It is not, of course. Iraq under Saddam Hussein kept the religious divide between the Sunnis and Shia out, and ran a secular state. The Americans dismantle that, gave the Shias power, and believed it could have a state in which the majority ruled. It has resulted in chaos, and the old enmity between Iran and the Middle East, part of this conflict, is that one is Shia and the other Sunni, both of the Muslim religion, one is Arab and the other not. The British is their long presence in the region understood this, and behaved accordingly. Iraq could only be ruled by the Sunni, it decided more than four decades ago, but it lost out in the end by ordering the Middle East in its image. The last British-controlled prime minister of Iraq was flayed alive when he has caught in the late 1950s, trying to escape in a woman's clothes, which included the chador. The king was overthrown and killed. But the group that took over was Sunni. As was all leaders until the Americans decided that should change. But it is against the Shia leadership now.

PRESIDENT BUSH WAS CROWING two years ago that Iraq is a democracy, that it is a far better place that when Saddam Hussein, who is now facing trial for his life, was in charge. But US destroyed the framework, made enemies of the Baathist Party, opened the country to be run by Shia, made sure that the Sunnis would never have a place in the government. The civil war is fuelled by the Sunnis, Iraqi nationalists (both Sunni and Shia), the youngsters who see no future in an Iraq under American control. President Bush has had to eat every one of US optimistic statements. Sure, there are foreigners amongst these insurgents, but so has the Americans. The world hears only one side of the story, the insurgents are not allowed, but the appears on Arab television stations, even if they do not report the more horrendous American atrocities, is had enough. In less than two years, the Americans have made themselves unpopular not only in Iraq, but elsewhere in the Middle East and Iran. But they want a foothold in the Middle East at any cost. Would they get it?

But Pak Lah, as chairman of the ASEAN Summit could not do otherwise. He is a prisoner of the United States, not for what he has done but for what his son had done. The Pakistani nuclear chief, Dr. A.Q. Khan, had asked his son's company, SCOMI, to manufacture the centrifugal rods, which was sent out to Iran on ten shipments of 1,500 rods each. The United States followed each shipment, but stopped the last one. SCOMI then tried to wash itself of the affair by explaining to the Malaysian media journalists that it is innocent. But it tried too hard. Senior US officials landed in Malaysia, in secret because the local media did not report it by linking them to the shipment. The head of the FBI paid a courtesy call on Pak Lah. But he also met the Inspector General of Police, Dato' Bakri Omar. What was discussed is not known, but Dato' Bakri has had extensions beyond the normal, after he had retired from the service. Pak Lah was not his own man after that. He is less so now, and that he did not object to ASEAN giving Daw Aung San Suu Kyi more importance than the 4 million Thai Muslims is indicative of that. The United States do not like the Thai Malays, and so he discarded them. More than 200 Thai Malays do not want to go back to lthe village they came from in southern Thailand, but want to take up arms instead and join the guerrillas. This has caught the Malaysian Government unawares. But the younger elements within the Thai Malay do not trust the Malaysian government any more, especially after the treatment the PULO leader got.

Another factor making the American invader having a rough time is Saddam Hussein's trial. The man is behaving not as the United States expected, and his trial, with his principled stand, will give the Sunni and the Iraqi vicarious victory. The United States is now talking of shifting the trial to another Middle Eastern country. If it does that, he, and the Iraqi nationalist and Sunni has won. The United States, faced with an insurgency that has no end is now faced with the fallout of the Saddam trial and gowing US public reaction against the war. You cannot run an empire on other people's money. But that is what the United States is doing. Its only product is money, and so it allowed US companies to hive off its manufacturing to cheaper Asian countries. The public was kept quiet for a while, but it lost the jobs as a result. Now, President Bush and the neocons are in trouble with his own Republican Party over the war in Iraq. The smoking gun is in the closet of the highest offical, and he would be forced to pull back the troops in Iraq before the next election. Vice President Cheney is implicated, and would have to resign to save the president. But unlike Vietnam, the United States has gone to war on terror with a Muslim country, and blamed Al Qaeda for it, and has made plans to get rid of the Saudi monarchy. I think he would not be allowed to, for local reasons, as he does not want to invade Syria over the Hariri assassination. He hopes the IAEC will rein in Iran on its nuclear plans. But the IAEC is discredited, although it has won the Nobel Peace Prize. The United States has manouevred it such that he got it. But it has to fight its battle in Iraq, with or without troops, for it has started a battle with no end in sight. The United States undersecretary for public diplomacy, Mrs Karen Hughes, visited Muslim nations to get these countries over, and her record is patchy at best. In Malaysia, the newspapers sang in praise of her visit and her results, but would the National Front go against the war in Iraq? It would not. The National Front cannot be against the war on Iraq, knows full well that the people are with Al Qaeda in this war on terror. Pak Lah is chairman of the Organisation of Islam Countries, but he is in the minority in supporting the United States. His attempt to get Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim to the chairmanship of a Muslim fund of nearly a billion US dollars came to nought. All Muslim countries now supporting the United States in this war on Iraq must eventually change sides, or its Muslim street would not let it alone.

The insurgency is Sunni-based. It gets help from other Sunnis as the United States and Britain widens its arc of support by getting countries to join it. Al Qaeda is involved. Why should it not when Australia and Japan is involved? It gets new recruits as the US and UK gets other countries to join it in this war on terror. The US army targets in Iraq are Sunni centres. Even Tal Afar is Sunni, though the majority in that town is Turkmen. Mosul, in the north and an oil town, is basically in guerilla hands. The insurgency in Iraq also hits at oil pipelines and facilities deliberately, denying the US and the Iraqi government they set up use of oil. In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein (as proxy for the US) fought a war with Ayatollah Khomeini, but each were careful not to destroy the other's oil facilities. The war destroyed only the area where it was fought. Iran and Iraq, as states, could do that. But such an option was not available in Iraq when the US reduced it to a rubble. Iraq is now a fourth world state. The Sunnis now are determined it should be under a regime that is set up by the Americans. The anger is on both sides, and a mutually- agreed-destruction is not possible now. The US has lost the initiative in asking Sunnis not to touch the oil facilities. So, the insurgency has two aims: one, to drive the invader out; or, as now, make it more expensive to him to get out, and two, to make it impossible for the Shia or the Kurd to take his place. The US-led coalition has destroyed Iraq, and dismantled its bureaucracy. The US plans to federalise Iraq makes it another reason for the Sunni insurgency to continue unabated.

The US wants to spread its influence in the Middle East. It gains that influence by talking of, for example, democracy at home and corruption at the target country which can take many forms. It bribed the senior advisers of the Shah of Iran with residences in the US and with money, but when the crunch came, even the Shah was not allowed in the United States. Iran is now an Islamic state, Shi'ite, and one of the countries the Americans want to control. It was the time of the Cold War, and it wanted countries on its side in the Great Battle with the hated Soviet Union. So all this was fair game. And it sang its praises by favourable press notices. The conduit was news organisations, mostly Western but Third World as well. The information war was won by the US because it had the most resources. A continuing gripe in the 1960s of US foreign service officers was the growing influence in the region of Agence France Presse, the French news agency. Now that the Cold War is over, its new enemy is Islam. But it and the West uses Cold War officers to fight the battle, and fall flat. The difference is education. The farmers children in the Third World are educated. Those who were educated in the Soviet Union were derided in the Free World and those educated in the best universities of the Free World were given pride of place. But they got education, and they learned to think. Some found that the United States was superior to the others, while others thought that all foreign imperialisms were a menace to their countries. In the Cold War, there was the cushion for either the United States or the Soviet Union of the Non-Aligned bloc. But post-Cold War, there is no cushion. In the Cold War period, a meeting with the Soviet Union and the United States ambassadors at a neutral country can affect the war in Vietnam. Not now. Not yet. The Muslims all over the world are angry. And the enemy to the West comes from every where not just in the Middle East. So the war in Iraq has its effect in southern Thailand or Mindanao. The governments of Thailand and the Philippines have to take up the cudgels to prevent the Islamic insurgency from boiling over.

It is, as I have written, Vietnam redux. The Christian powers have been trying to put the other religions in their pockets. The British attempt to control Hinduism in India ended their British empire. The United States went home licking their boots when they tried to rein in Buddhism in Vietnam, and lost the Cold War there to Russia. Now, the US takes on the other great religion, Islam. The problem here for the United States is that Islam is multinational, aggressive, and in Islamic countries normallay thought of as supporting Washington. And they spread across the world. There are now 70,00 Muslims in Europe, a Christian nation which will add millions if Turkey is admitted. As the Muslims involved in the London bombing showed, the Muslim objection to be second graded can affect the most docile of Muslims. The war on terror encompasses no territory, and apart from the Middle East, it can be anywhere. That is the United States' fault. It is no use blaming Islam, as commentaries in the West are apt to do, when suicide bombings take place. Islam is not a religion framed by Christianity. But Washington has taken battle now to Islam, but Islam has two main branches, Sunni and Shia. Shia Islam is dominated by Iran, a non-Arab nation, although Shia Muslims are Arab as well. But Washington attacks Iran as well, so it has made an enemy of Iran, and by extension Shia Muslims. What the United States has done in Afghanisation, Iraq and elsewhere has affected the Islamic street, and these people think with their feet, not with their minds. And they are more likely to fight an insult to their religion with blood than with argument. President Musharraf is find this for himself. He supported Washington and the war on terror, but his people did not.

But it came at the right time. The Western nations led by the United Nations are caught in a bind in Iraq, Iran was refusing to be bamboozled by the Western powers over its nuclear plans, North Korea has caught flatfooted the six-nations that negotiatied an end to the nuclear controversy by insisting that the nuclear power plant it had planned was for peaceful uses, and asked the United States to continue to build it for it. But not after North Korea established the point that the United States was 'playing' politics with it. The people around the World, outside the West, cheered in their hearts for what North Korea has achieved. It has now asked the UN and other agencies to stop feeding its malnourish people, as it believes it is part of the West's plan for North Korea.

Dr Mahathir defended his stand to criticise Western countries. He told reporters: "As much as they have the right to criticise me, they should give me the right to criticise them...but if you don't want to hear my criticism of them, then you are denying my right." What he says is a truth rarely mentioned because people like Tun Mahathir are rarities and can be picked at random. But education is a wonderful thing. It allows the native to think, and what they think is not the West wants to hear. Today, India and Pakistan are members of the nuclear club, but they fought their way into it, after the two countries made their own nuclear devices. Iran is the next member of the club, to be followed by North Korea. You cannot stop them, but they make them for fear of what the US would do. The US soldier is complainging about depleted uranium they had to handle in Iraq, and get health problems. The New Zealand government two decades ago barred US navy ships from its ports, because it would not say it carried nuclear missiles. That DU bullets are used in Iraq as it was in the Plain of Jars in Vientiane in Laos, who was not part of the war against the Vietminh, and its health problems will be with the people of the area two decades after the DU missiles or bullets are used. North Korea develops its nuclear weapons because it is afraid of the US army just south of the border with South Vietnam uses DU bullets. The US now threaten to use nuclear weapons on any country it suspects of having weapons of mass destruction. But this WMD might not exist, as in Iraq, and not following America's dictates are enough to be pulversed by nuclear weapons.

The US difficulties in Iraq have led to two main problems elsewhere in the Middle East: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. It is glossed over in the general Western media perceptions of the crisis. The Western media and its clones believe the US can only be right when it is wrong. The alternate view has no place in this view. But in the Middle East, as no doubt elsewhere in the world, the alternate press though muted nevertheless report an important local view. The US and the UK was pleased when al-Jazeera TV was broadcast with local views. The format pleased everyone but the contents did not. It reported the views on the ground, often ignored by those in power, but since it is ignored as not important as Washington, London and capitals in the Middle East, all US supported, would have us believe.

In recent weeks, in the runup to the UMNO divisional elections, aspIrants in public office find creative ways to make themselves known to the voters. They have to do this because they have, in the past, ignored this aspect of politicking, and are caught flat-footed when the divisional elections come around. The mainstream newspapers, radio and television are quick to highlight what these worthies are said, on the grounds that what they say is news. Often it is. But these days it begins to take a confrontational stance. These worthies must attract attention to the baser instincts of UMNO members that will make them look good even to the PAS member. Their aim is not to defend government policy but to hijack it for their own political future. In the old days, say 30 or so years ago, what they said made sense, reflected government policy, and had a national base.

The intelligence services are not what they once were. It is clueless to what happens in south Thailand, south Mindanao, Aceh – the three Muslim regions where in the past they had important outposts. The counter-terrorism chief in one intelligence agency is a 27-year-old lady who has just obtained her Ph.D in an American university. She has no practical experience, and no doubt can spout theory and assumptions from published material. Her analysis, however good, must therefore be suspect. This insistence that all intelligence agents must, where possible, be Malays reduces their role even more. The infighting within the services adds to the misreporting and confusion. Meanwhile, the intelliegencies discuss such irrelevant issues as if the US would attack Iran and how.

It is not a battle UMNO can win. In the 1970s, the Shah of Iran confronted the underground Islamic opposition led by the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini but repeatedly lost ground as his regime became more autocratic and dictatorial until he was forced out in the Islamic revolution. It has declared war on Islamic fundamentalist groups, not because it believes it but at the request of the United States, who in the 1970s, backed the Shah in Iran, in a society which is ripe for change because it has been ignored by the government for long. Unlike the Shah, Pak Lah does not have the thinkers who would put an intellectual gloss to his rants. That makes his position more precarious than it already is.

The full story on it is not told yet. But in this west-dominated globalised world, only those who control information can make its voice heard. It decides on the spin, how it would be released, how the rest of the world would decide how and why the attack on Washington should be viewed. To buttress it, Afghanistan was first attacked, then Iraq, with Iran now in its sights. There is one common link with the trio: oil, with Afghanistan where a pipeline is to be installed to carry Central Asian oil to the warm waters of the Arabian sea in Pakistan; and Iran and Iraq are oil producers.

POLITICIANS THE WORLD OVER are firm on the idea of democracy as an ideal, but not the messy elections that could give them nasty surprises. It does not matter where they are from: the United States, the United Kingdom, Iraq, Iran, the Soviet Union, Malaysia, Singapore, Zimbabwe, India. They spout the same slogans and political beliefs. twist the law and language to their advantage, and sulk when the result is not what they bargained for.

That had one unintended effect. UMNO to meet the growing threat of PAS, after 1999, had to be seen to be more Islamic than its rival for the Malay heartland. With the multiracial parties sidelined, UMNO had to best PAS on its turf. Malaysia is declared an Islamic state, the judicial system gives equal status to civil and syariah law, and now, the prime minister announces, in the election campaign, that Muslim pupils must study the Quran from the first year of school. This, he insists, would not affect the non-Muslim pupils. As usual, this is a gut reaction not thought out properly. It does not matter. PAS would accept it wholeheartedly. The BN and UMNO is pushed further into changing the character of the Malaysian state in a debate, like in Iran in the 1970s, where the other secular and non-Islamic views were battened down. KeADILan, even with its raison d'etre the release of its eminence grise, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, promised that hope. But UMNO wanted nothing more than to see it destroyed, and is now caught in the islamic dilemma.

There is no international law which can accuse Malaysia or even Pakistan of what it did. The United States continues to strengthen its nuclear weaponry programmes while it threatens others from getting into it. It unilaterally decided the only nuclear powers should be restricted to those who have the technology. No new comers are allowed in after the cut-off date. The racist rationale behind it clear enough: nuclear weapon technology should be confined to the Judae-Christian countries of the West; others should not be. But Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan broke the barrier; several more are on the verge. Israel and South Africa have nuclear weapons, but their role is played down for the two countries are inextricably linked to Washington over it. The others are not. The idea of Muslim countries like Iran and Libya and communist North Korea is frightening enough in Washington, free lance transfer of technology more so.

THE MORE THE MALAYSIAN government nervously insists it is not involved in Pakistan's plan to spread its nuclear technology to Muslim nations, the less it is believed. It is nervous because the blame is laid at the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's door. A company controlled by his son, Mr Kamaludin Abdullah, supplied the centrifuge units, to Pakistan specifications, to intermediaries who delivered it to Iran, Libya, perhaps others. After several days of stonewalling and embarrassment, Pak Lah is relieved that his son's company is cleared of "any wrongdoing or collaboration with illegal" international nuclear arms syndicates. He said "the outcome of police investigations proved that the allegations of certain segments of the foreign press against the company in Malaysia was unfounded", the New Straits Times reported on 09 February 2004. He did not want to say much, since his son's company is involved. But he has. He does not address if Malaysia is involved, only that he is "relieved" the foreign press reports on it is unfounded. Is that the issue in this affair? Why should wrong and false foreign press reports cause so much anguish if all was above board? And more important, why Malaysia? The centrifuge units can be used for a variety of applications, is widely used in the oil and gas industry in Malaysia, but is an important element in nuclear technology.

Having found nothing in Iraq, with Washington and London blamed on how they went to war, and Presidential Elections in November, some link had to be found. They focussed on Pakistan. The father of its nuclear bomb programme, a metallurgist named Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, stands accused of having sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and, incongruously, North Korea. Incongruous because Dr Khan in a televised confession said his mission was for Muslim nations to acquire a nuclear capability. That North Korea is in this list suggests that he was a small cog in a large wheel. The Pakistan nuclear programme is controlled by its armed forces. Nothing Dr Khan did was as he confessed, a free lance operation to sell state secrets. This programme is so tightly controlled that if Dr Khan was telling the truth, he would have been hung out to dry years ago. But it became useful to have a scape goat while exonerating an important Washington link in this ubiquitous war on terror.

Underlying this is this unconscious fear of an international bully which capriciously targets those who do not fit into his blinkered worldview: Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Myanmar, China, and any country that has cause to annoy its cosy simplistic solutions. For a variety of reasons, countries react in fear to the bully. The United States ambassador in Malaysia is, to all intents and purposes, a proconsul of that bully, issuing threats and warnings in public forums. Dr Mahathir in his 22 years in office have challenged this and so what caused this change of heart?

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