIR ONN JAFFAR, Menteri Besar of Johore, UMNO's founding president, father of the prime minister, Tun Hussein Onn, grandfather of Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, is also known for having got the Malay women of Malaysia to protest against the British plan to neutralise the Malay rulers. The British did not know what hit them. The National Archives is full of reports, written usually in amazement by British officials on the scene, of how the normally placid women protested against plans to remove the powers of the Sultans. The British officers did not know what to do, dare not allow a 'lathi charge' as they would have against the men. The normally apolitcal women were organised by Ibu Zain, who was given a Tan Sri in the 1980s because her daughter, who worked as a journalist for a while on the New Straits Times after she left the education service on a point of principle, would not accept any medal or title if none was given to her mother.

The non-Malay is downgraded in Malay eyes. He is never given a supervisory position. The Malay decides what is good for him, and carries it out, whether it is or not. There is much distrust between them. The Malay made sure they would not join the government or public services, imposing a glass ceiling for those who did. Over the past 30 years, the bright ones did not bother and went into the private sector. It is now said the non-Malays did not want to join the government or uniformed services because the pickings are better elsewhere. Perhaps it is, but most would join the public and uniformed services if they are promised a fair deal. It is said in the British Army there is ever private's knapsack there is a field marshal's baton. Only one man has becoming field marshal after joining the army as a private: Field Mashal Robertson. But the way is open for anyone who wants to get to the top. This is not so for the non-Malay. Now there is in every department a Malay Mafia which blights Malay officers if they promote a non-Malay. Even the secretaries general are afraid. So it is the non-Malay who is squeezed. The rationale for the NEP and Malay Dominance could be argued in 1970, but not in 2005. The suggestion that Rukun Negara will help in 2005 is a sign the National Front does not have any policies to prevent the race and religion from creating havoc in Malaysia.

The people will not rebel unless they have to. The people of England did not like what they had to pay and do in the 13th century until a lord, Simon de Montfort, rallied them to his side and made King John sign the Magna Carta. Napolean had he not the people on his side when he became Emperor of France. King Louis XVI and Queen Antoinette would not have been executed in France if not the nobles and others got the people on their side. The US independence would not have been possible if the people, already suffering from the exactions of the British, rallied to the side of the intellectuals and lanlords. The poor has not succeeded, if they are not led by intellectuals. Castro remains in power since 1959 because he kept the people on his side. India would have not got its independence had not the people joined the intellectuals and the rich. Pandit Jawarharlah Nehru, Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose were intellectuals and landlords. Mangal Pandey fired the first shot, as the new film shows, but Indian independence did not come until a century later, and after the people had been led these intellectuals and landlords.

The elections in Pengkalen Pasir was between UMNO and PAS, and UMNO was represented by the National Front. It has fine tuned the art of putting down the non-Malay over the years, and does so every day but Election day. Malaysians are told that the non-Malay must be put down in favour of the Malay. The reason is Malay Dominance and the New Economic Policy. I agreed with the policy when it first started, and its progenitors agreed at the time it could go wrong but the Malay would overcome their setbacks and would benefit from the government help. The Malay had been given a raw deal by the British, because the immigrant races - the Chinese and Indians - were more energetic, and were favoured. The British trained Malays to be like them, in the early years of the 20th century. The Malay College in Kuala Kangsar was modelled on Eton in the United Kingdom. Those who went to Malay Schools had to be educated in remove class before they could go English schools. On independence in 1957, this social structure was put in effect. The great debates in Parliament in the late 1950s were by political party leaders of all political parties, the Alliance and the opposition, Malay and non-Malay. And which is how I ended up at the English College in Johore Bahru and those in school at that time was Tan Sri Mohamed Rahmat, my class mate, and the former deputy prime minister, Tan Sri Musa Hitam, as my head prefect; others who were in school included Dato' Dominic Puthucheary, the former MCA president Tan Sri Lee San Choon. It would not happen now.

THE FURORE OVER AN ambassador's memoir is creating a scene in London. Sir Christopher Meyers had submitted his draft of DC Confidential, to be vetted, as Sir Jeremy Greenstock's was. Sir Jeremy was head of the British delegation to the UN and took part in the runup to the war in Iraq, and is now in Iraq. It was made clear that Sir Jeremy's account was not what he would write; the book was published with parts removed. But Sir Charles' memoir has hit the ceiling. Not that, apparently, what he said was wrong but that his book contained descriptions of cabinet ministers that would reduce their public view of them. Sir Michael Jay, head of the British foreign service, has taken the unusual stance of telling British ambassadors in a private note that they should not write anything that will damn British policy. The memoir it seems has set back British policy. The British foreign secretary, Mr Jack Straw, has called for Sir Charles' removal as chairman of the Press Protection Council. But his colleagues in the Foreign Office saw nothing wrong with what he wrote. They took bits of Sir Jeremy's book because they said it would damage relations with foreign countries. They did not with Sir Charles' book. Either they have lost, like many in Britain today, confidence in the Labour Government, or they have taken a step further and tie the Labour Government in knots. Even the civil servants could not follow government policies.

AL QAEDA has said it is responsible for the bomb attacks on three American-owned hotels in Jordon. The Americans call this group Al Qaeda in Iraq. If you listen or read what they have to say or write, they do not tell you the most important fact: that as the war on terror on Muslims is worldwide, the response is too. They ignore this, and suggest the Jordanian Arabs were the ones most affected. But 100,000 Iraqis have died in American bombing. There is no word of that now except that they deserved it. The US Senate has passed a resolution that the American legal system should not be available to those sent to Guantanamo prison from countries in the Third World. The Americans have latched on to Al Qaeda's statement that they are responsible. They are playing an information game as the Americans are. They have found a new organisation called "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and its leaders responsible and therefore gulty. The war on terror against Muslims requires less standards of proof of guilt than murder, for instance. But this is a fight unto death, with both sides having access to the same methods. If the Americans can attack a defenceless country headed by a CIA agent, after months of telling the world a pack of lies, the reaction is equally swift. When it justifies the invasion of Iraq also as a war on terror, and alientate the Sunnis, in power since the British put them in power more than 80 years ago, the reaction was swift. Iraq is in a civil war. It would never be a country again, with handouts from the United States to keep it going, and unsafe for any who supports it. The Sunnis have waged a civil war since they were removed in a fit of anger. They don't want to return. Their aim is to destroy. Four or five Iraqi Sunni organisations supporting the elections next month is neither here nor there. But the Americans and their cohorts in Iraq and elsewhere look upon every Sunni move in their favour as evidence of grasping any floating in the sea. The bombing of the three hotels in Jordan is a direct response to the invasion of Iraq. The hotels would not be bombed if Iraq was not invaded.

We are told that UMNO was formed in 1946 to fight for independent. But UMNO was formed on 31 May of that year to fight against the British plan to reduce the Sultans to a digit. Dato' Onn was its first president, and he was clear in his mind why he formed UMNO. It was not independence. He walked out of UMNO in 1952 when it did not agree to his plan to invite the non-Malay into the party, and left it in 1951. He died twelve years later, as an MP but of the Malay nationalist party, Parti Negara. He was not a member of UMNO when he did, and this was the case in two of Malaysia's five prime ministers. He was elected from Trengganu, which is why his son, Tun Hussein Onn's first act as Prime Minister was to go to the state and why he had a preference for the state although like his father he is from Johore. UMNO moved with the times, and changed its goal to independence once Tengku Abdul Rahman because its president in 1951. The party formed the Alliance in 1955 because the British wanted proof that the non-Malay could co-operate with the Malay before it would consider giving independence to UMNO. After Burma left the Commonwealth on independence in 948, the colonial power wanted to make sure that all colonies and protectorates remained friendly after independence. The UMNO-led alliance got its independence because the Emergency (so named for insurance purposes) was hurting. The 1955 talks with Chin Peng was stage managed, and the Chief Minister of Singapore, Mr David Marshall, joined the talks as Britain's man and to make sure the Tengku did not give away more than he could. Malaysia became independent at the time it did because Britain wanted a government in Malaysia that was favourable to it and could take over from it the fight against the communists. It was in a sense a con job. But we are told that the UMNO-led Alliance fought for independence. Nothing could be further from the truth. But UMNO then is not the UMNO today. Dr Mahathir changed it from a nationalist movement to a political party in 1988 so that he could remain in power. The rot in UMNO set in, and continues.

That the US tries to limit Al Jazeera's reach is seen in shutting it out when it can. They were given the coordinates of the Kabil office. Long after, the US strafed the office, killing its correspondent. The Palestine hotel is bombed, and the Iraq insurgents blamed. But the US did not want journalists in Iraq, and the atrocity would divert attention. It did not work. The insurgents might still have done the bombing, but until the evidence of that is forthcoming, I would believe it is the US or its allies that did it. The British after all raided a police station under its control where two Marines, caught redhanded bombing a car, had been sent, and two Americans had been captured doing the same thing. The British and the Americans are quiet on why they did it. I was told only the Russians had reported the arrest of the Americans. That is because the US chose not to. Books now talk of the propaganda nature of the war in Vietnam. We cannot expect any less in Iraq. Who gains the propaganda war in Iraq wins. At present, the US is losing, and shorten the odds by taking out the journalists who sees with his eyes that what the US says is not the truth. The poodle journalists have become barnyard dogs, and can reduce their number only by killing or making their life difficult not by argument or propaganda.

BRUTAL DICTATORS IN IRAQ are not new. The British was one in iraq. So were the Sunni leaders that followed. Iraq had no free elections since the 1920s. And it showed during the recent referendum. The Americans, and its sidekick, the United Nations, are happy that all went well. As Saddam Hussein would have crowed in his day. The Iraqi know which way the bread is buttered, and voted accordingly. So it is not surprising that the Americans recorded, so they said, more than 90 per cent of the votes in many Shia and Kurd provinces. The Sunnis, having lost power, were expected to vote against. But the Americans added difficulties at the last minute. One would have required two thirds of a province to vote "no". The people did not know the details of the constitution they were voting for. The ministers did not go to the ground in a country which CNN had a think tanker in Washington say is better than during Saddam Hussein and and security improving day by day. But the Americans are caught in a Catch-22 situation: The Sunni and the Iraqi nationalist, who include Shias, Kurds, Turkomen and others, have vowed to make it difficult for the latest dictator in Iraq to succeed. The Sunnis know they will never rule Iraq again, and they will make it difficult for others to rule. Their task is made easier by the invader dismantling what existed in government and not putting its own in force. Now it is too late. Iraq is in the throes of a civil war. The invading force, the United States, will have its troops in Iraq for decades for it will be worse after they leave. Iraq is now a fourth world state, with anarcy and no government. You would not hear it in the newspapers.

A BAD PEACE IS EVEN WORSE THAN WAR, said Tacitus, about the Roman conquest of Britain. He also quoted the British chieftain Calgacus tell his troops about Rome's insatiable desire for conquest and plunder and to 'savage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; they make a devastation, and call it peace." He wrote this 2,000 years ago but it refers to the United States as well, now. Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary and one of those who hurtled into the war in Iraq without an exit plan, said the United States was more powerful than Rome. The United States behaved now as the Romans then. And like the Romans, the United States are left wondering where they went wrong. It is perhaps trite to suggest now that you do not go to war with an adjective, but that is what the war on terror is all about. The United States did not want to sound racist, so the war against Muslims quickly became the war on terror. It invaded Iraq because of oil. It is a Muslim nation, so the adjective made sense in Washington. Its reasons at invading Iraq has proven false. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq had no nuclear plan. That it had both was why it officially invaded the country. It displaced the Sunnis and Baath party members from power, and put Saddam Hussein on trial. It had no plans other than ensure that the Sunnis and the Baathist Party did not rule. But in deciding that, it made sure that Iraq was not a oil producing state anymore, but a fourth world state which was like Vietnam in the 1960s. It war on terror made sure that all Sunnis world wide were targetted. In the Middle East, the Sunni sect of Islam dominated, and the Arab street was with the Iraqi, who did not like his country to be ruled by an invader, which the United States is. The coalition it has cobbled is a smokescreen, to make other countries join it in this war on terror. It went on an information war to regard those supported the Iraqis as foreign insurgents, as if they are not foreigners. The referendum on the American-drafted constitution may yet pass, but the insurgency would not end.

PRESIDENT JALAL TALABANI HAS left the "security" of the Green Zone for the "security" of London. He wanted to tell the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, of his government's plan for the referendum on October 15. But neither he nor members of his government has visited the people of Iraq of what the referendum brings. It is too unsafe. He and his ministers have not ventured out of the Green Zone for fear of being killed by the people. In President Talabani's terms, those people who are against the referendum and those who create mayhem in Iraq are terrorists, and should be eradicated, preferably by the United States or Britain or by the other countries who are part of the US-established multi-lateral force. But the insurgency would not last if locals do not support it, as President Talabani should know by now. First the country is invaded, then the election is set so that the elected are kept isolated in the Green Zone, and those elected ask those who put them in power to remain. President Talabani was "thankful" in London for the multinational effort in Iraq. He blamed Iraqis for protesting against the US-led invasion, as "Saddam Hussein as a bad man". But the United States dealt with the "bad man" for nearly 30 years, had made him a prime CIA source, like Osama bin Laden, and then turned against him, because he did not agree with Washington's plans for the region. President Talabani now faces Saddam Hussein in this attempt to turn Iraq into a US colony. The British tried it earlier, turning the Kurdish, Sunni and Shia provinces of the Ottoman Empre, and called it Iraq after the first world war. They knew their Middle Eastern history, and made sure the Sunnis, who formed 20 per cent of Iraq, as the rulers. They formed Iraq to defeat the French colonial power, who took Syria earlier, and established a Shia president there although he was from a minority Shia sect, the Aluwaites. Nearly 80 per cent of Syrians are Sunnis. The Prime Minister of Iraq, dressed in a woman's dress and flayed alive in Baghdad in 1958 was a Sunni Muslim. The governments that followed is Sunni, of which the latest is Saddam Hussein, which the Americans, like a bull in a China shop, erased, and brought about the present civil war.

TUN MAHATHIR GOT IT RIGHT. He did not apportion blame on the Bali bombings to Al Queda or the Jemayah Islamiyah or to other Muslim groups. But the ease with which both these organisations were blamed, and that this has been on the news particularly round-the- clock ever since the bombings last week, and the defensive posture of the Indonesian government followed by the British blaming the Australians for not letting it know of its 'early warning' to Australian revellers in Bali, and the constant berating of those who would listen that Al-Qaeda was involved, suggests something has gone wrong. The Western governments, or its intelligence agencies, are behind it, and keep at it because the people on the ground in Indonesia and elsewhere do not believe the events in Bali last week. The United States (and Australia, among others) created incidents in South Vietnam in the 1960s, blaming it on the Vietcong. There is no unanimity among Western reporters that Al Qaeda was involved, Jason Burke of the Guardian thought that Al Qaeda could not be involved, and the discordant voices in the Western media is matched by the ordinary people around the world, Muslim or otherwise, having doubts on the official story of the Bali bombing.

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