THERE IS MO MISTAKE ABOUT THE Election Commission's impartiality. It is as impartial as the United States' promise of a fair trial for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein if and when they are caught. The EC will deal only with UMNO, not even the National Front (BN), certainly not the non-BN parties. The Opposition parties are there to tell the world Malaysia is democratic and, incidentally, provide post-retirement sinecures for the EC commissioners. In practice it is anything but. Its chairman, Tan Sri Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman, is clear on this: the Constitution does not require neither him nor the EC to be impartial. He is appointed not by the government of the day but by the Yang Dipertuan Agung. It gives him and the EC immunity from mindless attacks from politicians as he goes about ensuring an electoral system the world can be proud of. He cannot be removed from office except by an involved procedure. That is so he could do his duties without fair or favour. He does not believe in that. He has decided, against the weight of constitutional opinion, that he is to serve UMNO. When he defines his role in these contested terms, the gloves are drawn, and he and his commission is fair game for an opposition assault. As now.

We see this now in Iraq. The US views every attack on its forces as the vengeance attack by remnants of Saddam Hussein's forces when it is clear the Iraqis are horrified at the desecration of Islam by the very presence of the soldiers. Add to this the potent belief in Jihad, not as a collective force but as an individual commitment, and the hidden bomb is ready to explode. The West would not understand this. The Judae-Christian Crusade must be won at any cost. If a country has to be destroyed on a belief it had weapons of mass destruction, that is enough grounds even if none is found after the war. The Muslim's rightful place in the Middle East is the hovel as two centuries ago the British decided the Hindu's place in India is the hovel. To succeed the more formidable enemy must be demonised.

It is the same old problem, of which we see a public example this week in Iraq. The US army in Iraq has killed Uday and Usay Hussein, the sons of Saddam Hussein, for the third or fourth time in as many months, and it cannot convince the Iraqis that they are finally dead. It is caught in a cultural warp, as the BN in a political warp in Malaysia. It does not matter if you say they are dead, but if I don't accept it, what are you going to do? The BN is as angry as the US in Iraq when it cannot get itself heard among the undergraduates and the young. And there is no serious attempt to resolve it. If the BN, when it went on a progress and development binge, had also understood the offside that could marginalise the people, it would have fared better. This problem is not new. It happens in every third world country when its leaders at some stage in their governance decide the old values are old hat, and want their countries to be a third world edition of the first world. It makes a few rich beyond greed, but the majority would not benefit from that.

Nothing has changed since. I do not believe the official view that it was the Muslims who bombed the Pentagon and destroyed the World Trade Centre. Osama bin Laden is the fall guy here, for he jumped on it to pursue his own agenda, which is to destroy the Saudi and other Muslim governments who do not follow the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam. But the demonisation has begun. So it is in Iraq. Neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein are proved to be dead. Afghanistan and Iraw are in the throes of a guerrilla war that must eventually transcend into a civil war. Imperial proconsuls and their stooges rule, frightened of their shadows and threatening mayhem of their attackers. A sideshow of this is this regional anti-terrorism centre. It can do not but nothing to resolve the fundamental discrepancy between theory and practice in this new Game.

But how would this be viewed by the Malay hinterland? My first reaction, listening to his speech and reading the translation of it, was of a churlish man leaving office with an incoherent mishmash of vacuous thoughts that he should have kept to himself. That could not be more misleading. That would be to misread him. He finds, as he winds down, he is in the same boat as President Sukarno, President Saddam Hussein, the Myanmar junta, the North Korean regime, and of what could happen to Malaysia if he misjudged the Anglo-Saxon mood. It is in the nature of Western colonialist practice that those not of the Caucasian race are better off as hewers of wood and carriers of water, with no right to rise above their station, and be grateful for their poverty-stricken existence. That has not changed in 500 years.

If anything undermined Western confidence in the past two decades, it is the Iran revolution, the Afghanistan regime under the Taliban, the Iraq regime under President Saddam Hussein, the isolationist North Korean regime. Add to this the attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in New York, and the rise of virulent Islamic groups, and for the first time in centuries there is a deliberate and systematic challenge to Western hegemony. It is run as a collective hurt, one the West does not understand, and which it insists on cataloguing, often irrelevantly, into easily digestible intellectual pigeonholes. But the United States can forget about pulling its troops in Iraq for, let us say, Christmas, ten years hence. It begins to make the mistakes it made aplenty in Vietnam. It does not begin to understand what makes Iraq tick, that democracy cannot be imposed in chaos. Afghanistan, for all its hype, is led by an American citizen and forced upon the people. So would Iraq if the Pentagon had its way.

He has, let us not assume it does not exist, this constant fear now that he would be called to account for his excesses, as other leaders around the world have. The Marcoses, the Suhartos, the Saddam Husseins, the Richard Nixons were all called to account by their people after they left, or were forced out, of office. And made to pay for their acts of ommission and commission. His great friend, Mr Robert Mugabe, is under threat. With the Malay community so divided in a rift for which he must take responsibility, the more extreme proponents want him to be held to account for what he did. I argue with some of the more hothead of Malays that we elected Dr Mahathir in power, he is our Prime Minister, we did nothing about the excesses at the time, and the office too important to be damaged by such intemperate action. Indonesia understands this, which is why President Suharto is not held to account, for that would diminish the presidency, but those around him do not have immunity. Even his sons are in jail.

IN THIS COLONIAL WAR the United States fought in Iraq, invading it to rearrange the political map of the Middle East, Washington presumed that only one worldview is accepted: its own. It would not allow any opposition, amongst its citizens or international bodies like the United Nations, not for the weapons of mass destruction it claimed Iraq had, but to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime. The United States has a long history of destroying its clients when they get to act independently of Washington's dictates. And Saddam Hussein was once a client, as Osama bin Laden was, and many a third world dictator it now finds would not continue to dance to its tune.

THE SOVIET UNION TOOK TWO MONTHS TO seize Kabul in Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 and a decade to withdraw in ignominy. It ruled by the sword to subdue a proud race only too quick to defend their tribal allegiances and foreign invasions in the best way they knew: by spreading fear into the hearts of the invaders. Aside from the usual ambushes and harrassment in a country well suited for guerilla war, they seized young largely Central Asian recruits of the Soviet invasion force, buggered them and sent them back, with or without their throats slit. One ambassador in Tashkent said this more than military defeats or bombed airports ensured the end. The United States rushed to arm the very people it now fights again, created a rag tag army of Islamic fighters, mostly of Middle Eastern descent which now targets Washington's imperial agenda. This is not unusual: President Saddam Hussein, Colonel Muammar Ghadhafi, Osama bin Laden were all creatures of the CIA, whom Washington used when it served its prupose and discarded when it did not.

There is another. Pope Urban in 1069 planned for the destruction of the growing Muslim power as President Bush in 2003. Both viewed it as an opportunity to stop the unstoppable: the growing power of Islam. The Crusades Pope Urban unleashed is now in another name by another leader who believes he has God on his side. Both faced an enemy born in Tikrit: Saladdin and Saddam Hussein. And victory, for President Bush, is as problematic as for Pope Urban. Few in Iraq or the Middle East have any illusions why the Anglo-American coalition of the willing to be bought and corrupted must be in Baghdad. The two most sophisticated, and westernised, of Middle Eastern Muslim states, are Lebanon and Iraq. Lebanon in the 1980s and Iraq in 2000 were also hotbeds of anti-Israel extremism, and the Anglo-American blitzkreiging into Iraq in 2003 is as blighted as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It took Israel 18 years for Israel to disengage from Lebanon. It would take as long, if not longer, for the Anglo-American invaders. It does not matter now if President Saddam Hussein survives or not.

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN COALITION DEFIED THE UNITED Nations to lay waste Iraq, had no qualms of how right it is, was sure the Shias in the south and the Kurds in the North would welcome them as liberators, but seven days into the war cannot even capture small towns without heavy losses. More than a hundred soldiers have died, half a dozen captured, several missing and hundreds wounded in a reaction that shocked it. The US and UK had stepped up the propaganda months earlier, about the new Hitler in the block, how dowtrodden and fearful his people were, how they could not wait for an Anglo-American force, with or without United Nations support, to destroy the leaders, and how the Iraqis would come out to greet them as liberators and join them to defeat the hated dictator in Baghdad. So widespread was this believed by President George W. Bush and the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, that President Saddam Hussein was told bluntly he had better disappear if he valued his life. The propaganda ratcheted to a crescendo that when the bombing started, and the war began, the liberators found their way blocked by the very Iraqis they had come to liberate.

WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THE JUST-CONCLUDED XIII NAM Summit? Let us forget the predictable view that it went smoothly, the clockwork precision of the conference, the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed's brilliant handling of it, how the world is about to lose a statesman of undoubted presence, the gathering irrelevance of yet another talking shop, the media falling over each other to tell the world how parochial it is, the tightest security arrangements for a conference in Kuala Lumpur in a long time. Malaysia, as host, moved heaven and earth so all would go smoothly but unconcerned about the issues. Jordan was to be host but begged off amidst Israel's bloody occupation of Palestine and the Anglo-American push to destroy President Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Malaysia stepped in, spent RM1 billion it could ill afford and as if there is no tomorrow.

But no thought to the annihilation Baghdad faces. A distinction is made between President Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people. A cause is built on dodgy statistics and cribbed material from a failed doctoral thesis. He is demonised, and the world decides he is evil. What is frightening about the NAM approach is that Presiden George W. Bush's raison d'etre to destroy President Saddam Hussein is implicity accepted without question. Washington would not, in its single-minded march to war, even allow its allies to challenge or question its intentions. And we are impliedly told that if we do not back Washington we back Iraq and President Saddam. No shades of grey is allowed. Its Western enemies of the moment are France, Germany and Belgium over their NATO vetoes over Turkey. They are in general agreement that President Saddam must be reined in, but that is not enough. So is it any wonder, NAM took the easy way out? The only hope to stave off war is a French veto, and that looks less certain now.

It does not matter now if the offending letter is seditious or if malaysiakini is guilty as charged. As President Bush would tell you ad nauseum that President Saddam Hussein is guilty as charged, so the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. It is the demonisation which both think is needed for the world to accept what is demanded of it: Saddam Hussein is an evil man, and malaysiakini is anti-national and both must be destroyed. The two men have a common hidden agenda: how to stave of internal dissension and possible electoral defeat in the elections to come. One with forethought and the other without and both fell into traps of its own making. And both will have much difficulty to extricate from the mess they created.

So when the former chief minister of Sabah, Dato' Seri Salleh Tun Said Keruak, returns as a member of a Malaysian delegation to Iraq, he cannot contain his pride that Iraqi leaders have a high regard for Dr Mahathir and his sensitivity and sense in articulating world problems and conflicts without fear or favour. The Iraqi leaders thanked the Malaysian delegation for visiting Iraq "during the present period of uncertainty". But the Malaysian delegation did not, it would appear, bother to find out more about "this period of uncertainty". Leading it was the information minister and UMNO secretary-general, Tan Sri Khalil Yaakob, and they called on President Saddam Hussein, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadhan and Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz.

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