Reading the opinion piece by Barry Wain ( Asian Wall Street Journal , March 24), one cannot help but reflect on the many cruel ironies that plague us in this already confused and confusing world.

In the article Wain laments what he sees as the steady erosion of the rule of law and the institutions of civil society in Malaysia. For him the country remains in the grip of a powerful clique of Umno politicians who have been in power since 1957, using the very same tools of oppression, domination and control that were left behind as parting gifts by the British colonial authorities.

After nearly five decades of uninterrupted and unchallenged rule, the powerful Malaysian elite has been able to brush aside any criticism of abuse of power from both local as well as foreign critics and observers.

"Transparency and accountability, the buzz words since the economic crisis struck East Asia almost three years ago, remain foreign concepts in Malaysia," he concludes.

But what really offends Wain (along with countless other observers of Malaysian politics) is the apparent lack of justice in the Malaysian legal system. He condemns what he sees as the double-standards of the Malaysian system which took so long to bring the ex-inspector general of police Rahim Noor to the courts, and the comparatively light sentence meted out to the man who was responsible for the near-deadly assault on the ex-deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.

What is worse, Wain deplores the fact that "Washington is satisfied (that) Dr. Mahathir didn't order the assault on Anwar" and that the matter has been brushed aside in the corridors of power in the US.

One wonders what kind of reaction from Washington would have satisfied Wain in the end. Should the US order an embargo or boycott of Malaysian goods? Should Malaysia be put on a blacklist and all official communications cut off? Should the country be declared a dictatorship and treated like a pariah or outcast by the international community?

Here is where we encounter the greatest difficulty of all. For what such a move would require on the part of the US and other Western states is that they should live up to their own standards of human rights.

For the US to occupy the moral high ground in relation to Malaysia it must first demonstrate that its own house is in order and that its own record is beyond question. This would be difficult for the US, considering its own appalling human rights record and some of the more spectacular examples of human rights abuses by the US police force in recent years.

Witness the case where an African immigrant was shot 41 times by four police offices in front of his own home, simply because he was suspected of carrying a firearm. Then there was the case of an illegal immigrant who was abused and tortured by policemen while under detention. The victim was bound and beaten, and then sodomised with a policeman's truncheon until his bowels were ruptured and he suffered massive internal bleeding.

In all these cases, the policemen in question were eventually let off or given light sentences. The excuse given (very much like the unbelievable one offered in defence of the ex-IGP in Malaysia) was that the policemen were over-worked, under pressure and that they had momentarily "lost control" of their senses.

But it isn't just the behaviour of US policemen that needs to be examined carefully. The conduct of the US government is just as blemished and needs to be scrutinised at length. First of all, there remains the enduring myth that the US is a country that does not (and will not) deal with dictatorial regimes where abuses of human rights take place on a regular basis.

This image of the US as a caring nation was first cultivated during the time of Jimmy Carter, the peanut-farmer-turned-president who wanted to promote America's positive image during the Cold War against that "evil empire" known as the USSR.

Carter's human rights offensive began with the Helsinki accord of 1975 when the US first began to use human rights as an instrument of political conditionality in international relations. Since then, the US government had been riding the human rights bandwagon and has been championing the cause of human rights worldwide.

But if we look at the motley crew of tin-pot dictatorships, autocratic governments and downright genocidal regimes that the US has been keeping company with, one might have a different view of things.

For a start, we need to dispel the myth that the US does not deal with regimes that abuse human rights. Despite its sanctimonious rhetoric, the US continues to do business with China for the simple reason that it knows that it would be economic suicide to jeopardise US$50 billion worth of annual bilateral trade with the Chinese.

The US has also kept as its close friends and allies client states like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kuwait, Turkey, Panama, El Salvador, Chile and a host of others. Until recently it also counted the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos and Iraq under Saddam Hussein as its strategic partners as well.

It is clear that "transparency and accountability" are not only absent in Malaysia - these factors are also absent in the US' relations with many of its client states.

All this points to the simple fact that the US, being a superpower in this increasingly lopsided unipolar New World Order, has always been motivated by the pursuit of its own strategic, economic and political interests. Human rights has always had low priority unless it could be used to give the US a leverage over others.

To put it bluntly, Washington is no more concerned about an Asian politician being beaten up in a jail somewhere in Southeast Asia as it is about the thousands of political prisoners who are tortured, raped, burnt alive, decapitated and electrocuted on an hourly basis all over the world by its other client states and political allies. (In fact, compared to the horrific accounts of torture that come out from many of the other client states of the US, the stories from Malaysia must seem boring in comparison).

Harsh though this must seem, it remains a stark and brutal reality in a world ruled according to the paradigm of realpolitik. US politicians may mouth quaint and touching platitudes about "heroes of democracy" who are being victimised by cruel and oppressive governments the world over, but the sad reality is that the US has never (and probably will never) budge an inch to help them as long as its interests are not directly affected or threatened in some way.

This would explain, for instance, why the shares sold by the Malaysian government in the US recently were snapped up by US businessmen and corporations as soon as they were put on the market. It is clear that US companies and corporations are motivated more by their immediate economic interests and have not been swayed by all the negative reports about the state of affairs in the country.

Cynics will invariably conclude that come what may, businessmen the world over will be guided only by their greed and short-term interests, and that issues such as human rights and freedom of

speech do not often get raised in boardroom meetings where the perennial concern remains the need to wipe out one's competitors.

Bearing these factors in mind, one needs to look at the Malaysian situation as well.

From the beginning, the mistake of the reformasi movement was that it counted on morale support from other parties as well. This is understandable, though it remains regrettable nonetheless.

When US vice-president Al Gore visited Malaysia, his comments in favour of the reformasi activists received resounding applause and acclaim from the supporters of the reform movement.

But surely there was a contradiction here? Was this not the very same US government that led the way in the war against Iraq and has bombed the country back to the Middle Ages in the wake

of the Gulf War?

Was this not the same US government that has supported the Zionist regime in Israel and continues to pump millions of dollars into the government in Tel Aviv that has maintained a state of aggression against the people of Palestine and its Arab neighbours?

Was it not the US that propped up countless puppet regimes all over Southeast Asia, in Thailand, Indonesia, South Vietnam and the Philippines?

And was it not the US that was responsible for countless coups and revolutions that brought down so many progressive governments in the Muslim world like that of Mossadeq in Iran and kept in power so many dictators like the Shah of Iran? Had the US suddenly changed into another country altogether, all thanks to the glib rhetoric of Al Gore?

It was indeed sad to see so many reformasi activists being taken in so easily by the honeyed words of Al Gore. Reading the words of this American politician in the websites and newspapers of the reformasi camp gave one the impression that the whole political crisis had been turned into an elaborate political game instead.

Worst of all, it gave the paranoid Malaysian government the excuse it needed to label the entire opposition movement a "foreign plot" that was designed to overthrow the government.

The lesson to be learnt from all this is simple: Change, which is a political necessity as well as a part of life itself, must always come from within. The democracy movement in Burma, for instance, did not depend on any external help - it continues, till this day, to be a home-grown movement that is propelled by local energy and local needs rather than the support of foreign media or NGOs.

No amount of self-righteous humbug from foreign observers can help us unless Malaysians are prepared to take up the struggle themselves. Neither the governments nor the business community of the developed countries of the West will ever come to the aid of true democratic movements in Malaysia or any other part of the world, for the simple reason that true democratic reform would also affect their own interests.

(This is why, for instance, the West does not want to see democracy flourish in the Arab world. It is much easier to control these Arab states and all their oil resources as long as the Middle-east remains under the control of a handful of parasitic, inbred, illiterate and mutually-antagonistic Arab families).

Barry Wain's article in AWSJ therefore raised all the right questions but failed to answer any of them. What he and the other liberal journalists and political commentators of the West should be asking is not the question of why the US continues to allow the abuse of human rights to take place in other parts of the world, but how the US continues to profit from the abuses meted out by its client regimes, from Arabia to Indonesia.

In all these cases, we can be assured that the Yankees won't be marching in.

DR FARISH A NOOR is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. He is currently researching the topic of Islamist movements in Southeast Asia and writing a book on the Malaysian Islamic party, PAS.