COMMENT Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad is rarely, if ever, apologetic. It’s not his style to be contrite.

Even when he suggested that protege-turned-nemesis Anwar Ibrahim’s sensational black eye suffered in detention under the Internal Security Act in September 1998 was self-inflicted rather than the result of a punch by the inspector-general of police Rahim Noor, he could not bring himself to say sorry for inferring that Anwar had feigned injury.

Shortly afterwards, a royal commission of inquiry, formed as a result of public clamour over the issue, established that the injury was inflicted rather than induced.

But there was no apology forthcoming even after the commission faulted Rahim, with the result that he had to leave his lofty post under a cloud.

Likewise, Mahathir did not apologise for the callous threat he issued in the late 1970s when as deputy prime minister, he became an international cause celebre by warning that the Malaysian navy would shoot at the rickety boats ferrying Vietnamese refugees, desperate to flee communist tyranny, to our shores on the East Coast.

Earlier this week, in an uncharacteristic gesture, Mahathir apologised before a university audience for having twice chosen as prime ministers leaders who turned out to be - by his valuation - failures.

He was referring to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi ( photo ), his immediate successor against whom he relentlessly campaigned to remove from office, and to Najib Abdul Razak, against whom he has a hit a dead-end in efforts to eject Malaysia’s sixth PM.

One would have thought Mahathir, before an audience of university students - propitious for the display of the introspection that issues in wisdom - would opt for self-scrutiny of his methods of leader-selection.

After all, it was no just that he chose two failures at prime ministering; he had also presided over the ejection of three deputy prime ministers.

By any reckoning, this constitutes quite a record of failure at the task of discernment of human character and motivation, and individual substance and leadership potential.

These are puzzling flaws in one who lasted 22 years on top of the greasy pole of political leadership.

A leader in a fairly democratic set-up cannot last that long without what in the military is called night vision - the ability to see in the dark.

It now appears that Mahathir could only see in the dark when there were moves that were a threat to him; skilled at preemption, he would manoeuvre to thwart the menace before it could come within range of striking at him.

Flaws attributable to his approach

Mahathir’s deeper flaws of discernment are attributable to his approach as a leader.

His political craft was sourced in Nicolo Machiavelli and his worldview premised on Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Florentine political scientist espoused a modus operandi that was amoral, and the Prussian philosopher held that men of destiny made their own rules.

Both thinkers propounded an ethic of achievement that saw morals as dispensable if they hindered the attainment of success.

In the Machiavellian and Nietschean vision is discernible the sneering at ‘middle class morality’ that one of Bernard Shaw’s characters gives vent to in his play, Pygmalion.

‘Middle class morality’ is precisely the morality that restrains people from channeling an organisation’s funds into their personal bank accounts.

Mahathir will not be caught sneering at middle class morality; his understanding of the Machiavellian ethos is too good for him to commit that mistake.

He possesses the Machiavellian understanding that ordinary people are not apt to look closely into circumstantial detail but only at a successful, or unsuccessful, outcome. Thus one’s reputation never suffers if one’s object is attained.

In a long career that’s mosty seen as successful, Mahathir has attained many of the objects he has sought, barring of course the removal of Najib from office.

But several of his successes have come at great cost to the body politic, especially to institutions of state, such as the judiciary, police force and the civil service.

Now these institutions lie prostrate before a new Caesar whose path was paved not just by Mahathir’s flaws of character discernment but the lingering effects of his 22-year practice at the top of the greasy pole of Machiavellian statecraft and Nietzschean morality.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.

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