This is written in reply to Harry Lee's ' PM's US-bashing will ruin us '.

To my knowledge, in the past decades, many disillusioned Arab leaders (eg Nasser, Sadat, Gaddafi, Saddam) want to be called champion of Islam and be remembered in history like Saladin or the Calliphs. Most of them use this as a way to distract people from domestic problems or their incompetence, some of the consequences are the problems of today's Middle East situation.

PM will be remembered by many in Malaysia as the o­ne who brought Malaysia to stand o­n its own feet (I think he knows very well how much we need the US to sustain this).

However, from his recent performances at the NAM and OIC conferences, the PM seems to be attracted by the fame of being the champion of Islam and the Palestinian problem.

The benefit of this is three-fold: o­ne, is to compete with PAS which is critical of Umno's Islamic image, two, is to distract people from domestic incompetence, corruptions and cronyism, and three, is to grab the opportunity to fill the gap left by Saddam in championing Islam and the Palestinian problem.

Overall, he thought he could gamble with US ties and probablyl win this bet just like he did with the Anwar incident. However, you cannot play with fire all the time. Surely, the PM will back down after the Iraq war or when the whole thing backfires.

However, I cannot deny that PM has grown old and some of his judgments do show some flaws and are clouded by ego.

We hope that the Iraq war ends quickly, PM will have to face the reality with US and then we will see how sharp his teeth are.