MA's views in the letter 'Watch Mahathir's actions, not words' are interesting. The letter should open up a public debate. Let me offer some observations for discussion.

MA gives the impression that Dr Mahathir Mohamad is a passive and helpless balancer between 'radical Islam' and the United States. I do not agree.

For those who understand history, Mahathir had been actively anti-Western and anti-American even before he came to power in 1981. o­ne of the major reasons he opposed Tunku Abdul Rahman, the first prime minister, was that Tunku was pro-American and pro-British.

Immediately after coming to power, Mahathir launched the Buy-British-last campaign and boycotted some Commonwealth summits. Mahathir has also been publicly and consistently critical of Australia even before Prime Minister John Howard came to power.

Seen against this background, Mahathir is not a passive balancer, but an active promoter of radical and anti-imperialist Islam against the West, particularly the United States.

However, it seems that this is not the case with Najib Tun Razak. Born into an Anglophile family of -Malay aristocrats, he was educated in UK. He speaks better English than Malay, and he loves things British and Western.

In contrast to Mahathir, Najib come across as a colonial hangover but he may be the rising star because of the global expansion of American power, especially military power. He also suffers from a lack of Islamic credentials.

As for Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, he is neither here nor there. Educated locally o­nly in generalist religious studies, he has no academic knowledge in hard disciplines like finance and defence.

As a weakling loved by autocrats like Mahathir, he can o­nly hope to maintain the status quo created by Mahathir. Maintaining the status quo and Mahathir's legacies is what Mahathir and his supporters want Abdullah to do.

Without charisma or transformative vision, Abdullah typifies the unimaginative civil servants in their 50s or above: lack of energy or creativity and propensity to play safe to protect o­ne's position by appealing to tradition.

Maybe the American hawks have to love him too because with Najib holding the real and hard power, Abdullah's academic credentials in religious studies, however inferior, could be used to dupe Muslim voters in rural areas or those monolingual Muslims who o­nly read Utusan Malaysia or Berita Harian .

American hawks are now in desperate need of puppets in the Muslim world. It is for this reason that Abdullah has been promoted by Western (like Far Eastern Economic Review ) and Singaporean media (like Straits Times ) as a 'moderate Muslim'.

However, what is not understood properly is that it is counter-productive for Westerners or non-Muslims to do so, because ordinary Muslims are always suspicious of such labeling.

However, without intellectual self-confidence and political legitimacy, Abdullah could be dangerous too. He could become more autocratic or tyrannical than Mahathir, although he may not be all that plain-speaking. Top leaders who suffer from intellectual inferiority complexes tend to resort to forces to maintain power.

The continued ISA detention of legitimate opposition leaders under the tenure of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as Home Minister should remind us of this tendency.

Abdullah's autocracy could backfire o­n his American backers because the awakening Muslims in Malaysia may attribute the lack of democracy and violation of human rights to the US, because it is seen to be backing their oppressors.

It is therefore not in the interest of the US, or any foreign power, to see Abdullah becoming a post-Mahathir autocrat.