In Thailand, the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was stopped in his tracks months after his return to power. The middle class, especially in Bangkok, went against him, and he went. The king played a conciliatory role, who decided in the end Thaksin should go. So it was in Italy, where the former prime minister Berlusconi, to remain in power, altered the rules so that the middle class who went overseas could vote, but who in the end turned him out. This has split Italy down the middle, but it showed the power of the middle class more than anything else. In the United States, President Bush is in trouble because the middle class in up in arms over government policies, of which Iraq though the most important is one of many. He faces difficulty in Iraq because the Iraqi middle class, bar those who joined the Americans for personal gain and power, are against the American occupation. Washington has finally realised that Iraq cannot be won, and amenable to bringing in others with more clout in the Middle East for talks on the future of the country.

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.

But Iraq is a better place, the spin meisters say, after the US invasion reduced that country to a wasteland. Go into almost any office for information, and the first person of contact is the public relations man. He usually does not know what happens, but he is tutored in the art of deceiving people, while giving the impression he is telling the truth. The US and UK government, for example, is now in trouble because they lied to the people they represent, feeding them with public relations chatter on what is happening, and telling lies when the spin for going to war is broken down one by one. Today, the world is told to accept that despite what was said before, Iraq is a better place than under Saddam Hussein, now on trial for his life but one in which even the spin meisters cannot spin it to a victory for the quisling Iraqi government.

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?

The Americans wanted him tried in Baghdad, that he would be tried by Iraqi judges. A laudible move, but can turn into farce if not handled properly. As this trial has not. The special court, US-appointed and controlled, ran into difficulties from the start. The court has had three chief judges, two flawed. Every hearing starts with a harange by the defendants, whose lawyers have been prohibited to act for them, or have withdrawn. The proceedings of the court is bizaree. A reporter has to depend on videotapes, given our 20 minutes later and after the US officials had erased what it does not want Iraqis, and the world, to hear. That the court is broadcast live on television and radio reflects the difficulties the US administration is facing in Iraq. One cannot also be not sure how much the trial ensures the Sunni and Iraqi insurgency fuels.

THE MESS IN IRAQ today would not have happened if the United States had planned before Iraq was invaded. Their plans were of quislings, who were not given positions in the Iraqi government unless they held Western citizenship. In Australia, its citizens could not be in politics if they held dual citizenships. In Iraq, that was a necessity. Iraq had a working government, but that was destroyed for no reason than no planning. No one could be in the new government who held a Baathist Party membership. That restriction threw the experienced Sunnis out of the new Iraq. It was a precipe for disaster. The United States and those who followed it depended on quislings who had an agenda of their own, and who told lies without batting an eyelid. The United States was sucked into a quagmire. The Sunnis created an insurgency, knowing it would not be ruling power, and had no interest in a new Iraq. It got fighters from the Middle East, those who could not go back to their countries after fighting for the United States in Afghanistan against Russia. Osama bin Laden. a wealthy Saudi Arabian who is not allowed back, was, after all, once a CIA agent. So was Saddam Hussein, whose trial makes him a great figure in the Middle East each time the trial fumbles. And it has fumbled more often than not. The United States wants to hang him for what he did as a head of state. All his arguments are waved aside. They created a law that did not exist when he ordered the killing as head of state. The United States had, after all, supported Augustino Pinochet as president of Chile, and turned a blind eye when he allegedly committed the offenses for which he is now found guilty. The killings were done with United States connivance, in Iraq and Chile. The new circumstance in Iraq meant he would have to be killed.

Islam has become the opponent in the American crusade on terror. We saw a glimpse of that in the bombings of the three American hotels in Amman last week. Those killed were Arabs, but the news networks failed to mention that they had more in common with the West than their compatriots. There was hardly any reaction to the already suffering Muslims in Jordan. When the Americans and later King Abdullah of Jordan blamed the bombing on a dead man, and went into detail of how an Iraqi couple was involved, the point was missed. Al Qaeda or Muslims would attack American and European institutions anywhere in the world at will, just as American does now. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" has subsequently taken responsibility for the attack, erasing any doubts who was responsible. And the West has taken that as proof. But a bomb which exploded was in the celing. These Al Qaeda fellows are so smart that they put the bomb there, we are told. The intelligence agencies are on the ball. They found that out. They are guarding the hotel round the clock, as is common in the Middle East for decades. How come they did not catch them? The 57 Arabs who died and 300 wounded in the bombings will only be relevant if the United States can treat the 100,000 it killed, often at weddings, during and after its invasion of Iraq.

The officials are throttled to say nothing about the murders and mayhem, and they would keep quiet in their retirement unless they become activists themselves, as David Kay, the former chief of the WMD in Iraq has done. The television, the media, the government information services is Western inspired, so we get the public relations version of what happens in Iraq. There is little of what happens in the country. Al Jazeera does report what happens in the street, and the mayhem caused by American invasion. But every effort is made to silence Al Jazeera. He who has the information wins the war. But if both sides have the information, they energise their supporters and the divide is wider than ever. We are told after the Amman attacks that most of the 78 per cent Sunnis in Jordan spit at the perpetrators of the American hotels. But those who died are those who wanted to be there. That means well off Arabs, who live in a world of their own and are seen important if they deal with the West. The bulk of Jordan, to these people, are irrelevant. King Abdullah of Jordan is more popular in the West than in his country. So what he says is ignored. The poor people, in the majority, have supported the Baathist Party in Iraq and President Saddam Hussein. They did not change overnight because he is arrested, and his country invaded, by a foreign nation. The United States have gone into war with terror, and terror here means the Muslim world. But it does not understand what the term means, and finding itself in difficulties, gets into dividing the religious and racial factions. It is not between two Iraqi factions, but it is between Sunnis and Shias or between the Iraqi Sunni and the Turkomen, who is Sunni more often than not. But will we hear in memoirs written by those who are there? We might get a sanitized version of what happened there, but little else.

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.

It is important for the United States and Britain, especially after its quagmire in Iraq after it believed it would be welcomed with flowers, to win its ubiquitous war on terror. The United States, Britain, Australia would not apportion blame so soon in a police case, but they had already decided guilt of Al-Qaeda or others opposed. In Vietnam in the 1960s, the Vietcong had been blamed for atrocities perpetrated by the United States and its allies. The world believed it at the time, but retired officials have written their memoirs in which they said how these atrocities were done. The war on terror is against Islam, and the United States and its allies decided to make their first strike in Iraq. What happened in Jordan could be part and parcel of the Islamic reaction. We are not sure. Others could be involved. If the United States can act in other countries, so can the Islamic movements. In this case, it need not be Iraqis; it could also be Islamicists around the world who are opposed to the West's condemnation of Islam. Or even citizens of the West who are Muslims.

DIFFERENCE OF OPINION, ESPECIALLY, in conflict is normal. To suggest the Al Qaeda is split, as the Guardian suggests yesterday (26 October), is not unusual. Just as there is a split between the United States and its allies on how to conduct the war in Iraq. But this is information war and one side is told its opponent is split. As if both sides are not. We see the split within the leaders and between the leaders and the people. The splits are reported in loving detail by the people who started as handmaidens of the war but the splits, mistakes, and doubts and their own credibility caused them to take a neutral stand. So, the United States and its allies assume the worst in their enemy, and reporters voice them in their colums. They do not bother with the insurgents who do not give press conferences as the Americans do. The Al Qaeda network has shown a sophistication in its operations, that how can you be sure that its split is deliberately fed to the Western journalists? What we have learnt of Al Qaeda and the insurgents are suppositions from Washington, London and other capitals, usually in the course of a propaganda onslaught. Those who are not on either side of the fence in Iraq and elsewhere see through this propaganda battle, and those directly not involved in Iraq take a neutral if not a partisan stand against the United States. This propaganda battle is to reassure their own people that all is well. The level of propaganda rises as the insurgents, in reality the Iraqi nationalist and the Sunni who detest, among other things invaders in their midst, make havoc of the invaders and gain support around the world. The US assistant secretary of public diplomacy recently toured the Muslim nations to gain support of the war, which she did not get whatever Malaysian newspapers wrote of the visit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But making Islam an enemy is a mistake. Islam as we know it is as told us by Western or Western-educated scholars or politicians. But this will be accepted by the Western educated, and those who think that the West is always right. The great unwashed, or the hoi polloi, does not accept it. They go on their lives by referring to the Koran and Islam as they have been told or taught in the mosques or madrasahs. As we saw in Vietnam, the people believed in Ho Chi Minh and those who supported the West believed in money, and villas in the West. It was an uneven fight. Those who supported the West had a bolt hole they could escape into if their prescriptions failed, and the nationalist, like the Vietnamese people, had to stay and fight. In Iraq, it is different than in Vietnam: the senior ministers in the US-led government are all Iraqis in name, but hold Western, mostly American or British, citizenship. In Austraiia, you cannot be elected to parliament if you hold dual citizenship, but in Iraq you are welcomed if you do!. But the war in Iraq is not going well. Even its erstwhile supporters now turn against it. Western journalists are now writing whether there is an end to the Iraqi tunnel.

Now it is turn of the US to sink in a quagmire of its own making; the very promise it gave the Iraqis when it invaded, proved to be false. Its grip on the country slips by the minute. The War on Terror terrorises it, though it is not viewed as such because it controls the war through its media and deliberate official control of information that seeps through. So its chief, President Bush, to the military commanders on the ground, from politicians and right wink think tanks, all praise the successes in Iraq. No one believes it. Least of all the Iraqis, and the rest of the Middle East. The leaders of the American run Iraq hold American or British or other Western citizenship, who had left Iraq because they could not stand the heat. The elections are yet seen as another US ploy to retain power through indirect means. Saddam Hussein, who had ruled the country since 1969 and never allowed religious differences to surface as it has under the American, and was was careful to align himself with the Arab Muslim, will soon go on trial for acts of state. will soon face trial for keeping the Kurds and Shia leaders more than 20 years ago. The US-appointed president, Jalal Talibani, a Kurd who has lived in the US and holds a US passport, has already said he is against the death penalty, and would leave it to the vice-president whether to allow it or not. This is an ideal cop out. Last week, the Iraqi regime hanged three thiefs, on the vice-president's say so. Meanwhile, the US has announced no plans for rebuilding Iraq it had first destroyed, and is destroying, while it annouces further plans to extend its control the Middle East by threatening to destroy all countries in the region which does not accept its view that it must control the Middle East.

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