At first it seemed to me that ex-premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad coming down like a Tun of bricks last year on his successor and former allies in Umno, while setting up his Perdana Global Peace Organisation to outlaw war, were somewhat contradictory concepts.

But now I see my error.

The old warrior was and is simply behaving his old belligerent self and still, in his customary take-no-prisoners style, attacking everyone and everything he's peaced-off with, including war itself and those whom he somewhat selectively categorises as war criminals.

Now that he's reached an age at which he must be acutely aware that he hasn't the time or strength to fight forever, and each battle could well be his last, he's more determined than ever to go out in a blaze of gory glory.

But unfortunately, if predictably, his campaign against world leaders he accuses of having blood on their hands appears as self-serving and two-faced as almost every other aspect of his long and combative career.

As is aptly symbolised by his principal pre-mortem monument to himself, the Petronas Twin Towers, he has been a figure of towering duality and duplicity. A mighty force for both good and bad, right and wrong, unity and division, truth and lies, and almost any other pair of polar opposites it's possible to think of.

He's been a double-edged sword - or keris , if you prefer - cutting both ways with equal effectiveness. For example, he provided the Malaysian people with First-world infrastructure, or at least the facsimile of one; but at a crippling cost, thanks to the system of sweetheart deals, secret commissions and kickbacks he condoned and even cultivated.

He self-righteously posed as the economic, social and political messiah of Malaysia; at the same time, mercilessly attacking and inflicting crippling injury on the nation's most precious institutions like legitimate protest, freedom of expression and independence of the judiciary.

He 'saved' Malaysia from the East Asian financial crisis - and himself from revolt against his personal authority - by sacrificing his deputy Anwar Ibrahim and the hopes of millions of others calling for reformasi of the system of cronyism, corruption and patronage he had allowed to ravage the nation's natural and financial resources from within.

Two-faced attack

Neither his belligerence nor his ambivalence has slackened since he retired. First, he turned his two-faced, forked-tongued style of attack against the very system he helped to create, in the process both damaging his legacy and destroying what remained of his always dubious credibility.

And now he has launched himself as a loose cannon in the noble cause of world peace. Or rather the Nobel cause, as, having achieved, in their turn, the titles Dato' Seri and Tun, he's clearly now gunning for the big one, the Nobel Peace Prize, and has managed to get himself nominated, incredibly enough, by some groups in Bosnia.

Other than clinching him an outside chance at the Nobel, Dr M's latest assault on the world's patience and credulity - the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission - looks like just the first shot in another battle in his career-long war against The West, whose leaders did far more than he ever did about putting a stop to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.

The victims of war on whose behalf he claims to be seeking redress are all, it seems, from places like Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon. And the war criminals he's targeting seem to be largely or even exclusively leaders of the so-called 'coalition of the willing', like George W Bush and Tony Blair.

Far be it from me to deny there could be some justice in this. Especially if the hit-list could be stretched to include one of my own favourite and thus-far unindicted war criminals, the mad bomber of Cambodia and Laos during Nixon's segment of the Vietnam War, Dr Henry Kissinger.

But I also perceive a considerable bias in Dr M's approach, in that the victims he mentions seem invariably to be Muslim and/or Arabs and the criminals, Christian and Jewish Caucasians.

I'll personally take the Perdana Global Peace Foundation a good deal more seriously when it includes the president of Sudan, for example, for his depredations against the people of Darfur, and Dr M's old pal Mugabe, the mugger of his Zimbabwe, among the accused, and starts to show a shred of sympathy for some of the world's numerous non-Muslim casualties.

I think it's also fair and timely to remind Dr M and his fellow pacifist poseurs that it was the US warmongers who liberated Muslim victim Kuwait from Muslim invader Iraq, and who have since, albeit in their typically wasteful, wayward and wrong-headed manner, fought hard with the help of the UK and other nations to free the Muslim people of Iraq and Afghanistan from the murderous tyrannies of Sadaam Hussein and the Taliban.

We should also recall, just as Dr M apparently and conveniently chooses to forget, that back when he was 20 or so years of age, it was the Warmongers of the West who saved him, Malaysia and the rest of the region from a rather bleak future as part of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, by defeating the Japanese war criminals.

But, like journalists so cynical as to follow the sarcastic old rule 'never let the truth spoil a good story', Dr M never lets considerations like truth, reality or integrity get in the way of a self-aggrandising stunt.

So I guess we're stuck with the old warrior's war on war and war criminals as long as he covets a richly-undeserved Nobel Prize and keeps avoiding the fate of other old soldiers.

Which is, of course, as unforgettably expressed in a rock classic by the Rolling Stones, those other veteran campaigners who refuse to let age push them off the stage, to f..f..f..fade away.