I refer to PC Wong's letter US-Japan nexus to contain China .

If democratisation is the reason why the US has been militarily intervening in other countries, then it should first send its troops to liberate Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia is not only undemocratic but highly discriminatory against women and non-Muslims.

Saudi Arabia has only recently held very limited municipal elections where no women were allowed to vote and appointed local councillors are still predominant.

Pakistan, where the president came to power through a military coup d'etat and not democratically, is a close US ally. Even now, the US treats the undemocratic Pakistan regime and the democratic government of India without any moral distinction. It sells advanced fighter aircraft to the former thus threatening democratic India's national security.

In fact, if we look back at recent history, the US supported all kinds of corrupt despots in South Korea, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina and Chile. Throughout the 60s and 70s, the almost medieval and close autocracies in the Muslim world were the US' anti-communist allies.

The US was involved in the bloody overthrow of the democratically-elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1973 causing untold suffering to thousands of Chileans under the pro-US dictatorship of General Augustus Pinochet. Spain's former dictator General Francisco Franco Bahamonde's anti-democratic regime survived from 1936 to 1976 without any complaint from the US.

It is also on public record that the US had been supportive of the white supremacists' apartheid regime in South Africa.

Has the United States ever called for the abolition of Malaysia's Internal Security Act, Official Secret Act, Universities and University Colleges Act and Printing Presses and Publications Act? Never. It only criticises the abuses of these repressive laws, not their very existence.

Also on public record is that Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime were once America's close ally in their murderous war against Iran between 1980-1988. The US dumped and vilified Saddam only because he was silly enough to assume that the US would gratefully reward an ally with oil interests in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region. Foolish man.

To recall all these cases is not suggest that democracy is not to be protected and advanced. The point to question is whether the US is truly committed to democracy and human rights.

These rights must include the right of the ordinary people of the Third World not to be politically ruled by US-backed tyrants, dictators and autocrats. Neither are they to be economically exploited by American multinational companies whether oil or banana or arms - whose only concern is profit, not the lives of simple and decent human beings outside the US.