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?

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 It has withdrawn USaid from those countries who are not prepared to vote against any attempt to bring the US to the International Criminal Court.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.

The few thousand ringgit promised to the tsunami victims in Kedah and Penang remains unpaid a week after the disaster. Najib Razak was in charge when the tsunami struck, but nothing would move until the prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, returned from holiday overseas. The government would only listen to him. He rushed back. So did the Penang chief minister, Koh Tsu Koon, who arrived in New York for his holiday when the tsunami struck, but only after Abdullah Badawi told him to. The years in office immured him in office from the plight of his people.

Its security was breached – partly, as the official report on the events of 09 September 2001 reveal, because it complacently looked the other way – but the full story remains hidden: How is it possible for some one who attended flying school for the first time commandeer jumbo jets – four were out of an eleven intended, so says the 09/11 official report – breach the tightest official security cordon in the world, veer off course with two crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York, one into the Pentagon in Washington, the fourth crashed (shot down?) before it reached its target believed, then as now, to have been the White House.

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.

THE MALAYSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER, Dato' Seri Syed Hamid Albar, did not mince his words: the CIA director, Mr George Tenet, lied. Malaysia is not part of Pakistan's Dr A.Q. Khan's Islamic nuclear transfer of technology. The company he accused, Scomi Precision Engineering Sdn Bhd (SCOPE), did not know the parts it made for a Dubai-based Sri Lankan businessman, Mr B.S.A. Tahir, could be used for nuclear weapons. SCOPE opened its doors to journalists to prove Mr Tenet lied. It is all above board, you understand. Mr Tahir, signed a long term contract for centrifuge parts. To fulfill it, SCOPE built a factory in Shah Alam in 2001; it is a simple business transaction. It claims it did not inquire what it is used for. Is it as simple as that? SCOMI is in oil and gas exploration. It knows - at least it should - the centrigue is used in oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, nuclear technology. Yet it claims it did not want to know what it would be used for. To prove it, it brought local and foreign reporters to inspect it. The New York Times reporter was so convinced of it that it cleared SCOPE and blamed Mr Tenet. After all, the officials were so helpful. How could such nice people do something as nasty as to be part of a black market in nuclear technology?

A case is built on British and US paranoia, this fear that Islamic militants and rulers they trained and paid to destroy the Soviet Union, could bite the hand that fed them. So Afghanistan is invaded. Iraq is invaded. The Muslim world is thrown awry. Washington and London seek a common link amongst especially Muslim countries who disagree with their plans to control the world and its oil. All it has done is to put all nations it regards as potential enemies at edge and, under pressure, agree with its global agenda; but with a citizenry hostile to the very idea. Neither Washington nor London understand the enemy they fight, but they are sure they can be contained. They believe that their enemies operate as they do, with computer graphs, long-term plans, detailed war plans, contingency planning, when as tribal societies, they dance to a different beat, linked only by a common enemy and sense of injustice, often working independently and without a central direction. When the dust clears, it could well be while Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network took the blame for blowing up the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001, an offshoot planned and executed it independently. But in the Western mind, that is impossible.

News of this sent shivers down the Najib camp. Dato' Seri Najib complained to Dr Mahathir when both were in New York shortly after for the UMNO general assembly. But neither could do anything about it. The Awana meeting showed how divided UMNO is, with neither faction prepared to challenge the other in the open, and revealed only each's uncertainties. On the face of it, Dato' Seri Najib is still ahead if Pak Lah is challenged. Aligned to him are mentris besars Dato' Seri Tajol Rosli Ghazali of Perak, Dato' Seri Ali Rustam of Malacca, Dato' Seri Adnan Yaakob of Pahang; Puteri UMNO; the second finance minister, Dato' Jamaluddin Jarjis; the Trengganu UMNO deputy chief, Dato' Idris Jusoh. UMNO Youth is split in its support, with its head and Dato' Seri Najib's first cousin - their mothers are sisters - Dato' Hishamuddin Hussein, not with him. But he is unsure if this support would remain if, as is the norm, extrajudicial, political threats and worse are brought to bear on them. Dato' Seri Najib realises how vulnerable he is. An unconfirmed rumour mentions politically damaging proof in a CD that could ruin him if he persists in his challenge.

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.

The Anglo-American imperialist adventure in Iraq is no different and suffuced with the same hubris. As Moscow in 1979, Washington in 2003, defied the world to invade a country to show it could. The neoconservative cabal around President George W Bush had been straining at the bit to march into Iraq for months before the aerial attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. And looked for excuses to march in. It defied the United Nations, and its claim of 49 nations backing it must be taken with a pinch of salt: many dare not reveal their support, a few heard of it when they read of it in the newspapers, some of them one would have difficulty of identifying on a map. When all is said and done, it is the United States and its sabaltern, the United Kingdom, that marched in. Nothing one has heard from their operational headquarters in Doha or from the House of Commons in London or the Pentagon says it is anything but.

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.

THE XIII NON-ALIGNED SUMMIT IN KUALA Lumpur opened in good intentions and hope, the 114 heads of government and state present praising and criticising it with equal abandon, but with Iraq and to a lesser extent Palestine taking centre stage, all else was pushed to the sidelines. President Parvez Musharraf made a quixotic attempt to force NAM to focuss on Kashmir, but he clearly spoke to an audience which believes it is best resolved bilaterally between India and Pakistan. Terrorism, especially after the blowing up of the World Trade Centre in New York and the attempt to blow up the Pentagon, got more mention than it would have. Several delegates looked inwards to see how NAM could be strengthened, but the will to do it is not there.

ALL WHO MATTER in this global war on terror are in no doubt that what happens anywhere in the world that smacks, in their view, of Muslim terror must be the handiwork of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaida and his ubiquitous network of dissipated terror. Find a Muslim group that disagrees with Washington's right to damn it, and you have, almost certainly, a ready made terror network with, surprise of surprise, links to Al Qaida. No one know what the Al Qaida is, or what Osama bin Laden is up to, or indeed if he and his network are behind this terror. But it is taken as read that he is, he must be, and since CNN, BBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Times, President Bush, Mr Tony Blair, and the Al Qaida specialist, Dr Rohan Gunaratna, has decreed he and it is, how could it not be true?

In the changed global backdrop of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, every attack, if by a Muslim, is ipso facto connected to bin Laden and his Al-Qaida network. It does not matter if it is or not. Nothing is proven. Nothing need be. But the Big White Chief in Washington has spoken. He is not sure. But he has said it is. That is enough. So, only Islamic terror groups could have hijacked four Boeing 747s and have them crash into New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon; the fourth crashed, or was shot down, before it reached its target. The world is turned upside down. But Washington reacts in fright and impotence, building a case how vicious and dangerous what it created --- Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaida network -- is. It forces the world to accept it, but the Muslim world would not. The rhetoric rises to a shrill, but it remains unconvinced. There is now a perciptible division between the Muslim world and the rest of the world. And if Muslims are involved in a decades old terrotorial dispute, as for instance Kashmir in India, it is pressganged now into this war on terror.

She she threw her weight around, and a tantrum. There is no ifs and buts to it. She does this all the time. This time it landed her in hot water. All her gratuitous statements about how terrible the Australian police at airports compared to New York and Los Angeles comes to naught when the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, and the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, have complained how tetchy American immigration and police can be at airports. She claims she was treated like a terrorist. Her actions, in the profile of policemen all over the world, especially amidst the worldwide madness about terrorism, does make her out to be a terrorist or a drug smuggler. She is not. But the point is: why did she give throw her weight around and a tantrum at people who do not know, or care, who she is? She left a bad taste in the mouth and, if she likes it or not, fit it with a police profile of a terrorist.

In the wake of the Bali bombings, security was tighter that normal, more so with a high profile international meeting. When the police insisted twice more -- once when she was about to get into her car, and another at the hotel where she stayed -- "I got furious and told them if they touched my luggage I will leave immediately" and boycott the WTO meeting. The lady threw a tantrum. And, would you know, they kept her incommunicado in her hotel, and prevented her to shop for gems and jewellery as she is wont to. She implies the Australians are terrible people: "when I was in New York recently, we were not subject to such harrassment."

The Tengku went to London in June, got the shingles, was admitted to the London Clinic. The UN was in session, the future deputy prime minister, Tun Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman, led the Malaysian delegation. The Tengku asked the Malaysian ambassador to the Netherlands, Dato' (as he then was) Philip Kuok, to London to fly to New York to ask Tun Ismail to stop over in London on his way home. He wanted Tun Razak in London immediately. Tan Sri Philip, nearly blind by the 1980s and whose amanuensis I was for his memoirs, said Tun Ismail, a lifelong friend from his schooldays, did not know then why. The Tengku told the Tun to proceed to Singapore forthwith and demand of Mr Lee the agreement of the Singapore cabinet for separation. Since there is no written document of that, it is possible Tan Sri Abdullah refers to a later letter -- after separation was inevitable. By which time it would be too late. In any case, the Tengku, once decided, could not be made to change his mind.

So, there is a link between this feudal prescription for its failings by forcing Malaysians to learn English after forcibly removing it from the curriculum a generation earlier and the PAS penchant for hudud. Fanciful explanations justify both. But punishment and inconvenience dominates both. The hudud laws is in keeping with an extreme form of Islam, the Wahabbi strain of Saudi Arabia. In this battening of the hatches against the infidels, especially in the anti-Islam frenzy after three commercial airlines slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington last September, the Muslims in Malaysia keeps the non-Muslim and non-Malay at bay, in law and practice.

But the more dangerous is how the outside world views us. The speed with which Dr Mahathir's reign dismantled before one's eyes has frightened its financial and fiscal allies. The stock markets tomorrow could well react in shock. If there was any goodwill left in the financial markets overseas -- the first would be the US$3.5 billion bond placement by Petronas in New York -- could the new Malaysian leader, or even Dr Mahathir should he stay against all odds, help or hinder it? The country is run on autopilot since Dr Mahathir's feet was chopped bit by bit after he sacked, humiliated, tried and jailed his putative successor. The biggest problem for the new Prime Minister is how to turn the near stupor government Malaysians have been accustomed to to one which serious acts to stop the rot.

So, military intelligence was involved in this. Buying arms from Latin America and Africa and flown to Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Mindanao. Many army officers were involved in this, many retired early to continue with it. The Philippines government accused one director of military intelligence of involving in the Mindanao imbroglio. To make Malaysia more acceptable to the Middle East, Arabs and Muslims from Africa could come into the country with few checks, and had carte blance to do as they pleased. It made very easy for plotters like those who crashed jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington to gather here. One head of military intelligence, now retired, is said to orchestrate the arms shipments, and remains a special adviser in the government after retirement.

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