When a century ago, Chinese agents seized the rebel leader, Sun Yat-sen, as he walked past the Chinese Legation in Portland Place, London, and held him captive in it, he managed to throw a scribbled plea for help on a scrap of paper out of this third floor prison. A priest picked it up, alerted the newspapers, questions asked in the House of Commons, and his arrest soon became a cause celebre.

The legation called a press conference to insist Sun is a prisoner, would be tried in China. This raised the usual questions of that. The head of the legation tetchily replied: "He will get a fair

trial in China. First the trial, then the execution." The British Government stepped in. That saved Sun, who went on to overthrow the monarchy a decade later.

The United States on what to do with Saddam Hussein is no different than China's over Sun. When Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi demands a fair trial for Mr Saddam, he conveniently forgot the injustice meted out to his own Saddam or Sun - the former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim (photo), rotting in jail by the same judicial machinations as the US wants in Iraq and China wanted for Dr Sun.

Sun Yat-sen wanted to overthrow the Chinese Empire. If he had been caught in any other country, even Malaysia, where he lived for years, he would have been sent back to China and certain death. The view of governments at those it want destroyed is: "He is ours. We can do what we like with him. No one should question it. We want him dead. We will decide how. The others should not object. Let us do our dirty work, however messy."

To mollify public opinion, he will face trial in what is a kangaroo court, and convicted. It happened to Anwar. It happened in the victors' courts in Europe and Japan, after World War II. It would

happen now in Iraq. But the US would not have an easy passage. For one, the invasion is illegal, as the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

Same cowardice

If Berlin could be held accountable for that when the tables turned, and its architects hanged in a victors' court, so could Washington. President Bush said on Dec 17 that nothing short of death is good for Saddam. The arguments about the trial reminds me of vultures hovering over a body waiting to pick it clean.

The US wants to go it alone. Its handpicked local government of mostly Iraqi expatriates and those who showed the same cowardice they now accuse Mr Saddam of and fled into exile as they accuse Mr Saddam for not killing himself when cornered. Many of them are US and UK citizens. It has suspended the death penalty but wants it reinstated for Saddam and President Bush's re-election in 2004.

But the vultures must await a while for their ghoulish feast. For the judicial hanging of Saddam would challenge the very notion of Western justice. His crimes are not as straightforward as we are led to believe. Many would come under the doctrine of acts of state, and absolve him.

Others like the Halabja massacre of the Kurds in 1988 or of the Marsh Arabs earlier in the decade had the blessings of both London and Washington. All the weapons of mass destruction, the nerve gas and other biological weapons were sold by Western powers who now blame him

for deploying them, without admitting their role.

Saddam must be dispatched without spilling the beans. Which is why the US would not allow him to be tried before an international court. What he has to say in his defence would not be music to Western chancelleries. So he must be silenced forever without incriminating his former masters. Besides, international law eschews the death penalty.

The US tetchiness at the Arab reaction to the Saddam capture and his humiliation in public ignores the larger impact of the clash of cultures and civilisations that comes when the world is reduced to a pastiche Hollywood village, ignores the strains within to impose on it a monolithic culture and civilisation that is alien.

Okay for others, not Saddam

There is a superficial imposition of it in the "Western culture" that holds sway in most of the world: a society is not deemed "civilised" if the Big Mac is not the food of choice. When the global power comes to a region, say the Middle East, it cannot understand why the natives behave odds, and rush into a conflict it cannot then get out of.

The Saddam episode is one. Like many an autocratic leader, he is everything he is depicted as. His governance clashed with every cannon of civilised behaviour, but he is ruler of a region where this is common place. Why is it then all right for the others to practise what he did, but not for him?

That he is overthrown by a foreign power, and a coalition of stooges installed, and when caught, is humiliated so it arouses Arab anger, and the spontaneous celebration is not in Iraq but in the United States, and that one is Christian and the other Muslim, underlines the widening divide of culture and civilisation in this globalised world.

When the dominant force is not prepared to understand this, it makes nonsense of this ingrained Western belief of a world that is no different than Hollywood. For there are cultures and civilisations that would fight tooth and nail to preserve theirs as there are the dozen and more resistance groups to US occupation of Iraq even after the capture of Saddam Hussein.