I am well aware there is a campaign by a former US ambassador to Malaysia, John Malott, to petition the White House for the release of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

While I won’t stop anyone from signing the petition, however, I myself have chosen not to do it because I know too well how the US foreign policy works.

As I wrote previously, it is just too ‘unfortunate’ that Malaysia is nothing but a small oil producing country - too small to be mentioned and geo-strategically less significant.

What's more, Putrajaya is a rather friendly ally to Washington, otherwise the Americans would have helped us to get rid of Umno even without us having to go to the ballot box.

Towards the latter part of ex-prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s rule, Washington was indeed working very hard to destabilise Umno until Sept 11 - which changed everything.

Suddenly, the Americans realised that having a ‘secular’ autocrat such as Mahathir in power would serve their interests far better than an Islamist-dominant government.

I still remember helping an American official to organise a meeting with a group of young Malay Muslims in the aftermath of the shocking attacks in New York, as she very much wanted to gauge the sentiment of young Malaysians towards the US.

Needless to say, the meeting did not produce much of a positive outcome as the participants challenged her on the US' hypocrisy from the Middle East to Asia - and she was so livid at those present that she refused to have any more of such engagements.

“Sorry to say, these people have made Mahathir look so much more reasonable,” she would later say to me.

Not long after, Mahathir was invited to the White House for an audience with then president George W Bush. The rest is, of course, history.

Then, Mahathir stepped down and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi took over. From then on, Umno has been showing overtures to the US once again.

Just think rationally: Would Washington favour a Pakatan government with PAS as a major partner who constantly harps on the Palestinian and Islamic state issues? Fat chance.

In my view, the petition is just a futile exercise because it is the US' interests that count.

The sooner Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak concedes on the Washington-initiated, controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), the sooner Anwar will be forgotten behind bars.

A potentially terrible mistake

Tactically, seeking foreign interference won't go down well with the majority of the Malay grassroots - which is precisely the constituency that Pakatan is supposed to win over. In asking for US intervention, one risks alienating the nationalist Malays further.

Didn't we say "save our country on our own"? Having a petition as such simply makes a mockery of the not-so sincere pledge. It has all the potential to be a terrible strategic error.

For the Malays to do that, they would end up being perceived as pengkhianat (traitors), a kind of perfidy if one understands the Malay psyche.

As for the non-Malays, and the Chinese in particular, petitioning Washington would only confirm the long-held suspicion that these people only pay lip service to patriotism.

I can imagine Mahathir is already laughing: Ku dah kata mereka ni cakap tak serupa bikin!

In my view, it would be far more effective for Malaysians to boycott the BN government than to seek help from a foreign power.

For instance, a poor turnout at a Chinese New Year celebration hosted by the MCA or Gerakan would send a more definite signal that people are crossed with Umno - that knows nothing other than using someone’s bottom to put the opposition in jail.

People like to cite the example of Nelson Mandela as an encouragement to Anwar; but they often forget Mandela was detained for 27 years simply because the US and British governments wanted him behind bars, fearing that a successful black uprising would usher in a pro-Soviet government in South Africa.

In fact, it was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that tipped off the White supremacists - which led to Mandela’s arrest and detention. Of course, Mandela was eventually released in February 1990 when Washington was fairly certain that the Soviet Union was already on its deathbed.

Even when there had been no such thing as online petitions, the black activists in South Africa did not send petitions in the form of letters to the White House requesting intervention. Rather, they teamed up with the media, lawyers and NGOs in the US, Europe and the Commonwealth, which in turn created enormous pressure on other governments to act consistently.

Most notably, Australia - which had just ended its White Australia policy a decade earlier - came on board, with then prime minister Bob Hawke playing a key role in getting Commonwealth countries to adopt financial sanctions that eventually choked South Africa’s economy, to the chagrin of the late Margaret Thatcher who was on the wrong side of history.

It was a bottom-up approach, aided also by the fact that many prominent journalists and scholars - such as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger - were genuinely against the apartheid regime. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, too, was instrumental in the whole campaign.

Many other ways to get attention

Although Anwar does not enjoy Mandela’s prestige and his misery has failed to arouse much sympathy on the part of the global media, there are many ways still to get international attention.

Engage the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Asean human rights bodies by all means, because these are the organisations that are largely free of government influence.

What about something like Occupy Dataran Merdeka? Or mobilising people to attend the nightly candlelight vigil outside the Sungai Buloh prison? If there were tens of thousands of protesters every night, would that not come across more as an eminent threat to Umno than keyboard warriors?

I am belittling the online petition; I do believe anyone who is doing something to highlight injustices under Umno deserves recognition.

Still I wonder, if people are so concerned over Anwar’s imprisonment as to urge US attention, what then, is stopping them from going to a protest to vent their anger at the government?

A rally is now scheduled to take place outside Sogo in Kuala Lumpur on March 7, and how many who have signed the petition would also be willing to attend?

I am concerned as well as intrigued, because the turnout would give us a fair indicator of the state of Malaysian politics in general, and how much one really cares about the fact that the leader of the parliamentary opposition is languishing in jail due to his political convictions - whether one agrees with him or not.

JOSH HONG studied politics at London Metropolitan University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A keen watcher of domestic and international politics, he longs for a day when Malaysians will learn and master the art of self-mockery, and enjoy life to the full in spite of politicians.