But the European Union members cannot live without cheap labour from Turkey. It needs Turkey and other Muslim nations to provide that. The most European of the Muslim states in the Middle East is Turkey, and so taking it as a member will solve all its problems. So it thinks. There is much opposition to it in Turkey as there is in Europe. The more historical members of the European Union remember that Turkey came into Europe by conquest, and its entry into the European by invitation would be by peaceful means. But the US wants Turkey in the European Union and the civil code requires Turkey be equally treated as all other European nations. Now that Turkey is rejected, the Turks who have settled in Europe, or those who had gone there in search of jobs, would be the next boiling point. Just as the United States take on the world as its oyster, so does Islam. More trouble is in store. It is already difficult for a citizen of a Muslim country. The United States will end the global war of terror soon for it hurts their institutions which survive on the Muslims. The war on terror is one thing, their institutions another. But having started the war, it cannot end it unilaterally. It has to sign a peace treaty where he must state the reasons for ending it. Islam will then have won again.

There is a lot that can be written about Malaysia's relations with the outside world. And those in the execution can or should write their version of it. These days it is about the pomp and circumstance of the job and little else so that the reader knew little at the beginning as at the end. We do not write books here because it takes a long time, and the returns are often not as much. Money causes many to write books on retirement. So they keep diaries, which are published after they retire. Almost every one in the West keep diaries. There is a restriction on civil servants in most countries, but not as restrictive as it is in Malaysia or Singapore. Reading Malaysian or Singaporean accounts, unless they include their actions against the other or about bilateral spats, makes one feel that all if well and nothing can spoil it. It is much like Iraq after the invasion. The United States and its allies speak as if they are not responsible for the destruction of the land, and operate from their fortress in what is known as the Green Zone. If you believe them, it is a safe place to go to. The secretary-general of the United Nations, after having allowed one of its members to be invaded, now talks of bringing that invaded country into the world. But the UN is the handmaiden of the US. Various figures from the West make a hazardous attempt to come into Baghdad by air, and talk to the press of the improvements made, but the murders, mayhem, and disruption continues. There is no word of that. But this is the report we have come to expect.

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.

AL-QAEDA SUICIDE BOMBERS ARE blamed for bombing three Amman hotels. Abu Musab Al-Zarkawi, who is believed to be dead, is the agent directly responsible, the television news and talk shows try desperately to inform the world that this bombings are the trade mark of Al-Qaeda. There is great effort to blame Al-Qaeda for the bombing although there is no hard evidence. But the United States and others have decided that Al-Qaeda is responsible. And that gets world wide play. But is it? Jordan is a soft target who could cause mayhem in the West's war on terror. Iraq is to the left of it, Syria to the north, Israel to the East. It need not be Al-Qaeda or the believed dead Al-Zarkawi, it could be any of the myriad of countries and organisations that could be responsibe. It could also be the West, which is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which we are told can investigate it, is rushing to Amman to aid the Jordanian authorities. But is the FBI going there as the Australian police authorities are going to Bali to help the Indonesian authorities investigate the bombing in Bali: to remove the evidence of their involvement?

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?

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 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 MALAYSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER, Dato' Syed Hamid Albar, has told Thailand not to interfere in Malaysia's internal affairs. Why he needed to do so escapes me, when he did not interfere when the Thai prime minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, told Pak Lah off at the United Nations last month (September) about the situation in southern Thailand, in Dato' Syed Hamid's presence, and both did not respond. Why? It is no use playing to the gallery because UMNO general assembly is around the corner. For Malaysia's record in southern Thailand, where Thai Malays are fighting for independence from Thailand for more than a century, is based on the belief that Britain in the early years of the 20th century should have insisted on the Thai Malay provinces be given to the Malay peninsula. Malaysia has interfered in south Thailand from the early days of independence. I spoke to the PULO representative in the prime minister's department more than 30 years ago. (PULO is the fighting arm of the Thai Malays in southern Thailand.) Malaysia has internationalised the conflict by bringing in the Muslim nations, and brought in the global war on terror that the United States launched. Mr Thaksin has added the pressure recently and so has PULO. Southern Thailand in the East is not safe for the Malaysian. Recently, southern Thai separatists killed a Thai monk, one of several in recent months, and a friend whose mother is from southern Thailand was trapped for months when he went to visit his relatives across the border. It is unsafe to visit southern Thailand by crossing the Golok River In Kelantan state. This is a stream most of the year, and one can wade across into southern Thailand. It has now become a conflict also between Buddhists and Muslims, a religious war in what has been a territorial dispute.

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.

The US says, in effect, that it alone has the right to kill Iraqis – and 40 years ago, Vietnamese. It was nationalism that defeated them in Vietnam; the war was lost when its chief enemy, Ho Chi Minh, died mid-way through it. As far as the Vietnamese were concerned, the US were fighting a dead man, and could never win. The reaction is different among the US and its foreign troops, on the one hand, and the Vietcong, Vietnam, North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese, on other. Similarly, in Iraq. The information is in the hands of the US, but the war, as in Vietnam, is in the hands of the "enemy". It was nationalism that drove the Vietnam war; it is nationalism and religion that drives the Iraq war. Islam is on the defensive because the West has targetted it as the enemy. Those living in Muslim countries find they are targetted by immigration officers in the West. In Malaysia, the a/l and a/p (for 'son of' and 'daughter of' is removed from the passpost of Indians in Malaysia because computerisation does not allow the back slash in computer searches, and the al that comes out is often viewed by immigration officers as belonging to Arabs. I have been told by immigration officers that 'al Gopal Pillai' is a strange Arab name. It is, for it belongs to an Indian. So I will get my passport with an additional name. But it does not get over the fact that Islam and Muslim countries are targetted. The loss is the West's, as well as the Muslim countries. Schools are closing down in the United States because its embassies are reluctant to give visas to Muslims, and more important, Muslims do not want to go through the hassle of getting a visa. At the personal level, it works both ways. But as Tun Mahathir has put it succinctly elsewhere the West has taken Islam for an enemy.

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.

TUN MAHATHIR GOT IT RIGHT. He did not apportion blame on the Bali bombings to Al Queda or the Jemayah Islamiyah or to other Muslim groups. But the ease with which both these organisations were blamed, and that this has been on the news particularly round-the- clock ever since the bombings last week, and the defensive posture of the Indonesian government followed by the British blaming the Australians for not letting it know of its 'early warning' to Australian revellers in Bali, and the constant berating of those who would listen that Al-Qaeda was involved, suggests something has gone wrong. The Western governments, or its intelligence agencies, are behind it, and keep at it because the people on the ground in Indonesia and elsewhere do not believe the events in Bali last week. The United States (and Australia, among others) created incidents in South Vietnam in the 1960s, blaming it on the Vietcong. There is no unanimity among Western reporters that Al Qaeda was involved, Jason Burke of the Guardian thought that Al Qaeda could not be involved, and the discordant voices in the Western media is matched by the ordinary people around the world, Muslim or otherwise, having doubts on the official story of the Bali bombing.

President Bush's reign should also be the end of America as a great power. President Bush diverted more money to rebuild the south than it has in iraq, which it first destroyed and now tries to wriggle out of rebuilding it. He, as commander in chief, allowed the US armed forces to use Depleted Uranium bullets in Iraq. The US does not announce in advance that its troops are using DU bullets or its navy ships are using nuclear weapons. But it obviously does. It has withdrawn USaid from those countries who are not prepared to vote against any attempt to bring the US to the International Criminal Court. It has signed an agreement with North Korea not to make nuclear weapons in return for American recognition and aid. All the time, US forces in South Korea carry DU bullets and other weapons of mass destruction. It is reverse side of globalisation. There is an assumption that globalisation should only be good. But the good is only for the Western powevers, as China is finding herself. But Osama bin Laden, who may be dead but is kept alive by the United States, and the Arab Muslim revolt in the Middle East is the reverse of globalisation. The US has got countries around the world to decry the Arab nations and Al-Qaeda and the Arab attack on New York. It is President Bush and the Western countries that now shiver in their pants. President Bush had a great role in this. And for which he will rue in his retirement.

Appearing on programmes like Hard Talk is double-edged. Few can come out of it with their dignity intact and reputations burnished. A predecessor to this programme was the "Face to Face" programme, in the early days of television, where prominent people were interviewed by that ogre of television interviews, John Freeman, who went on to be British ambassador to the United States when Harold Wilson led the Labour Party to victory in 1964.

But it reflected the yawning divide between the theory of press freedom and the practice of it. The governments, journalism schools, NGOs and many practitioners opt for the theory to put the practitioners in a strait jacket. Since since they have the upper hand, they have their way. A free press is the last institution anyone in authority and power wants. This is universal. That great bastion of the free press, the United States, denies it in Iraq and elsewhere when it can, with official sanction. It does not matter if the nation is a democracy, dictatorship, theocracy or run by the armed forces: press freedom is defended so long as the media will sing their tune. Shackles are put on the press, ever more so in recent years than in the centuries past. The press, radio and television, by and large, is an appendage of governments or commercial organisations. In Malaysia, every major newspaper, radio, television is controlled either by the government or by the private sector.

Suddenly news of him disappeared. He moved quietly around the world, addressing Malaysian students, world business men and politicians, meeting heads of government in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, the UN secretary-general, Mr Kofi Annan. He spoke of his vision of Malaysia, his prescriptions for the morass Malaysia is in. But there is a blackout about what he does. The Malaysian students department in London was so terrified that it banned students from attending his lectures, but which it could not enforce. He is seen in foreign chancelleries and meets heads of government and others as a more believable leader of Malaysia than BN leaders.

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