I read Dr Chandra Muzaffar's opinion piece, 'Anwar and the IMF' with great interest and sadness.

While I still read Dr Chandra for his command of Bahasa Malaysia and English as well as analytical skills, I must say that his reasoning on international affairs often end up with extreme conclusions based on passion-inflaming conspiracy theories which border on a delusion of persecution.

Is IMF a "covert arm" of the US Treasury ? If it is, why don't Malaysia withdraw from it? Why do communist and former communist countries like China are still members of the IMF? Why does Dr Mahathir seem to enjoy being praised by IMF ( and for that matter, Western media and Western leaders)?

One limitation of such pseudo-leftist analysis is that it often serves to justify and legitimise tyrannies and unproductive waste of resources within Third World countries by Third World despots.

It is alone this line of unthinking and fixed anti-US reasoning that Dr Chandra has been supporting the Saddam Hussein regime in the name of 'peace' even though thousands of Kurds, Shittes and Kuwaitis were evidently massacred and gassed by the Baathist tyranny.

I have had enough of such pseudo-leftist hypocrisy.