THE PEOPLE CAN BE LED like sheep. The politician knows it, the political party knows it, the people know it. People who welcomed Saddam Hussein and voted him into power, now spit at him. Why? Because they think they have a new dictator to rule them. The CNN and BBC know this only too well when they rouse the people to spit at Saddam by going back to the alleged atrocities he had done as head of state. It is victor's justice that is being parlayed in Iraq today. No amount of whitewash, in television and newspaper reports can wash this away. Saddam is a victor if he is not hanged, and a martyr if he is. He is brought to court after he is overthrown, but it took more than three years after his arrest, and it could not the chargers against him and his compatriats until just before the trial. But the point is not that. It is that the American-led Iraqis can lead the Iraqi people as surely as Saddam Hussein. How else could it have led the people to throw scorn on a man they revered before the invasion. The people voted the constitution of Iraq in for the same reason they would have voted a referendum on a bill by Saddam Hussein. In some constitutiencies, the vote was 99 per cent, a vote that would have gladdened Saddam Hussein. It is power that mattered. Who had it ruled the people.

THE GUERILLA WAR IN Iraq is against the the United States by the Iraqi Sunni. Despite what you read in the news and watch on television, it is not going well for the US. The constitution is a sham. The ministers still cannot go out of the Green Zone, the US term for the area that used to be where Saddam Hussein and his men worked and lived. There is much talk of television these days on how the constitution would change life in Iraq. It was passed with a tremendous margin of votes, with only two Sunni provinces voting against. But the principles of constitutional law as seen in the West is not what it is in Iraq. The constitution which was passed in a referendum last Saturday has no effect on Iraq so long as the Iraqi Sunni is opposed to it. An Iraqi Sunni, Saddam Hussein, albeit President of the country which Britain carved out of the Ottoman Empire, goes on trial for what his actions as head of state, during the Islamic fasting month of Radaman. It was a mistake to order the trial during the fasting month of Ramadan but it fell in line with the United States' timetable for the country. He was arrested in 2001 but the defence is not given the full details of the charges against him. There are other charges against him for the United States want to make sure the death sentence is meted out to him one way or the other.

THE PEOPLE OF Iraq vote in a referendum tomorrow (October 15), not knowing what they are voting for. The United States and Britain has given their blessings. But the president and cabinet ministers, secure (so they think) in the Green Zone and not daring to go out, even to the airport, for fear of assassination or ambush, discuss the constituition as if it is the US or Italian or Malaysian. The people do not know what it is about for no politician has discussed it with him. Not even in Baghdad. The referendum tomorrow has no relevance for the future of Iraq. It is surreal, the referendum is conducted to American home requirements, and will produce nothing. The moral will still remains with the Iraqi, who is fed up with seeing his own country invaded by foreigners. The Americans made the biggest mistake of all in refusing the Sunni any role. The constituiton was drawn up by the Shias and the Kurds. Iraq did not have a written constitution. But so does Great Britain. The Sunnis boycotted the election. Sundry Sunni groups are co-opted to write the constituiton, but these groups represent only themselves, if at all. The US is now trying to get Sunni groups not to boycott it. There is no or little coverage of the referendum the past two weeks. Even the invaders know that if the referendum is lost, they cannot withdraw their troops on their own timetable. If the referendum is won, then it is a hard slog to the next target, which is the elections early next year. The Sunnis, who are excluded from drafting the constition, are not likely to take part in it. The invading force, which is what the Americans and all its allies are, is stuck in a quagmire, much like in Vietnam forty years ago but worse. The Sunni Muslim is the dominant religion in the Arab lands. Saddam Hussein, once the CIA's great asset, has now become the Arab's, Iraqi Sunnis and Iraq's hero. He is on trial next week, but here again the invading force made a mistake. He is put on trial during the Ramadan fasting month, again to the American schedule. He has won the victory, whether he is hanged or not. Every miscalculation on him and the Sunnis are to the advantage of both Sunnis and Iraqis.

THE TELEVISION NETWORKS AND newspapers are all about the South Asian earthquake, a disaster engineered by nature. There is little talk now of the man-made disaster in Iraq. When it is all over, the man-made disasters will have killed more people than nature's. As it would be in Iraq and Afghanistan than in Pakistan. Those who are glued to television, as many Malaysians are these days, are shocked at the paucity of services in an emergency. But they say not a word about Iraq, where more people are dead or worse off than in South Asia, and the bombs have reduced to rubble what used to be pastiche of an European city in a way no natural disaster has. Imagine what would happen to Kuala Lumpur should it be reduced to rubble, either by nature or by man. The South Asian earthquake, the tragedy at New Orleons, the Guatemala earthquake show that if man continues to test nature, then the forces of nature would demand a catastrophic price. Man-made wars, as in Iraq, is to reduce potentially growing nations into rubble. The reasons may be justified, but the end result is the same. It is a question of power. Do we expect BBC or CNN to cover the ordinary people in Iraq who are made homeless, or cannot get a modicum of medical treatment? No, we don't. We expect either or both networks to show the power of the countries they represent. So it is Fallujah reduced to rubble, and no mention is made of the people made homeless in that town. We do not hear of the people forced to leave the town while CNN or BBC reports of another attack on the attacked town. But human beings are the same the world over. The refugee from Fallujah is no different from New Orleons or Balkot. The attention given to the South Asian earthquake and news elsewhere, particularly 'democratic' developments elsewhere, is due to difficulties the Americans face in Iraq over the referendum this weekend (October 15).

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.

Datin Seri Rafidah went on a charm offensive, once it became clear that she had no choice but to face Parliament. But in her statement, in and out of Parliament, she spoiled her own case. She said that AP (approved permits to buy non-Malaysian made cars) were only given to companies. This may be true, but the question of APs became an issue because she allegedly gave her son-in-law APs, enough to make him a millionaire every month. She says now that only companies are given APs. If that was so, why was Tun Mahathir's son, and MPs, singled out in her defence? Tun Mahathir's son runs Eurocars, which imports Saab and Porche cars. She should have mentioned Eurocars and not Tun Mahathir's son. But she hoped that this would stop the attacks on her. She has as many creative reasons as President Bush has in invading Iraq. I am not saying Tun Mahathir is a saint, but his son is mentioned for no reason than to stop the attacks. She wants to look good, does not want to be looked as one who made use of her position for her own (or son-in-law's) wealth. Parliament may have absolved, and got her off the hook, but the people remember the verbal gymnastics she did to justify her giving APs to her son-in-law.

ABU MUSAB ZARKAWI's dozen top lieutenants have been killed in Iraq, say the US military, but the mayhem, including the killing, caused by his group would continue without any let up. Abu Musab Zarkawi, in case you are wondering who he is, is, again according to the US military, Al Qaeda's top man in Iraq. Probably he is. But he is probably more adept at getting lieutenants than the US military gives him credit for. Al-Qaeda had chosen him for just that capability, among others, for it is fighting a battle in Iraq in which public relations, particularly Western, is not on its side. The Al-Qaeda would not have landed in Iraq had Saddam Hussein been in power. He was very firm about not letting them in, and he did not allow either the Shias or religious groups be in power. And you could walk around after midnight in Baghdad during his rule. The US invaded Iraq to throw him out. Today, he is in jail and would probably be hanged, but he is fighting the Arab cause, and he welcomes anyone, including Al Qaeda, on his side. And made sure civil war will break out once the US withdraw, as they would have to do, not for exigencies of the situation in Iraq, but that the American people do not want the troops there. Now it is a civil and religious war, with Saddam, whom the Arab countries hated in office but support him how, and the US is caught in a cleft stick. The US has turned Iraq from a well run Arab country to one fit for civil war, but not before bombing the place with nuclear weapons and with conventional weapons so that like in Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II, Iraqis have to live with the after effects of that. US soldiers alreadty face the after-effects of handling the depleted uraniam bullets, and the US army has plans to quarantine those who handle depleted uranium bullets. The US believes that the people of Iraq will be grateful to them for the invasion of their country. They were talking of flowers thrown at them by grateful Iraqis for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They made a war, and made a mess of it. And they would have to pay for it. It is Vietnam all over again, though the precise position of the Vietnamese and the Iraqis are different, and the battles are different now and 40 years ago.

THIS IS THE INFORMATION war. Lance Price, who has published a book of his role in lying to journalists in Great Britain under Tony Blair, said he routinely lied to journalists and the press on Tony Blair and his government. Those of the journalists who knew them as lies were immediately dubbed "conspiracy theorists", as I was for my piece yesterday (04 October 2005). It is conspiracy theory in 1965 to say that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong would win. But not ten years later. But journalists take the line of least resistance, and write what they are told. John Kenneth Galbraith summed it well years ago: "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking." We are not allowed to question what we are told. The United States do not want us to think too deeply on Iraq. It was Gen. Tommy Franks who told us that the United States do not 'do body counts'. But it is the United States which does so, to tell the world it is winning the war in Iraq and the war on Islamic terror. But it forgets one very important facet of life among the insurgents: they do not like their country to be invaded, they will do anything to drive out the invader at much cost, they will get foreigners to support it as the United States will only after armtwisting. It tells us, daily, of how it is winning the war, and it cannot tell that without telling us of how many insurgents they have killed, how many Iraqis they have misplaced, how many cities they have displaced. They spin the story around, and we lap it unquestioningly, that the United States is winning the war in Iraq. And the only way it can tell the world that 'good' news is by telling us how many Iraqis, insurgents and locals, they have displaced or killed.

THE EMAILS AND TELEPHONE CALLS I received after I wrote the piece yesterday (3 October 2005) led me thinking about the Bali bombings three years ago. I did not have the guts to write about it then. It remains a theory, as what I wrote yesterday is, but they remain plausible theories. It will be years before they are proved right, by someone looking at the causes of the Bali bombings. Historians, and journalists, looking for what happened miss the causes, often lie. They look at the dominant event, and interview people of their recollection of it, and miss the larger story, which is why it took place. If you read Patrick Keith's book, Ousted, the story of an insider's account of why Singapore was ousted from Malaysia in 1965, you get the impression that it was wholly the Tengku's fault and Mr Lee Kuan Yew was blameless. Much like the Iraq war, where the Americans are blameless and insurgents are guilty of fighting their invader. But the two men represented two different points of view. Singapore would have remained in Malaysia had Mr Lee Kuan Yew behaved then as he behaves now. Patrick Keith, who left Malaysia for Australia forty ears ago, wrote the book, which is pubiished in Singapore and (not yet) released in Malaysia - the Special Branch has not cleared it for distribution) as a senior government official involved in the drama. But Singapore would have left Malaysia in 1965, because Mr Lee did not understand the Tengku, and it was the Tengku who held the cards. And he put in charge of the negotiations those who wanted Singapore to be out of Malaysia. All this remains a theory, although books are coming out by historians and journalists who suggest the Tengku's raison d'ete was correct and Mr Lee's wrong.

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.

President George W. Bush is in second term when tragedy struck in the form of Hurricane Katrina, adding to his problems as America's chief executive. He is in the same boat as President Richard Nixon, who resigned 33 years ago than face the possibility of an impeachment, on August 9, the year he was re-elected. President Bush has gone to war against terror in Iraq, when Hurricane Katrina struck. New Orleons and the southern states are just an excuse, but the anti-war crusade has been buttressed by American incompetence in the south, President Bush has taken the blame, and provides reasons by the day why he should be impeached. He has taken responsibility for all that went wrong with Hurricane Katrine. He will dither with excuses until the mid-term elections next year, and then he would resign or face impeachment. But the Republicans are also asking for answers. Even if the Republicans are in the majority in the House of Representatives (Congress) or the Senate, the possibility of an impeachment is real.

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."

The war cries from Washington and London does not carry weight these days. The occupation of Iraq is a disaster. British carved Iraq out of the Ottoman Empire, and ruled through its cronies, till from the early 1920s until the then British-lodged Prime Minister, Nurul Said Pasha, had run away in a woman's dress, and was flayed alive by the people. The people in Whitehall did not know their history as to why Iraq was structured the way it has been. The British were trying to outdo the French, its colonial rivals then, which had already carved Lebanon and Syria from the Ottoman Empire. While the leadership in Syria was Aluwait, the majority was Sunni Muslim. In Lebanon, a concord was reached by the French in the 1940s, by which the president was Maronite Christian, the chairman of the National Legislative Assembly was Sunni Muslim, and the Prime Minister a Shia Muslim. It was British power play that gave the Sunni Arabs power for reasons that had to do with currying favour with the majority Sunni Muslims in Arabia. The United States, with British help, is now trying to reverse this. Britain does not have the power it once had. None of the British territories in the Middle East joined the Commonwealth of Nations, and there are more nations outside the Commonwealth than in. Those in are led by British educated locals, and today, the Commonwealth is not what it used to be. While the British civil servant was better Arab-educated, the Arab Muslim did not prefer to be British-instructed.

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.

Iraq UNFOLDS IN WAYS thought possible; a stalemate in less than two years that in Vietnam took 12; each held to a single-minded righteousness in their clash of fundamentalisms but framed in a battle for self-respect against a cynical invader.

The government cannot fight corruption alone. All must join in, insist of ethical values and integrity. Or all will come to nought. Societies like the KLSTI works with the government to root out corruption. Pak Lah said what was expected of him. He went off to attend the ASEM meeting in Hanoi. It did not take long for his words to be challenged. The Iraq Survey Group, which for 18 months had investigated Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, found instead weapons of mass corruption. There were no WMD, they found, embarrassing the two totem poles who insist Saddam must be destroyed at any cost because they had. This report is causing political waves in the US and Britain. So, the spin moved sharply to what Saddam did with the UN oil-for-food programme, which allowed Baghdad to sell its oil to buy food for its people. The sanctions continued in the meanwhile, and the ISG, in its trawling of official documents, found countries and inviduals all over the world who allegedly benefited, for personal gain, by partaking in it. It provided the much need diversion from the political flak in London and Washington.

THE UNITED STATES IS in a quagmire in Iraq, as in Vietnam four decades earlier; the lessons unlearnt, mistakes afresh, its amoral rectitude hurtling it to doom. It fights in Iraq, as in Vietnam, an unseen enemy, whose numbers rise by the day with every indiscrimate bombing of innocent and helpless Iraqi men, women and children. Like in Vietnam, a civilisation three millennia younger than Iraq, Washington went to war on a lie: in Vietnam, an attack on a US patrol boat in the Gulf of Tonkin; in Iraq weapons of mass destruction. But by the time it was discovered, the war had solidified against the unseen enemy. Nothing could now stop it, political careers depended on it; but as American casualties mounted, and more young men sent as cannon fodder, the public reception to the war changed to outright hostility.

THE QUIET JUBILATION IN in Washington at Malaysia's unwise offer to send a 'significant' medical mission to Iraq tells it all. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has firmly joined Washington's tattered, and fraying, coalition of the willing in Iraq when he acceded to President George W. Bush's request. The Asian Wall Street Journal was quick off with an editorial which reflected this change of mood, how a recalcitrant Malaysia under the former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is not under his successor, and how that bodes well.

MALAYSIA IS BEHOLDEN TO the United States more than ever. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, after a call on President George W. Bush in Washington, announces a "sufficiently big and not just a token" medical mission to Iraq. But in Paris en route to London shortly after the Philippines Government withdrew its token medical presence from its armed forces in Iraq in exchange for a Filipino truck driver it held hostage and threatened to decapitate.

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