There is a whole world of advantage to be gained by training with United States troops; their experience on the battle fronts would certainly influence their military doctrines and exercises; Malaysian defense forces would gain just by observing them in action, what more participating in a joint exercise without ever having to set foot in a battlefield.

Even the US is still learning, as evidenced by the Somalia debacle. The Thai, Philipine and Singapore armed forces are recognising this - S'pore and Thailand have just concluded military exercises with the US.

The well-written piece criticising a jingoistic attitude of Harakah published in The Sun a few days ago by ADD magazine people captured my (and I am sure those of many others) sentiments well.

The threat of covert intelligence gathering by the US is ever present. Not much that the government could do. I don't think playing bumper-cars China style is on the cards, if they decide to send their electronic snoops this way. And I certainly don't think Malaysia is on the US' radar screens anyway.

If the US/USSR/China (and soon India) sends nuclear submarines to transit the straits, what do you think the Malaysian on Indonesian government is going to do? The Zopfan is practically an unappreciated joke. They're not laughing at it, but nobody takes it seriously.

Nuclear capable vessels ply the straits and will continue to do so. A few diplomatic noises and that's as far as it goes. It is about as predictable as Snow White, except that this is not fairy tale, but supposedly an Asean commitment.

Anyway I thought that the piece in Harakah was over-dramatic. There are many segments of society (not necessarily confined to Muslims) who would like to see a shift in US policy towards, say Iraq and the issue of a Palestinian homeland. Many Muslims (even in Saudi Arabia) oppose the setting up of US bases in Saudi Arabia.

But in my opinion, those are distinctly separate issues from having joint military exercises and should be treated as such. After all, China supported our communist insurgency, yet we are all for closer in economic and political ties nowadays, to a point.

The only motivation that I could make out so far in Harakah's shrill denunciation of the US troops' presence would be as a riposte to the"foreign interference" bogeyman raised by the PM when PAS MPs made a courtesy call on Alex Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister during a visit Down Under.

Mahathir accused the PAS President Fadzil Noor of having a colonial mentality. Somehow, this comment insulting both PAS and the Australian government escaped the attention of many commentators, the abovementioned ADD magazine included.

Various defence arrangements with Australia including the presence of Raaf planes that include F-111 nuclear capable bombers and F/A-18 fighter aircraft are studiously ignored for reasons best known to those concerned. As with politics, scoring political points was paramount.

Yet somehow, this omission fits perfectly in the scheme of things that is Malaysian politics. The feeling is that we'll be seeing many more installments of such tit for tat sandiwara in the coming months. BN has fired another salvo - the banning of political ceramah. Stay tuned.