He spent 70 minutes harping on Anglo-Saxon perfidy. It was an emotional outpouring of his fear of this Great Demon of his to destroy this country, if not today then tomorrow. The countries of the world are expected to fall in line with this power. If Europe cannot get along with Washington and London and are therefore consigned to the doghouse, why should not Malaysia or Mauretania? His understanding of this is deep, and he believes it. But he cannot get his team to go along. Whatever you might say of President Sukarno, or President Tito, or President Gamel Abdel Nasser or President Kwame Nkrumah, or the Indian prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, they kept the Western powers and the Soviet Union at arms length while they developed at their own pace. But when the Indian deputy prime minister, on a visit to Washington, is prepared to commit an Indian army division to police Iraq, it reveals India's departure from its nationalist and internationalist ideals for an immediate advantage.

If we were to look at every G-8 summit from the first in the mid-1970s, what has it achieved? Originally G-7, it invited Russia to join when the Soviet Union imploded. It was a cosy club of Western industrial powers to which was added Japan, which it not ignore as an industrial power, and Russia, as a political power. Others who should have been there - China, India and Brazil, South Korea, for instance - were not. The G-8 is yet another Caucasian attempt to control the world, the gentle face to their atrocities worldwide - Iraq is only the most ruthless of that G-8 face - which the rest of the world rise up to salute. These talking shops are offshoots of that large talking shop that is the United Nations. Ther is an underlying presumption in these meetings that the rest of the world must kowtow to its agenda.

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.

The Iraqis react, apart from unexpected defiance in the cities along the Anglo-American march to Baghdad, in defiance. They know that in the end the fighting must be in the streets of Baghdad, but without knowing if the country would rise in revolt if Baghdad is seized. If this invading force is stretched thinly, from its support base, there is more trouble ahead. No one wants his country to be invaded, for whatever reason, and would fight to the death to repel the invaders. The US did against the British in 1812. The Soviet Union and Britain did against the Germans. When Pakistan tried to hold on to East Pakistan with force, Bangladesh was the result. And the heavier the bombardment and the siege, the greater the internal unity. Whether the leadership is hated or not is not the central issue any more. Through history, nations would rather be ruled by a cruel, sadistic, blood-thirsty dictator than a benigh foreign rule. And a nation which traces its roots to the city of Ur, which flourished around 8,000 BC, would rise against the invaders with more than nationalist outrage. When the invaders destroys the country in order to save it, the battle is all but lost. And the Anglo-American armada is close to that.

The issue now is not Iraq, the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the global war of terror, nor even regime change. It is colonisation, pure and simple. As skepticism grew of the Bush-Blair plans, and global opposition mounted, the two spinned ever unconvincing reasons why Iraq must be destroyed. Why is not hard to find. The global superpower is unchallenged after the Soviet Union self-destructed in 1989. It is now: the informal and disparate global coalition of individuals and non-governmental groups which confront the US, softly and without weapons. That worked. The US and its 'Coalition of the Willing' is challenged at every turn by this informal global force. The meeting in Azores is its latest humiliation. There would be more.

All agree that NAM is a useful forum for the countries of the South, but it has lost its focus, and is a far cry from what the Bandung conference in 1955 had envisaged. Formed as the middle ground in the Cold War conflict between the US and the Soviet Union, it lost its role when over the years the staunch middle grounders aligned to one or other of the superpowers, and those aligned to either joined NAM, especially after the Cold War ended in 1989. The question of relevance dogs it at every turn. But there is neither the will nor the inclination to right it. NAM now has 116 members, two more were admitted in Kuala Lumpur.

MALAYSIA AS HOST TO THE XIII Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit lost her head in the preparations to it. When the sums are added up, she spent far more than she needed, she could afford, she should have. Kuala Lumpur bent over backwards to put on a grand show to compensate for NAM's soulless image and irrelevance. NAM is not what it was. It does not have a clear focus, represents the poor and wretched nations of the world with no idea what it represents or it hopes to achieve. NAM lost its relevance with the end of the Cold War was over, although by 1989, when the Soviet Union gave up the ghost, NAM was amidst signs of decay and decadence.

But as the leaders faded away, many in coups d'etat, and the countries they inherited often denied of even the basic needs by the former colonial masters -- when President Sekou Toure defied France's attempt to form a commonwealth of its territories, and opted for independence, it left Guinea in high dudgeon, taking everything, even the telephones, desks and tables with them -- -- ethnic and tribal tensions, fanned by the aligned worlds, and newer members joined it, NAM lost its substance and meaning. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1989, what little of that also disappeared. With one global superpower, NAM has no place unless it re-engineers itself into a sounding board for those unhappy with the United States.

During the Cold War, North Korea's awesome industrial potential made it a jewel in the Communist empire in East Asia as East Germany in Europe. The Korean War in the 1950s ended in a stalemate, with more than 100,000 US troops, which arrived there under the aegis of the United Nations, now stationed in the South to contain the North. For five decades Washington placed troops there to forestall North Korea, and in Japan to drive home the point that Tokyo was defeated in war, more to confront the Soviet Union and China, but with the Cold War no more, it was a matter of time before North and South Korea and Japan would shake off the United States. The end of the Cold War hardened the United States' imperial ambitions, but as a new generation of Koreans and Japanese, born after the Second World War and the Korean War, replaced the older generation to demand a voice of their own, Washington did not understand this cultural change and acted as before, if not harsher.

So it did not surprise that even before the huge bomb blast in Bali on 12 October 2002, which killed and wounded 500, mostly Australian, tourists and destroyed the area, it was quickly decided it was the Al Qaida through its alleged local offshoot, the Jemaah Islamiyah. Singapore quickly found local Malay Muslims planning to blow up the US embassy and local government establishments. It even found some of those it arrested to have had links with Al Qaida before it was established. Several had visited Afghanistan and visited Muslim groups there, including one led by Osama bin Laden, at a time when the CIA and other US government agencies funded them to force the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. In Malaysia, the government has arrested several who had studied in Pakistani madrasas. All are linked to the opposition Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS). It has not admitted that the governent, no less, encouraged this study at Pakistan madrasahs to reduce the dependence on those who went to the Middle East to study.

The United States and Australia have no clue about the new terrorist movement that break them into paroxyms of fear and terror, emphasise their impotence with descriptions of how brilliantly its ghostly enemies operate. So successful have they been at it that Mr Osama bin Laden is now proud to be acknowledged the terrorist demon he is depicted as, and that makes more Muslims to rush to join him. Is he alive or is it his ghost we deal with? No one knows. But he has to be kept alive, for it is easier to hate a known charismatic individual than an amorphous body of terrorists led by an unknown. He -- let us take it for granted, for argument, that it is he -- defies the United States and all it stands for more successfully than the Soviet Union and the communist world ever could or did. And gets recruits galore.

The Malays who joined the MCP often did through the organisations they represented. Those who fought, in the 1930s, against British colonialism, opted to back the MCP when it took up arms against Britain. But Kamarulzaman Teh joined it out of personal conviction. In 1946, he wandered into the City Light bookstore in Foch Avenue (now Jalan Chenglock) in Kuala Lumpur, bought a book on the History of the Soviet Union, was so impressed with it and its hopes for energizing the individual Man, that he walked into the offices of the Malayan Communist Party, further down the street, and joined it. There was a brief misguided attempt to suggest he did not, but had instead joined a Malay-based political party which did not exist. But it was out of character. He had had no ties with any purely racial party or association in his life. The MCP was legal then, its leaders marched in the Victory Parade in London, and Chin Peng, its future secretary-general, was awarded the OBE for his exploits during World War Two. Another who marched in that parade and represented the opposite steam was the late Tun Datu Mustapha bin Datu Harun, later Yang Dipertua and chief minister of Sabah, who also got an OBE for his wartime exploits.

In 1944, Stalin moved the Chechens out of Chechnya to other Central Asian republics, only to be allowed to return after President Nikita Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin twelve years later. But the Chechens had never accepted their incorporation into Russia. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1989, the Chechen demand for a state of their own began afresh, which Moscow put down with an iron boot. What happened last week was an extension of their quest for a state of their own. That that move is energised by Islam, and the support they get from it, does not abjure an earlier desire. What Chechnya wants is what, for instance, Aceh, in Indonesia, wants: A state of their own. To diminish it with an irrelevant reference to its religion only makes the intensity of the dispute worse.

The US went to war with terror when it bombed Afghanistan a year ago. It is still there, mired deeply into a quagmire as surely as the British and the Soviet Union before it. The Taliban and Al Qaida remain potent threats to Afghanistan, Pakistan and US interests. The Pakistan elections over the weekend put all three on notice. How else could the strong showing of the fundamentalist Muslim parties be looked at?

The news out of Afghanistan now reminds one of news out of Moscow of its adventure in this blessed land: the supreme confidence and belief it turned the corner enroute to civilisation for these 'barbarians'. But this confidence and belief is inverse to ground reality. The Afghan regards the United States as it once did the Soviet Union and, lest we forget, the United Kingdom: a foreign power who should be made to pay for daring to colonise it. There is, in Afghan eyes, no difference between the Moscow-protected Babrak Karmal or Dr Najibullah and the Washington-protected Hamid Karzai. When Washington recently took over the security of its protege, Mr Karzai, the battle is lost. All Afghans now only need do is to force the United States into a never-ending quagmire, as they Britain during the Great Game in the 19th and 20th centuries. The recent attempt on Mr Karzai's life in Kandahar is but the first salvo. There would be more. And a new enemy. With Mullah Omar and his Taliban disappearing into their tribal heartlands, the new enemy is its old friend, Gulbudeen Hekmatyar, building a new crusade against the new invader.

The original Great Game was between Great Britain and Imperial Russia. Both suffered horrendous casualties -- in one telling example, all that remained of a 16,000 strong convoy of British men, women and children, from Kabul when it reached Jalalabad was one doctor. The Soviet Union moved into Afghanistan in 1979, fought an unwinnable battle to be its Vietnam. Its plan to modernise the state was stopped by a combination of Muslim fundamentalists backed by the United States. The Russians were forced out.

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