The Iraqi Sunni has the support of the Sunni majority in the Moslem countries in the Middle East. They may not like the Sunni leader, Saddam Hussein, but he knows how to get the Sunni street in the Middle East. The United States may buy support of the Governments in power, and give it face by sending people it arrests to them for third degree treatment by their intelligence services. Syria, which it has targetted, had helped by allowing its former citizens be illtreated at the request of the United States. The United States will do anything it can so that it leaves Iraq with the Middle East in flames. Its target is the Muslims, and most Muslims live in the Middle East. It has as much stake in Jordan as Al-Qaeda. But it has decided the former is at fault. The world believes it, as it would by the constant barrage of opinion, but is it correct, or is it information war as part of its policy against Islam? It has targetted Al-Jazeera for that television station reports what the Muslim street thinks. The governments in the Middle East do all it can to stop its broadcasts. It is an offence in Saudi Arabia to be seen with a copy of its broadcast, or be seen watching it. But it would have happened if the United States had not begun its war on terror?

THERE IS WORLD WIDE interest these days in bird flu as there was four years ago of bio-terrorism, each threatening, so health authorities maintained, the deaths of millions of people. Bio terrorism did not come to pass. Neither will bird flu. The only beneficiaries will be the pharmaceutical companies and the authorities who keep their people glued to television sets so that they can do as they like. If a pandemic is threatened, individual countries would have strengthened their health regimen so that it does not spread. They have not done so. The people panic unnecessarily at these health concerns made worse by authorities assuming the worst but doing nothing about it. The people are left with half baked advice on television, radio and newspapers on how to cope with the pandemic should it ever strike. But bird flu has killed less in the whole of Asia these past two years than daily road deaths in the United States. The United States have killed about 100,000 Iraqis deliberately and have lost more than 2,000 in the conflict there. But that does not count in these calculations. Saddam Hussein, we are told, is a evil figure and his people's death is necessary to him out. The only beneficiary of this bird flu scare is the pharmaceutical industry. That stories appear daily of the threatened pandemic. A pharmaceutical product is miraculously found which is out of reach of Asians Africans and Latin Americans. But the pandemic in time will be no more. Another one will take its place, and the pharmaceutical industry laughs all the way to the bank.

But it will be difficult. The journalists are up in arms. They have been fed lies lies during the Bush years. They had written favourable stories to justify the United States going to war in Iraq. They have found too late that the reasons for it are not there. There are no weapons of mass distruction and Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear programme. No one in the main media questioned it; they were in fact cheerleaders for the invasion. Now these journalists are unstuck. And they are mad. The news coverage in the tail end of the Nixon presidency was helped by ubiquitous "Deep Throat"; the reporting now is dictated by the jailing of a New York reporter, Judith Miller. She deserved it for going along with all the Administration's lies. The Bush team allowed her to be jailed, when it became evident that the journalist who broke the CIA scandal got free because he made a deal. Now the journalists want to find out what other stories based on Administration briefings are false. From poodles, they have become barnyard dogs. Journalism schools will get a fillip, as it did after the Watergate scandal. But would it provide a government which does not tell the truth?

The Judith Miller case and the split in Al Qaeda are fair game for the White House spinmeister. It allows people's attention on the war to be forgotten, as it has in the past month. At least in the US newspapers. But the Judith Miller is reported as if it were a First Amendment (of the US constitution) violation, and is reported around the world in that fashion. But it is not. It is a diversion from the main problem. So Saddam Hussein's trial. From early references to him as Milosevic and Mandela, there is now talk of having the trial in another Middle Eastern country. I read this on several newspapers, and saw it on CNN and BBC, that it can only have come from an American government source. It is certainly not true that several journalists in Iraq thought of it at the same time. So, he is going to be a difficult opponent. There are several things wrong with the case. He is charged under a law that did not exist at the time the offences were allegedly committed. The United States thought it would charge him with one "crime" first, and he would collapse, and so the other charges would finish him completely. But the longer the case goes on, as Milosevic's case in the Hague, the more embarassed the West and more energised the Iraqi insurgents. It is victor's justice, however legal the proceedings. The killing of one defence lawyer is to warn the defendants that the victors still hold the trump card.They would like Saddam Hussein to die in the course of the trial for he could bring out Western collusion with him in the 30 years he had been in power. They had lost the propaganda battle here as well.

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.

The reports are for the leaders. In the West, and the Third World. We have quickly learnt to forget that the Western news organisations are all for President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and, lest we forget, Prime Minister John Howard, to go into Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein once and for all. That UK and Australia are US poodles does not matter; the poodle barks louder than the master. So the chancelleries in the US, UK and Australia found reasons to invade Iraq, and it is the news organisations now that is pointing out that the reasons were false or non-existent, for the news organisations are now being questioned why they supported their political masters then. But Iraq is a nuclear-bombed country, and could be just another Lebanon in its politics. But is the Western news organisations interested? It has the South Asian earthquake, the Liberian elections or the former South African president charged for corruption to bother. That is the problem with the Western news organisations. They are as embedded with authority as their Third World counterparts. They have an agenda, like the Third World news organisations. And they are both owned by the corporate organisations or those friendly with those in power. Who is calling in the kettle black? The Pakistan Prime Minister, Mr Shaukat Aziz. complains in BBC to complain of the coverage of the Pakistani suffering in much the same fashion as President Bush complains of the coverage in Iraq. This is made possible by globalisation, it is true, but globalisation also tells us that governments and people are the same all over the world. The people in authority like to hide that while milking for all it is worth by another aspect of people all over the world, the aspect of giving what they can afford, and of governments and people all over the world who are the same.

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.

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.

The spin is that it is a hopeless organisation. It does the Bali bombing so that the United States is off the hook, in the information war, in Iraq. The information war the Western powers led by the United States is waging shows Al Qaeda and its fraternal cousins at par or better. Most of these who receive this information do think, and they are not educated in Western-oriented or Western means of education. What happened in Pakistan, where President Musharaff is with the United States and its war on terror, but not the ordinary man-in-the-street, could happen in Indonesia, where President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his government are being directed to support the West, but the people do not. The more the West tries to get President Yudhoyono on its side, the more Indonesia would turn against the West: a sort of President Musharraf redux. The Muslims around the world are on the opposing side, not just the Arab Muslims, against the United States. It does its information war on the basis that its war on Islamic terror is correct. But its message is to those who support, or made to, and lost to the ordinary Muslim. It is no use telling us of another car bomb in Iraq when Al Jazeera broadcast news giving a different perspective to its viewers. Al Jazeera was planed for the Arab world by Western-trained individuals, and praised by the Western nations for a television station to explain world issues to the Arab street. Not any more. They use Arab sources, and only Western sources if they are relevant. The Western countries believe they are right in what they do, and expect all television stations to carry their message. But Al Jazeera does not, preferring to carry the message of those who are victims of Western aggression. Aggression it is in Iraq. The United States say it is to rid the country of its leader, but the outside world sees it as invasion. The country is worse off now than under Saddam Hussein, and worse, a civil war is in the offing. Iraq under Saddam Hussein could run the country efficiently but it cannot under United States hegemony. I have been to Iraq under Saddam, and I remember walking to my hotel after midnight. It would be foolhardy to do that now. I can be killed by car bombers, thieves, pickpockets, Iraqi or American troops, or by unexplained air strikes.

The war in Iraq has brought Al Qaeda into the country, and all Muslim fighters, most are from the ground, into the country. These people do not read newspapers, listen to pontificating statements on television or read 'think' pieces in the main newspapers in the West. And they do not accept Islam to be what they say it should be. In Arabia, Sunni Islam rules. In Iraq, it does not. The United States invaded Iraq and disbanded the Sunni Muslim from their posts in the government, allegedly for being a Baathist. But the Sunni rule in Iraq was ensured by the British, in a race with France for colonial hegomony in the Middle East. They ruled Iraq for 30 years, and lost out when its Sunni prime minister, dressed in a woman's dress, complete with the hijab, was flayed alive by the crowd in Baghdad when he was caught out. The subsequent rulers were Sunni, of which Saddam Hussein was the latest. In thumbing for Shia religious rule, Britain was dismantling its own creation, and turned, with American help, into a mess. Saddam Hussein was hated in the Middle East, but the ineptitude of the West in Iraq has allowed Saddam to be a Sunni martyr. He knows he will be hanged. But he will be hanged a martyr in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iraq has become an ungovernable country, with the West, particularly the United States, making mistakes that will prove Samuel Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilisations,

Times have changed in the 33 years since President Nixon resigned. President Nixon ended the war in Vietnam but the Watergate caper sunk him. It was a political affair at the top which sank him. President Bush is fighting for his presidency for reasons that had to do with the people. And they have two scores to settle with him: that of sending their sons to Iraq on the dubious anti-Muslim war on terror in Iraq, and of inept handling of Hurricane Katrina. He had projected American superiority a la Hollywood on the rest of the world, but the people who elected him are not happy with having to pay the price. He has got the Sunni Muslims in the Middle East against America, brought religious rivalry in Iraq, supporting Shia Islam against Sunni Islam, in effect supporting a non-Arab ideology in an Arab land. (Iranians are not Årabs.) Saddam Hussein saw the opportunity, and while many in the Middle East hated him in office, he is now the Arab hero. He has agreed to die for Arab Islam, and he wins both ways. If he is convicted and sentenced to death in a country where the American passport holder President Jalabani has publicly stated his abhorence to the death penalty, and said he would ask his vice-president to sign the death warrant. If he is not convicted, or if he is not sentenced to death, he becomes a martyr for the Arab cause. Either way he wins.

The Hindus ended the British empire. The two men credited with ending the British empire are Mangal Pandey, who objected to biting off the lard off British bullets, and paid with his life, and Mahatma Gandhi, a British agent at one time. But he destroyed the British Empire. The Muslims now fight against the American empire. The Americans thought there was no difference in Shia and Sunni Islam in Arab lands. There is. Sunni Islam is dominant in Arab lands, Shia Islam in Iran, which is not an Arab nation. If Saddam Hussein is put on trial, Sunni Muslims all over the middle East will rise in his favour. A death sentence for him, which if not carried out, will evoke victory for Sunni Muslims. Saddam Hussein, a former CIA agent like Osama bin Laden, will be fighting for Arab Islam with his death or with his time in jail. The US have aroused Muslims all over the world, by trying to control the Middle East, and who are now in jihad over the United States. The moderate Islamists in the West and elsewhere will you that it is wrong, but the Muslim street do not read the talking heads or the intellectuals in Islam. What happens in Pakistan is instructive. The government of Parvez Musharaf is with the United States, even helping the US capture Pakistani citizens to Guantanamo prison where they are held without charge and without hope of release. But the people do not agree with their government, and go about calling the US a "satanic" country. The Muslims will be the end of the American empire.

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.

But he is a voice in the wilderness. To change that, he must lead a political party. One senior UMNO leader insists he must return to UMNO if he wants to be prime minister. That he cannot. He is feared and hated in UMNO as Saddam Hussein is in the United States. He has ruled it out. KeADILan remains a small party with internal problems so massive that it exists but barely. Reports persist that when a PAS delegation visited him in Munich after the surgery, he was offered its presidency. It would make sense for him. But some sections of PAS, especially its religious heart, resist it. But neither should or indeed can reject it. It gives Dato' Seri Anwar a formal political base, and PAS a leader who could well turn it around to national victory. UMNO fears an Anwar-led PAS more than he in UMNO. He is about the only man who can bring DAP on one end of the political spectrum and PAS on the other into a workable coalition to meet the UMNO-led BN head on. But that is by no means easy.

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