James Wong Wing On ('Moral escapism of West-bashers', Aug 20) writes, "In the tense atmosphere of bipolar confrontation with the Soviet bloc, the United States and the West were sometimes fooled into supporting 'our bastards' in Asia, Africa and Latin America and into giving them money, arms."

Ashwin ('US should not be fooled into backing Anwar', Aug 20), on the other hand, writes that the US should not be fooled into supporting Anwar Ibrahim, a known Islamist.

Come on, guys, you can't believe that America and the Western powers are that stupid? They are smarter than you give them credit for. How else do you explain Britain's selling of arms to Ethiopia and Eritrea, two warring nations, at the same time? Surely they were not fooled into supporting both the regimes at the same time!

On the contrary, the Western powers, especially the US, know exactly what they are doing, and if and when they decide to help.

A leaked 1990s Pentagon document provides considerable background insight into this expansionist dimension of US policy, and I quote "Our first (US) objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival... we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role... these regions including Western Europe, East Asia, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. ( New York Times , March 8, 1992; International Herald Tribune , March 9, 1992; Washington Post , March 22, 1992; Times , May 25, 1992).

As one would say, it is not the action that counts, but the intention, and one would like to question the intention behind Western intervention and 'advice' in the ruling of other nations.

It is erroneous to think that, as James claims, "the notions of democracy and human rights, and even technical skills were all acquired from the liberal democratic societies of the West".

It is a little known fact that the Mesopotamians had already introduced a system of democracy well before the Greeks - whom Western textbooks led us to believe was the first to practise democracy. Thus democracy is an inherently Asian system, not European.

Furthermore, if one looks at most of the notions of democracy, human rights and technical expertise, one would find that they were actually introduced to the West through Muslim Spain, and that they, the West, now propagate it back to us, like they invented it.

This was finally admitted in BBC 's recent superb documentary entitled The Empires of Faith .

Furthermore, as the Human Rights Watch record, the so-called proponents of human rights are themselves vile human rights violators.

In the Watch's world report 2001, they write about the US where "human rights violations were most apparent in the criminal justices system - including police brutality, discriminatory racial disparities incarceration, abusive conditions of confinement and also violation of workers' rights...."

Perhaps we should mull over how some political scientist define 'Western hegemony'. Hegemony is not the process of a 'greater' power imposing its belief system on the smaller and weaker nation; rather it is the willful adoption of all the precepts and viewpoints of the greater nation by the weaker nation, especially the elite.

From this perspective, Western hegemony has already succeeded in many parts of the world.

This is not to say that a right is wrong simply because the right is carried by the West. Indeed, we have to realise that the West do not have a monopoly on justice and democracy or on right and wrong.

However, there are many in the West who are sincere in their wish for a more just and equitable world. They include people like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein, etc. These are the kind of people we may want to take advice from.

Therefore, we do not vilify Westerners but the Western power structures. For example, while the US was waging war in Vietnam, the protest by Americans helped end the war; and the greatest proponents and opponents of globalisation are in the West.

We have many problems in Malaysia but, in my humble view, they can only be solved by local solutions, which are sensitive to local and cultural needs. There is no such thing as a 'one size fits all' solution. These problems need to be solved by the people whom these problems affect.