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President Bush meets Dr Mahathir: Small talk and global irrelevance

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO" SERI MAHATHIR Mohamed believes his warm pro-forma meeting with President George Bush in Evian this week is sign yet this talk of US-Malaysian ties at a nadir is poppycock. The US ambassador, Mrs Marie Huhtala, described bilateral ties at a "low point" in a remarkably undiplomatic speech at a think tank of which Dr Mahathir"s son is head of. If, for instance, the Singapore high commissioner, had made a speech of that frankness about bilateral ties, he would have been called to Wisma Putra, and UMNO youths would demonstrate outside the high commission, and Malaysian newspapers would lunch on that for weeks. The Prime Minister hopes for a reality that is false to begin with. There is a problem in ties between Washington and Kuala Lumpur. Why it is, is more complex than a handshake could resolve.

Dr Mahathir, like President Bush, assumes his right to be as undiplomatic as he wants to, but is offended when the object of his ire reacts in kind. The US can invade a country on a whim and talk of "regime change" in countries which does not take kindly of Washington"s bull-in-the-china-shop plans to reorder the Middle East in its image. Dr Mahathir can talk as he likes about every other country and leader in the world, but woe betide any who thinks, often these days with some justification, he is mad. Too much is made of that meeting. If the exchanges the Malaysian newspapers carried did happen, it showed nothing of the softening towards Malaysia and him that is reflected here. In meetings and conferences like these, the individual leaders put the spin they like on what happened.

Dr Mahathir was there not as Malaysian leader but as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. But Malaysia and its inward-looking leaders decided he was invited as a person not as head of a movement. If an Asian or Southeast Asian leader was to be, it would have been someone other than him. More important, and this is not mentioned anywhere in the local reporting of the five-minute diversion, that men like him are invited shows how out of touch and irrelevant G-8 has become. Like the South summit he espoused, and is for all we care dead, G-8 is fast irrelevant and awaits burial. The three-day meeting is reduced by half, the focus is restricted, is no more than an opportunity to produce after every meeting irrelevant but well-crafted words of their "concern" for those ills of the world they alone must take the blame. It provides newspaper copy all over the world, but one gets the distinct impression when we read them from different parts of the world that each leader had gone to a different conference than the G-8 at Evian.

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.

What G-8, like the United Nations, should have discussed is the war in Iraq, but both would rather concentrate on the minor issues as its reconstruction, not of how one nation ignored the UN and the world to wage war on another for no reason than that it wanted to remake it in its image, and destroy a government that stood on its independence. Because it is the United States and the United Kingdom that invaded Iraq, it must be right even when it is wrong. Washington is upset Indonesia took that as a cue to force a long standing minority, the Acehnese with a centuries-old grievance, into submission. Like the Kashmir problem, the Acehnese problem is now a terrorist problem.

Where does Dr Mahathir fit into all this? On the outside. He wants no more than be accepted in the West as a Third World leader of substance. so he works his views to be an enfante terrible so that leaders in Western chancelleries look upon as a representative of the other view. One man who did that brilliantly is the Singapore senior minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. There is this inherent belief amongst many non-Europeans of their own inferiority, based on the assumption the West is always right, and our views compared to its, is always wanting. One senior Singapore diplomat even wrote an essay - "Can Asians think?" - to suggest they could not, not in the narrow confines of Western intellectual thought. And any one who cannot is confined to the dung heap of history.

It is this arrogance that is reflected in international conferences like the G-8 and in meetings even as regional as ASEAN. These conferences are in the Western mould, its ASEAN regional forum is so Western ideas of defence could be moulded into a regional perspective. So, in today"s world, the Asian or African is good if he discusses his country"s problems within a Western framework, not in the ideas of the area they come but from developmental models Western institutions have framed in which they are always found wanting. In other words, any Third World nation which has ideas above its station should be destroyed at source. It is not surprising then that Washington targets Iraq, Iran and North Korea: Brazil and Venuezuela in South America: and has the world lapping all it says. They are the rogues who should not be allowed to get more support.

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.

It is this Dr Mahathir should have addressed when he went to hobnob with leaders of the industrialised world. He is articulate in his views, but his views do not address the issues that must. Full texts of his speeches at overseas think tanks published in Malaysian newspapers mean nothing to what he said. Diplomats often cannot contain themselves for some "brilliant insight" in his speeches. But the sum total of what he said means nothing. It is a regurgiation of words that will gladden the minds of a foreign researcher looking for that elusive Asian response and finds it remarkably similar to his.

At the same time, there is no interest in a new view. When President Bush visited the Middle East last week, he was careful to meet only those he could manhandle to push his "vision" to remake the Middle East in the US image. Even the road map to peace between Palestine and Israel is a US-induced piece of diplomatic garbage only guaranteed to ensure the problem is not resolved. I am not surprised Hamas broke off ties with Abu Mazen, the Palestinian prime minister. All this ensures not peace but continued conflict. Neither Palestine nor Israel can allow it to work. No peace process can work if it is imposed as cynically as this Road Map is. Not when the power imposing it misrepresents and terrorises the group whose acceptance is crucial.

Robert Frost wrote, in a poem, that when he reached a fork in the road in the woods, he took the one less travelled. It is only when the less travelled route is taken would results show. Dr Mahathir for all his reputation as a slayer of dragons and fighter of tigers always took the safer, well-travelled path - even his attack of Malaysia"s first prime minister, Tengku Abdul Rahman, that earned him an immediate expulson from UMNO, was so well choreographed so he could not fail - and his meaningless statements these days does not enhance his reputation one bit. He will not admit it, but his deliberate high-profile position in international affair had also to do with his belief that Mr Lee Kuan Yew should not be allowed to hold forth as the only statesman of standing in Southeast Asia. It worked. But what does it prove, when both Mr Lee and Dr Mahathir as different sides of the same coin?

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my