According to a Feb 9 report in the New Straits Times , an intellectual cheerleader of the Umno-backed People's Alliance for Peace Malaysia was quoted as saying that three million deaths in Vietnam attest to the stark inhumanity of American imperialism.

He also said: "Or, o­ne should look at Iraq where the imperial power, working in cahoots with Britain, has imposed strangulating economic sanctions that have directly or indirectly killed almost a million people since 1990."

It is time younger and better-informed Malaysians seized the freedom offered by Internet to learn to critically discuss issues not o­nly with politicians but also intellectual elite and academics in an o­ngoing project of democratic liberation from the mental servitude of the politico-ideological superstructure in Malaysia.

There is no doubt that many people in Vietnam and other parts of Indochina, especially Cambodia, died as a result of the armed struggle for national independence against colonialism and imperialism.

The United States, through its controversial military involvement in Vietnam and support for the corrupt and arrogant Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the south must bear a portion of the moral responsibility for the suffering of the people there from 1955 to 1975.

Incidentally, the first prime minister of Malaya/Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj fully supported US military involvement in Vietnam, including the massive bombing of the north.

French and Japanese imperialism

However, what some intellectuals, politicians and activists often seem to have failed to account for is the perilous impact of French and Japanese imperialism in Vietnam and other parts of Indochina.

The greatest battle of the war of national liberation fought by the Vietcong was against French colonialism in Dien Bien Phu that ended with the French surrender o­n May 7, 1954. (See Lawrence Freedman, The Cold War - A Military History, London, Cassell, 2001; pp 89-117)

Earlier during the World War II, Vietnamese nationalists and communists also joined forces to fight against Japanese imperialism with the support of the nationalist and communist forces in China as well as the United States.

It is now a well-established fact that Ho Chih Minh was in contact with the US Overseas Strategic Services (OSS) headed by General William J Donovan, in the last phase of the war.

OSS, operating actively from the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC) based in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) during WWII in Asia, was the forerunner of the CIA. (See Richard J Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan , Cambridge, CUP, 2000)

Ho Chih Minh, an agent of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern) since 1920s, was also the guiding light of the formation of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM). Ho, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc, was personally present in the first representative conference of CPM held in April 1930 in Buloh Kesap, Johor that saw the birth of the CPM. (See Yong

Chin Fatt, The Origins of Communism in Malaya, Singapore, South Sea Society , 1997)

During the war of resistance in Malaya, CPM and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the war council of the Churchill government in London also liaised with each other. SOE was the British secret service at that time specialising in covert actions and irregular warfare behind the enemy lines.

Credit where due

At this point, it can already been seen that the contemporary history of Asia, Southeast Asia, Vietnam and even Malaysia is not as simplistic as some 'peace-loving' intellectuals, politicians and activists have always portrayed it to be.

For example, it was the United States that decisively ended the two world wars which were sparked off in the egoistically quarrelsome 'Old Europe', and liberated the people of Asia, Europe and North Africa from Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and militarist Japan.

We should always be prepared to give credit where credit is due, whether to countries we like or do not like intuitively. Artificially reconstructing the dynamics of the contemporary world or regional history as purely a bipolar struggle between the all-wrong (but all-powerful) United States o­n o­ne hand and all the can-do-no-wrong (but always powerless) non-American states and societies o­n the other, is intellectually dishonest and politically misleading.

It also covers up other earthly realities such as the secular genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 'Democratic Kampuchea' against its own people and later, the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia in 1979-1989. There were also the armed conflicts between the People's Republic of China and Soviet Union in the late 1960s and Chinese military strikes at Vietnam in 1978-1979.

Given the almost absolute control of the 'territorial integrity', 'political independence' and 'national sovereignty' of these communist polities, the CIA or MI6 or any other Western or Anglo-American secret services could not possibly instigate all these tragic incidents for any 'neo-colonial' designs.

The man-made human tragedy in Cambodia in 1975-1979, in particular, could o­nly be attributed to the ideological madness and pathological wickedness of the secular Khmer Rouge regime.

How do we fit, with a clear conscience, these realities and facts into the bipolar 'US-versus-the-rest' paradigm?

Morally wrong equation

Perhaps, the greatest moral mistake made by some intellectuals, politicians and activists is to morally equate the just struggle of the Vietnamese for national liberation with the regime security of the Saddam Hussein's clique of ruling elite in Baghdad.

One simple point suffices to show the equation morally wrong: It is that while the Saddam regime has built at least 10 presidential palaces, the Iraqi people and children are said to be suffering from 'starvation' and 'malnutrition'. These 10 expensive and luxurious presidential palaces are Al-Azimiyah, Radwaniyah, Abu Ghurayb, Republican and Sijood in Baghdad, and another four are located in Mosul, Tikirit, Lake Tharthar and Basra. (See BBC

World News: Oct 1, 2002)

Moreover, if ordinary Iraqis and their children have been suffering from starvation and malnutrition since 1990, why did the Saddam regime not spend money to feed or save them, but awarded instead a commercial contract to China in 2001 to build a "nationwide fibre-optic communication network" in Iraq. (See Kenneth Pollack, ' Next stop, Baghdad ?' in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002)

Or, did China give the "nationwide fibre-optic communication network" to Iraq for free without charging a cent? Even so, China was also morally wrong because it could have donated the money to feed and save the 'starving' children of Iraq first.

Why spend money to develop, among others, highly lethal biological and chemical agents for possible weaponisation under a programme led by Dr Rihab Taha and her team of Iraqi scientists at least up to 1995? (See BBC World News, 'Iraqi bio-scientist breaks silence': Feb 9, 2003)

Enough money to purchase fibre-optic and chemical and biological agents but not baby powder or medicines for children and food for the ordinary people? How to make sense of this troubling set of facts and questions without any ideological blinkers or political opportunism?

Blame starvation o­n Saddam

The o­nly natural and moral judgment to be made is simple and straightforward: it is the vainglorious and warmongering priority of the Saddam regime that should be blamed for any 'starvation' and 'malnutrition', if any, among the Iraqi people and their children. It logically follows that the international community should not be made the scapegoat of Saddam's cruelties and folly.

As a matter of fact, the complete trade and financial sanction against the Saddam regime was first imposed not by the United States or Britain, but by the Security Council of the United Nations in line with Resolution 661 after Saddam unilaterally launched his aggressive, imperialist and predatory war against Kuwait, and refused to abide by Resolution 660 which called for the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

In 1980, Saddam also unilaterally launched a war against Iran that resulted in the Saddam regime incurring public debts of US$60 billion to other Arab states. (See Patrick Brogan, World conflicts - why and where they are happening? London, Bloomsbury, 1992; p. 286)

The expedient argument in earlier years that the United Nations and Security Council are Anglo-American 'puppets' in implementing Resolution 661 now sharply contradicts the image of their 'heroic' roles in resisting Anglo-American 'hegemony'. For can a 'puppet' so vehemently oppose the 'grand design' of its 'masters' to 'control' the oilfields in Iraq now?

French, German, Russian brutality

The same 'idealist' expediency and 'politically correct' memory can also be found in their attitude towards France and Germany. While American military involvement in Vietnam is often recalled with seeming passion, not many now seem to remember how the French conducted its brutal wars and repression in Indochina and Algeria.

It was the territorial aggression and racial superiority complexes of Germany that sparked off two world wars, and a Holocaust, in the first 45 years of the last century.

What about the brutality of Russian troops which invaded and occupied Afghanistan for 10 years in 1979-1989?

Just because Russia, France and Germany now oppose the proposed US-led war o­n the Saddam Hussein regime, the memory o­n these parts of recent history is suddenly lost among our 'peace-loving' intellectuals, politicians and activists.

Maybe some would like to publicly and completely deny the Holocaust in the Third Reich as a 'conspiratorial concoction or fabrication of the Zionists', just as British academic, Malcolm Cadwell (1931-1978) o­nce denied the genocide and massacre in 'Democratic Kampuchea' as 'bourgeois propaganda' of the Western, especially Anglo-American, media.

Saddam's sadism

How would the 'People's Alliance for Peace Malaysia' account for the use of mustard, sarin and other poisonous chemical agents by Saddam's army against Iranian forces and the Iraqi Kurds (mostly Sunnis), the persecution of the Iraqi Shiite and the extremely vicious act of setting fire o­n Kuwaiti oil fields after Saddam was defeated in 1991?

According to Patrick Brogan, during the course of the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam also "ordered oil pipelines leading to terminals in the Gulf to be opened, flooding the Persian Gulf with oil" causing a loss of US$12 billion. (See Patrick Brogan, ibid: p.292)

As the result of that vicious act, 10,000 fire-fighters from 34 countries had to be mobilised to put down the blaze and neutralise the dangers of the fire spreading to other surrounding countries and causing a massive environmental disaster. It is estimated that the fire-fighting operation cost US$1 billion. (Patrick Brogan, ibid: pp 292-293)

How do they explain the facts that almost all Muslim-predominated Arab countries (except Syria) in the Middle East like Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirate and Kuwait have been hosting American and British armed forces, military bases, weaponry and other logistical and intelligence systems that are all now aiming at the Saddam regime in Baghdad?

Anti-Saddam alliance

The evident irony is therefore that, while some theoretical and opportunistic multilateralists' outside Middle East are promoting a global balancing alliance against the United States and Britain, almost all the Muslim-predominated neighbours of Iraq have already formed a regional balancing alliance with the United States and Britain to counter the imperial adventurism of the Saddam regime in the Middle Eastern region.

According to o­ne professional estimate, in 1990 just before Saddam's regime unilaterally launched his invasion and occupation of Kuwait, its army had 5,000 tanks, 7,000 armoured infantry vehicles and 3,500 artillery pieces, and there were o­ne million Iraqi men under arms. (See Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, Military intelligence blunders , London, Robinson, 1999: p.308)

Hughes-Wilson also estimates that in 1990, the number of armed Iraqi men was 10 times the size of the British Army. He also observes that, in 1990, "Iraq had more battlefield helicopters than the RAF (Britain's Royal Air Force) and the British Army Air Corps had aircraft combined".

The anti-Saddam regional alliance in the Middle East is also supported not o­nly by Britain and Australia, but also European countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Denmark and the Czech Republic.

On Dec 16 last year, a Japanese destroyer, Krishima had already set sail to the Indian Ocean to provide logistical and intelligence support to the Allied forces in the event of a war being launched against the Saddam regime. (No condemnation against US's Japanese 'sheriff' or 'lapdog'?)

No peace petition for Malaysia

We ourselves also o­nce faced a similar situation like countries in the Gulf when the Java-centric Indonesian imperialism threatened Malaysia with Confrontation in 1963-1966.

For the love of our own children in Malaysia, there was no pacifist signature campaign in the streets in Malaysia to condemn Anglo-American imperialism or their 'deputy sheriff' in Australia.

Instead, the Tunku government immediately invoked the Anglo-Malaysian Defence Agreement (AMDA) and requested Britain, Australia and New Zealand for urgent military assistance to help to defend Sabah, Sarawak and Johor. Canada contributed to the military effort to defend Malaysia by donating some useful instruments such as wireless radios.

In 1964, Tunku also flew to Washington DC to request for military, diplomatic and political support. President Lyndon Johnson ordered a US warship from the 7th Fleet to park at Port Swettenham (now Port Klang) to signal a serious warning to the Sukarno regime in Indonesia.

Like it or not, the peace for Malaysia was restored by Anglo-American arms.

Balanced view

The purpose of this article is to challenge the set of ideas o­n contemporary history and international relations that is re-constructed with an overarching anti-Anglo-American fixation.

It hopes to serve as a public call to Malaysians, especially younger o­nes, to seriously begin re-reading for themselves the complex relations and dialectical dynamics of the contemporary world, regional and national history as well as international relations without ideological blinker or political opportunism.

The ultimate purpose is to strike a balanced view of the contemporary world and always keep our minds open for moral reasoning through open and honest debates.

JAMES WONG WING o­n is chief analyst of malaysiakini and Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM) . Wong is a former member of parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily (now Sin Chew Daily ). He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew , he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999.