The quiet jubilation in Washington at Malaysia's unwise offer to send a "sizeable" medical mission to Iraq tells it all.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi firmly joined Washington's tattered and fraying coalition of the willing in Iraq when he acceded to President George W Bush's request.

The Asian Wall Street Journal was quick off the mark with an editorial which reflected this change of mood, how a recalcitrant Malaysia under former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad is no longer so under his successor, and how that bodes well.

If Washington's rhetoric is to be believed, it is the Iraqis who are in control of Iraq now. This is not true of course. Washington has only allowed the Iraqi government to take the blame and the casualties for the deteriorating security.

So, if Iraq wants a Malaysian medical mission, the request should have come from Baghdad, not Washington. If Malaysia accepts Iraq as an independent country, what it has done is inexplicable. It accepts that Iraq is not independent, yet allows it to open an embassy in Kuala Lumpur.

But we do not have a policy on Iraq or the Middle East. If we have one, it is kept carefully hidden. Parliament has not debated it, as it should have, and the cabinet pronounces policies not after careful thought but to attract universal attention.

Is that how things should be? That foreign policty is made on the run and announced in foreign countries because the prime minister could not say no?

Risky adventure

What is worrying is that it is yet another attempt to grout him as Malaysia's firm leader. The elections the general and Umno - could not, though he was victorious beyond doubt. His concessions in Washington have not either. The political spin suggests otherwise, but he has yet to make a dent as Malaysia's fifth prime minister.

He cannot afford now to see his Iraq promise bite the dust. But could he? Could we, if worse comes to worst, accept as a nation the casualties that must be expected in a risky adventure as this?

In the short term, he is praised, in Washington and London, for this 'statesman-like' change of policy.

The superlatives are brought forth to praise Malaysia for its belief in democracy, its commitment to help Muslim nations in need of assistance, and the idea that it can be relied upon to ameliorate the destruction of ancient Muslim cultures by the West, as is certainly happening in Iraq.

The decision is seen as affirmation of Malaysia's commitment to the ubiquitous war on terror, declared not for its impact on the rest of the world but because Washington was attacked and its security was breached.

As the official report on the events of Sept 11, 2001 reveal, this was because it complacently looked the other way, but the full story remains hidden.

How was it possible for someone who attended flying school for the first time to commandeer four jetliners (out of an 11 intended, so says the report), breach the world's tightest airport security cordon, veer off course and crash into their targets?

The full story is not told yet. But in this West-dominated globalised world, only those who control information can make their voices heard. They decide on the spin, how information is to be released, and the way in which the rest of the world will decide how and why the attack on Washington should be viewed.

To buttress it, Afghanistan was first attacked, then Iraq, with Iran now in the US sights. There is a common link - oil. In Afghanistan, a pipeline is to be installed to carry Central Asian oil to the warm waters of the Arabian sea in Pakistan.

But unlike in past imperial endeavours, where the benign nature of designs puts a gloss on its darker and unmentionable origins, this time there is not only an open challenge to these imperial designs but with a voice that brings the faithful to resist.

The West does not have a monopoly of explaining the issues. In this present confrontation, both the West and the Islamists have access to their respective ground, and the situation worsens because they address their message to mutually contradictory audiences.

This is where countries like Malaysia, where Islam has developed and adapted to local customs and traditions that contrasted with the harsher fundamentalist creed in Arabia, are brought in to justify the Western Islamophobia.

The Barisan Nasional (BN) government in office in Malaysia for 49 years has adapted Islam in the way that Britain has adapted Anglican Christianity as the official religion extruded from the government - the form not the substance, the Islam with which the West is comfortable.

This Islam could not hold. Not when it encouraged the Malays, who by constitutional definition in Malaysia are Muslims, to be more Islamic not because they want to, but to sideline non-Malays from the political spectrum.

But as the political rhetoric within the Malay community came to be dominated by PAS' promise of an Islamic state if and when it attained power in the centre, the BN had to follow suit; otherwise its main political party, Umno, would have lost ground in the Malay heartland, which like it or not is where PAS is strongest politically.

But the BN has had to walk a fine line. It has had to distinguish between Islam hardhari (progressive Islam) and Islam badwi (regressive Islam), and align itself firmly with the former.

PAS had to be damned for its fundamentalist image, its support for Muslim groups in opposition to Western interests; members of those groups such as they exist are placed in detention.

Ransom payment

Mahathir combined it with a hands-off policy towards Washington in its war on terror, demanding answers and assurances that were not forthcoming, tweaking Washington's nose often enough for it to dismiss him an irritant who ought to be turfed out.

Malaysia could well regret Pak Lah's promise to join in the reconstruction of an Iraq which the West destroyed and now wants the Muslim world to reconstruct. The imperial rhetoric has not changed.

It continues to justify what it did, although others who did Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, for instance faced a war crimes tribunal which, lest we forget, Washington insisted upon. But might rules. Its view is only what matters in this global reporting of this civilisational confrontation.

This is why Pak Lah defended the medical mission to Iraq in Paris and his hypersensitivity to an otherwise irrelevant news items in a Filipino newspaper. Irrelevant because when that newspaper asked the Malaysian government for reports that Malaysian parties had paid US$5 million, with another US$1 million from Manila, to the kidnappers of Filipino lorry driver Angelo de la Cruz in Iraq, Kuala Lumpur chose neither to confirm nor deny it. If it was untrue, why was it not denied outright?

Unfortunately we have a record of paying ransom to Muslim rebels and insurgents when they capture Malaysians and foreigners. If it would pay other Muslim insurgents in other countries, then the Malaysian medical mission is doomed before it starts.

Pak Lah understands this only too well. He now says it would be sent only if the situation in Iraq warrants it. There is this persistent belief that Malaysia stepped into the breach the Philippines left when it withdrew its medical unit from Iraq.

That would be a long wait: the insurgency is not about to wind down; the US-appointed government does not control even the Green Zone, let alone Baghdad, and the towns. The insurgents and the criminal gangs control the rest.

The US has given up the trappings but not the reality of civil administration, and remains in charge of military operations. It is into this no-man's land where four groups the US, the powerless civil administration that it appointed, the insurgents and criminal gangs vie for control and power, that Pak Lah has promised to send a medical mission.

This is Pak Lah's dilemma. The realities are not spelt out. It is assumed nothing could go wrong but the reality is something else: if anything can go wrong, it will. We saw a whiff of that when Malaysia sent a contingent of soldiers and policemen to Somalia, and two got killed. The media and government blew it out of proportion. The troops came back.

We got upset when the movie about US misadventures in Somalia was made Black Hawk Down the Malaysian contribution in Somalia did not rate a mention. As usual, it did not understand what that move was about: to glorify the Americans, to justify intervention in a country whose leader it did not like.

Shades of Iraq? Nothing has changed, has it in Washington and in Malaysia?