THE WAR ON TERROR, as dictated by the United States, is fast becoming one in Malaysia, as it already is in many countries with fealty to Washington. This is adopted to keep the opposition away from politics, but all it has done is to keep it alive. In Indonesia, this is more widespread than is reported in the news reports, that getting prominence only when this affects the government or foreign countries with an axe to grind, usually and not exclusively Australia. In the process, President Susilo Bambang Yudhyono is seen against the war of terror, the fine elements of which are Washington's, or Australia's dictates. Malaysia has gone wholly with the United States on this, because its largest opposition is Islamic, which it wants to say is pro-war on terror, mainly to blame it Islamically, but gets caught in a bind as the National Front's version of Islam – now Islam Hadhari, but that is under the present prime minister, Pak Lah, only; it was not under the former leader – does not cut much ice in the villages.

By insisting that the Americans and British authorities did the right thing in rescuing Jill Caroll, they have made it difficult for other journalists to be free of kidnappings, and the likelihood of their being killed by their kidnappers. The Christian Science Monitor is after all a corporation, and will pay if one of their officers are kidnapped. Almost all Western newspapers in Iraq belong to corporations, who will pay to get their men free. The talk of ranson being asked for is probably true, as it is of paying it. Other countries pay it. Others are free because ranson was paid. Why not the United States and Europe. Especially when there is a shortage of money in the insurgent groups. The Americans do not know how many of these groups there are. Some are Sunni, some are Shia, some support Saddam Hussein, some are independent, some are for the money. No one has any control over them. If one group which is independent kidnap a Westerner, and threaten to sell them to a murderous group if it does not receive money from the United States, would Washington go on the high horse then?

I find calling its help desk often. I have not been lucky to get the person the first time. Each time, I am left holding the telephone, often for ten minutes or longer, hearing the sickening message that "your call is important to us". and being cut off after some time, this time without any apology or message. I have to call again. I have had been cut off two or three times on occasion. Automation is introduced in Telekoms, as with other Government Linked Companies and government departments to free the telephone operators from having to speak to callers. This is regarded as being modern. Funny, though, I could get who I wanted when in London, Tokyo, Paris, Washington, even Bangor, Maine, even if I did not get to the operator. I shudder these days of having to call Telekom to report the phone out of order, or to get help. I must first make sure I am not going out in the next two hours, and I have time to waste. It is more important to have labour saving devices, it seems, than find out it if that benefits the public.

THE UNITED STATES IS losing badly in Iraq. It does not release news of any kind from there. In the past, before the reality struck in, one could not escape from Iraq, which it saw as evidence it is winning, whatever that means, the war. The government there is bothered about bird flu, as if that is the most important thing amid the mayhem the US has caused, is causing, in that country since it invaded it in 2003. The citizens have become the insurgents, and more join them daily as they see their life more hopeless day by day. There is the occasional talk from Washington of cutting down troops, but the aim of the invasion, based on false reasons like Iraq's nuclear capabilities, was to set up a permanent base in the Middle Eat in Iraq. That alone will make sure the continued insurgency. The Sunnis, in power since 1920, accepts that it will never rule Iraq again, so it will destroy the country, probably more viciously, than the US armed forces have done.

In this age of instant communication and 24-hour television, the British cabinet ministers read about them in the Guardian, which published extracts of Sir Charles' memoir. It was only after the publication, that the contents annoyed the politicians. Journalists have fanned the fire. The politicians fell for it. It is now a battle of wits between a fading Labour government and the civil service. The anger with which the memoirs are blamed for affecting foreign policy is a reflection of the uselessness of some Labour Party ministers. But this would not be the last. When the public is brought into the picture with inside events of the past, they have got a liking for it. They are given it than be told the rationale behind a given policy. It also allows the writer to make money and the reader to be vicariously. This is allowed, though only after vetting. The furore over this memoir should be directed to the committee which allowed it for publication. It looks whether it would damage Britain's policy elsewhere. That it would not is clear. The politicians are notoriously thin-skinned. They do not like to be labelled as 'pygmies' or tounge-tied in Washington. The memoir had nothing to do with foreign policy that would damage Britain.

The United States had the information war in its favour in Vietnam in the early stages. But it was the Vietcong and Vietminh who won. There was also discussion in Washington over whether the Vietminh controlled the Vietcong. It did not matter. Both were on the same side fighting the Americans and their cohorts. It was the only fight by proxies when the two giants of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, got involved in a fight. But the United States was not satisfied with proxy fighting, it wanted to, and got involved, in the fighting. South Vietnam was lost to North Vietnam. The Americans claim they won because they do business with Vietnam. But if business was the aim, they could have done it without losing a war. They have treated the war in Afghanistan as another war on terror. But it is bogged down there, as the Soviet Union was and the British before that. They happen to be Muslims, and so it is a war of terror. Whatever it says, it is bogged down in Afghanistan. To leave would be as dangerous as staying. The advisers in Washington have seen Iraq as similar to Afghanistan because Islam is the dominant religion. But as the Pakistani civil servant would tell you, it cannot rule the North West Frontier and the remote areas it look when it set the line of control in the dispute over Kashmir. There are periods when a strong government in Islamabad can estabish control in these areas, as President Ayub Khan, himself a Pathan from the North West Frontier, could. The Pathans have ruled in Afghanistan for about 150 years, and there is relative calm now because a Pathan is the West's blued eye boy President. But he still cannot leave his official residence without an escort, or leave Kabul by road. The Pathans – the Taliban (literally, the student) are from this group – will be an opposition if any group that it likes comes into power. The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan because the people it disliked, who were traditionally gardeners and cooks, came to power. Hamid Karzai is not only a Pathan, but from the ruling class, of the Populzai tribe. The United States probably did not chose him for his tribal connections, but the country is peaceful for who he is.

These corporations in the United States go along with the journalists now in attacking the government for they need them to retain their "independence". President Bush is alone as his officials are attacked, for their wrongdoing and by the press, and he can do nothing about it. His own supporters follow the press, and even attack him. His administration makes mistakes, which the press in anger writes about. In the past, they did not for they were in bed together. The Watergate scandal was dismissed as a police story by reporters in the White House in much the way as Mrs Sheehan is dismissed now. The attack is more vicious now, because joining the reporters is their owner, a commercial corporation. The Emporia Gazette, in Kansas, was read eagerly in Washington in the 1930s, but it was owned by one man in a rural community, and official Washington read it, as the next best thing to find out what happened in the rural community. It is now part of a chain, and it carries the same editorial and columns as the urban paper in the chain. But would the removal of President Bush makes any difference? I do not think so. The corporations, and the journalists, having played their role in the "freedom of the Press", would go back to the role they play best: as handmaidens to authority and power. Things will not change in the United States just because a president resigns. Which he would once it is clear to him, as it was to Richard Nixon, that he would face an impeachment.

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.

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 war cries from Washington and London does not carry weight these days. The occupation of Iraq is a disaster. British carved Iraq out of the Ottoman Empire, and ruled through its cronies, till from the early 1920s until the then British-lodged Prime Minister, Nurul Said Pasha, had run away in a woman's dress, and was flayed alive by the people. The people in Whitehall did not know their history as to why Iraq was structured the way it has been. The British were trying to outdo the French, its colonial rivals then, which had already carved Lebanon and Syria from the Ottoman Empire. While the leadership in Syria was Aluwait, the majority was Sunni Muslim. In Lebanon, a concord was reached by the French in the 1940s, by which the president was Maronite Christian, the chairman of the National Legislative Assembly was Sunni Muslim, and the Prime Minister a Shia Muslim. It was British power play that gave the Sunni Arabs power for reasons that had to do with currying favour with the majority Sunni Muslims in Arabia. The United States, with British help, is now trying to reverse this. Britain does not have the power it once had. None of the British territories in the Middle East joined the Commonwealth of Nations, and there are more nations outside the Commonwealth than in. Those in are led by British educated locals, and today, the Commonwealth is not what it used to be. While the British civil servant was better Arab-educated, the Arab Muslim did not prefer to be British-instructed.

THE 30 JANUARY ELECTION is not what is made out. It is not so Washington could leave Iraq in safe hands. It is not to usher representative democracy in Iraq. It is not to prove democracy is inherently superior to dictatorship. It is not so Iraqis can order their lives in conditions better than President Saddam Hussein could ever provide. It is not so the united Iraq under American stewardship would be stronger and everlasting than under Baathist rule. It is not so an Iraqi in a democracy could live his life better than he could in a dictatorship. It is not to elect leaders who would rebuild what Washington destroyed to destroy Saddam. It is not to end the total terror which the terrorists and renegades inflicts as thoroughly as Washington on the Iraqi. Nor is it to prove that Islam is terror incarnate if Washington so decides. But what the 21st century's Anglo-Saxon Don Quixote, known the world over as President George W. Bush, and his side-kick, Sancho Pancho, British prime minister Tony Blair, wants for Iraq.

In Vietnam, the backdrop was the Cold War, a proxy war between the free world and communism; in Iraq, of Islam and Christianity; in both, each sure of his singular righteousness. It does not stop here. Both wars began on false premises, and brought to a stalemate with only one credible aim: how Washington could extricate from the mess with a semblance of honour.

THE UNITED STATES IS in a quagmire in Iraq, as in Vietnam four decades earlier; the lessons unlearnt, mistakes afresh, its amoral rectitude hurtling it to doom. It fights in Iraq, as in Vietnam, an unseen enemy, whose numbers rise by the day with every indiscrimate bombing of innocent and helpless Iraqi men, women and children. Like in Vietnam, a civilisation three millennia younger than Iraq, Washington went to war on a lie: in Vietnam, an attack on a US patrol boat in the Gulf of Tonkin; in Iraq weapons of mass destruction. But by the time it was discovered, the war had solidified against the unseen enemy. Nothing could now stop it, political careers depended on it; but as American casualties mounted, and more young men sent as cannon fodder, the public reception to the war changed to outright hostility.

THE QUIET JUBILATION IN in Washington at Malaysia's unwise offer to send a 'significant' medical mission to Iraq tells it all. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has firmly joined Washington's tattered, and fraying, coalition of the willing in Iraq when he acceded to President George W. Bush's request. The Asian Wall Street Journal was quick off with an editorial which reflected this change of mood, how a recalcitrant Malaysia under the former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is not under his successor, and how that bodes well.

MALAYSIA IS BEHOLDEN TO the United States more than ever. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, after a call on President George W. Bush in Washington, announces a "sufficiently big and not just a token" medical mission to Iraq. But in Paris en route to London shortly after the Philippines Government withdrew its token medical presence from its armed forces in Iraq in exchange for a Filipino truck driver it held hostage and threatened to decapitate.

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, should be lord of all he surveys: his National Front (BN) coalition is returned to office with 90 per cent of constituencies, unseated one state of two in opposition hands, in the March general elections; he is returned as UMNO president, with a near perfect 99.99 per cent of nominations. Now, in Washington, he charms President Bush and tells him a thing or two about global and Middle East realities.

WHEN THE UNITED STATES adopted, in the wake of the jet plane attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on Sept 11, 2001, detentions without trial for those suspected of terrorist attacks, the then Malaysian prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, was ecstatic.

When you look at it closely, the presidential elections in Zimbabwe and the United States, which returned President Robert Mugabe and President Bush to office, were flawed. Both should not have been elected. But in the globalisation remake, President Bush is elected without question, but not President Mugabe. Washington which insists on elections as a panacea for systemic failures takes the view that if the people vote, all will be well. All it has to show for its belief is a litany of failed states that cannot survive except with Western handouts in which the greater danger is the systemic destruction of its cultural values.

The US has lost its legitimacy, its move forward from now on is downhill, but the end is by no means near; it could drag on for a decade and more. The best it can hope is a stalemate, but at an unacceptable cost. The release of photographs of US soldiers abusing Iraq prisoners only showed Washington's proconsul's contempt for them matches that of their own dictators and rulers. It is, like My Lai, an incident amongst many of the atrocities of the invader, which causes Arab anger only so it could add to the growing American anger. In other words, incidents like these are to be expected.

THE UNREST IN THE four Malay Muslim provinces of Southern Thailand, simmering for decades but in earnest since January, was one waiting to happen, with the added complication as a witting pawn in Washington's global war on terror. All the ingredients are there. A restive Malay population historically at odds with Bangkok and with close familial, racial and religious links to its neighbours to the south, in a poor south-east corner of Thailand that now faces the prospect of offshore oil and gas discoveries bringing new found wealth and encouraging a fresh cauldron of irredentist fervour, a renewed interest in Bangkok in keeping it firmly within its borders, and a belief amongst Malaysian hotheads, in the the governing National Front (BN) in Kuala Lumpur, and the Opposition Parti Islam Malaysia (PAS), of backing the irredentism. But Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok ignores a more powerful nationalist element, that the four states of Pattani, Yala, Songkhla and Narathiwat would want be independent, and which it can sustain with the expected oil and gas discoveries in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea.

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