Dr Mahathir Mohamad's ' performance ' at the airport on his return from a foreign holiday last weekend caused much worry among Malaysians and probably sent a chill down the spines of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and his supporters.

The gloves are definitely off and this is a fight to the finish. Mahathir is committed to removing Abdullah and replacing him with an administration that, at best, is friendly to Mahathir, and at worst, headed by him, either personally or by proxy.

Who wins is going to be ultimately determined by whether Abdullah has the cajones to go toe to toe with Mahathir. The 'elegant silence' strategy may have served Abdullah well in the first phase of this conflict, but from now he is going to have to get down and dirty, and Abdullah will have to start using 'inelegant' tools if he is going to be the one left standing after the bloody battles ahead.

There is no more formidable opponent than Mahathir. He has shown over and over that he will resort to any means, foul or fair, to achieve his ends. He is not constrained by principles, has a single-minded, unrelenting focus when he gets somebody in his crosshairs, and has the charisma, practical mindset and political savvy to force his will.

Yet, he is also at his weakest ever. Age is not on his side - though an 80-year-old Mahathir is still as formidable as most ordinary men of 40 - and, most importantly, the levers of power are not in his hands.

Abdullah will have to use those levers of power - perhaps as crudely as Mahathir once did - if he is going to win this conflict. Quite simply, Mahathir is blatantly challenging Abdullah to a fight - and if Abdullah chooses to duck, 'elegantly' or otherwise, his days are numbered. This is a shootout, and whether he likes it or not, Abdullah will have to fire his guns or die politically.

For a start, Abdullah needs to firm up his hold on Umno. It is probably a given that, other than the prime minister's committed supporters, most in Umno have moved to the sidelines, waiting for a winner to emerge that they can pledge their allegiance to.

But if they sense weakness in Abdullah, they may start making early moves that could really undermine Abdullah fatally even before the fight is over. The one lesson Abdullah can learn from Mahathir is that even within the party, Umno members respect the sword more than the pen.

There are a number of moves Abdullah probably needs to make in order to draw his line in the sand:

  1. Sack Mahathir from Umno. That would be the clearest message that this prime minister is no shrinking violet, and can give as much as he can take. It might conceivably shut Mahathir for good. Clearly, the good doctor has no respect for Abdullah's 'manhood'. Such a move would force a rethink of that notion at the very least. There will probably be a lot of smoke and thunder - one can see Mahathir fulfilling his one-time boast of flooding the streets of KL with 10,000 supporters from Kedah - but if Abdullah doesn't blink and gets the law and order authorities behind him, things will return to normal fast.

  • Start investigating in a very public and formal way - perhaps by appointing a special counsel - the past actions of Mahathir and his cronies, with a view to eventually bringing criminal prosecutions if evidence is uncovered of any wrongdoing and corruption. There is some difficulty in doing this since everyone involved on both sides live in glass houses, but there is surely enough to uncover to charge the ex-PM many times over in many different courts.

  • Play the Anwar card. Nothing worries Mahathir more than his former deputy being restored to the establishment. An individual with as much, if not more, charisma than Mahathir, and a man who can galvanise the Malay masses like no one else can, bringing Anwar back to Umno may cause some irreconcilable rifts within Umno, but on balance, what Anwar would bring to the party would be way more valuable for Abdullah.

    • There are Malaysians who are gleefully watching this fight in Umno from what they think is the "safety" of the sidelines. Well, think again. This battle is occurring at a time when the country is inexorably lurching towards a very dangerous crossroads, and this fight could well tip all Malaysians into a really bad place.

    Firstly, a whole generation of Malays (and non-Malays, for that matter) have now grown up indoctrinated into believing that non-Malays, instead of being equal citizens, are nothing more than a group of people who are 'tolerated' just so that the good life the country enjoys is not put at risk due to conflict. That sort of inbred hostility is difficult to hold in indefinitely, and there are signs at individual and bureaucratic levels all over the place that this 'tolerance' is creaking towards a breaking point.

    Secondly, the Islamists are becoming increasingly bold in fishing in these troubled waters. The script is a familiar one in many progressive countries where Muslims dominate. The moderate, progressive government becomes increasingly corrupted and dictatorial, eventually collapses due to internal rifts and popular discontent, and the fundamentalist Islamists take over.

    So this fight is important to all Malaysians, and their leaders need to take wise positions.