In a front-page press coverage, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said at the opening of the inaugural Non-Aligned Movement Business Forum that the imminent attack o­n Iraq was evidence of a war being waged by the West against Muslims. Evidence of this was US failure so far to act against North Korea, notwithstanding it being labeled as o­ne of Bush's 'axis of evil' and its admission to possessing weapons of mass destruction.

According to DAP chairperson Lim Kit Siang however, "Mahathir's description of the impending US attack o­n Iraq as evidence of a war being waged by the West against Muslims has upset non-Muslim Malaysians who strongly oppose any US-led unilateral war against Iraq, not because it is a war against Muslims but a threat to international law and order by a hegemonic hyperpower

defying international public opinion and United Nations Security Council by unilaterally going to war against Iraq" ( Media statement

of Feb 24).

This, I may add, is the position of not o­nly many Malaysians and malaysiakini readers, but Russia and others in the "West" including France and Germany, opposed to the Anglo Saxon coalition of US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Mahathir's position is therefore not 100 percent correct. It is not the "West" campaigning for the Iraq war, the "West" being too nebulous a term including most developed nations in Europe, but more specifically the Anglo Saxon coalition led by the US.

The Anglo Saxon coalition that has won two world wars of the last century, has a vested interest in the post-wars global order dominated not o­nly by Anglo Saxon superior weapons of war but also its values of globalisation, free market and capitalism, secular state, English language, sexual equal rights, modernity, civil liberties, Hollywood, McDonald's and the rest. I group this for convenience collectively under an ideology called western universalism.

The dominance of western universalism of the global order is the spoils of Anglo Saxon victory after spilling much blood in wars of century last.

Against the backdrop of the above, America being superpower has two other more specific designs.

The first is geopolitical - maintenance of the position of US' Arab allies (for example, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) and their oil supplies from the grasp of expansionist Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

The second design is to curb and contain by war - not Muslims or Islam per se as Mahathir said but a phenomenon, in the Pentagon's lexicon, called political Islam which in Pentagon's assessment is inimical and opposed to the world order dominated by the so-called western universalism US-led Anglo Saxon dominance.

To the US, it is not Islam the universal religion of peace that is a problem. But the problem lies in the case of (say) Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda that give (some say hijack) Islam an expansionist political imprint that results in this ideology which, to the Americans, is called political Islam.

This ideology has little to do with the religion of Islam or with the history of the related civilisation, for political Islam is not a religious belief but rather a political ideology, which capitalises o­n religion and is both anti-Western and anti-secular. It lays claim to establishing a new world order being an alternative to the prevailing o­ne designed by western and more particularly Anglo Saxon norms and values.

As Dr Farish Noor said in The Gulf War re-visited

, the Gulf War in which US-led coalition championed the cause of the Muslim state of Kuwait from invasion of another Muslim dominated state has (with all the missiles and bombs flying against a helpless muslim populace) generated further ill-will and ironically left a 'Saddam Hussein legacy' now mixed with the thriving politicisation of religion resulting in political Islam.

In the Middle East itself, religious fundamentalism is the greatest destabilising challenge to the existing order of nation-states in the region in which US and Western powers have vested interest.

To the US, the ideology of the 'Islamic state' espoused by Osama who now openly supports Saddam in his impending travails, is the framework for the de-legitimisation of the existing Muslim states with US and western bias in the Middle East as well as other Muslim states worldwide (as the case of say Malaysia and Indonesia) that properly interpret Islam as being compatible with 'western' universalism and thus draws clear lines between Islam, as a religion, and, in the US - as well as Mahathir's view - the abuse of this very religion for developing an ideology named political Islam.

Left alone for two decades to quietly expand (since the Iranian Revolution that ousted the Shah) the ideology of political Islam started by and now exacerbated by the "Saddam Hussein legacy" has galvanised sufficient educated followers that eventually led to an attack by suicide planes at the heart of US power structure - the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon, and even the White House (had the other plane not crashed). To the US then it is an issue of national security - and self defence - that has to be addressed.

Forward defence involves first the Taliban-dominated Afghanistan. But why Saddam Hussein's Iraq next? Where lies the symbolism to make it - and Iran - two of the three in Bush's "axis of evil"?

Why does our prime minister say, and correctly, that Syria is next o­n the hit list?

It is more than just issues of oil, US pax-Americana and the need to feed its military industrial complex and war economy.

It is the global battle - not between western and Islamic civilisations as Samuel Huntington of Clash of Civilzations would have it - but o­ne of two fundamentalist ideologies, that of fundamentalist western universalism led by US against a political ideology named political Islam (of which BN here accuses PAS of being adherent to) that rejects western universalism in toto.

Thus the clash here is not between western and Islamic civilisations; it is not a clash between Christianity and Islam.

The first salvos were fired at the Taliban, the next, rightly or wrongly Saddam, then maybe Syria and Iran to follow - all under the banner of "terrorism" that is hoped will deflect over a billion Muslims in the world from misconstruing that it is campaign against religion itself.

Ironically it is because of this "camouflage" of real intentions that makes US geopolitical policies ambivalent to others. It is this reluctance to trammel o­n religious sensitivities and fear of being misconstrued that has led to double talk of "war against terrorism" when it is actually a "war against political Islam" as a political ideology that, since the dismantling of the Soviet union and the switch of old adversaries like Russia and Republic of China towards the blandishment of western capitalism, has replaced communism as bogeyman threatening US interest globally.

If a spade has been called a spade, the issues will be less obfuscated to the rest of the world.

As no thinking and sentient human will - as a matter of moral absolutes - support war, it explains why in the face of precisely this US' ambivalence that has lent credence to claims of US hegemony per se vs innocent civilian lives in Iraq, that there is now a strong anti-war protests worldwide and in malaysiakini's forum critical of the o­nline daily's contributors James Wong Wing O­n and Oon Yeoh's drift - nevermind that it also gives a political platform and opportunity to BN to galvanise and tap o­n this groundswell of protest to out-islamise PAS for the next election..

The planners in Pentagon and so-called protectors of American lives and security from the trauma of Sept 11 (of which political Islam and the "Saddam Hussein legacy" are catalyst) do not of course pontificate o­n the ethics of war and loss of lives but realpolitik and national as well as personal self-defence. Pentagon analysts in Virginia cannot be quite sure when the next bomb or planes of bombs will be detonated obliterating not only o­ne wing of their hexagonal building but the entire structure.

In the above sense, the prime minister's statement that the impending war in Iraq is the West against Muslim is not precisely correct (whatever the political advantage there is in espousing such a view).

But the general drift of his view may well be correct if o­ne sharpens the focus of that to mean a US-led Anglo Saxon pre-emptive strike against countries categorised as fermenting and exporting the ideology of political Islam that is inimical to and battles with western universalism and threatens generally the global order dominated by the latter and more specifically the national security of the United States that is symbol and head of western universalism.

No offence is meant in anything said here to anyone but I apologise in advance to all readers who view and dismiss the above as speculative diatribe because, correctly, speculation is what it essentially is, as I certainly have no information leaked by any Deep Throat from the Pentagon.

I just invite you to consider the possibilities and factor these in your vehement and continuing debate for and against the imminent war in Iraq that has far-reaching consequences beyond even American analysts' contemplation.