The US, Anwar and regime change

If elections cannot oust a ruling party, Washington will conclude that the people have lost their sovereignty to a handful in power.

COMMENT

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in the wake of the jailing of Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, has again made his favourite accusation against his nemesis: that he is Washington’s candidate for regime change in Malaysia.

This makes it seem as if Anwar is unpatriotic, a traitor who is “in cahoots with Washington against Malaysia and the government of Malaysia helmed by the Barisan Nasional (BN)”.

The truth is that it’s Washington’s policy based on international law to support the opposition, political and in all other shades, all over the world while doing business with the government of the day. It’s called the “right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” syndrome.

The left hand in Washington, besides working for regime change, has a policy of stoking “latent hatreds”. But let’s not go there since no one would believe it anyway.

Washington is particularly concerned with countries where power has never changed hands even once, or never changed for a very long time.

This was the case in Iraq under President Saddam Hussein, where Washington concluded, again by reference to international law, that the people of Iraq had lost their sovereignty to a handful in power.

The weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) allegedly stockpiled by Saddam, which turned out to be the fiction of the century, was the trigger which the US used to put together an international coalition of the willing to oust Saddam from power. Of course, the Washington Administration was “furious that no WMDs were ever found”. It had to subject itself to Congressional and Senate hearings on the subject.

Saddam was hanged by the US-installed Iraqi government and political power shifted from the oil-poor Sunnis in the west to the oil-rich Shiites in the south. The ousted Sunnis, in turn, have turned to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to launch a tribal war under the guise of religion, but that’s another story.

The loss of the sovereignty of the people is the same reason that Washington is determined to boot out President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. His eventual departure is seen as a fait accompli and what appears to remain is the manner of his going. Washington begins with the end in mind and then works backwards on the premise that the end justifies the means, a leaf it took from the communist bloc, which it fought for decades during the Cold War.

Generally, Washington’s regime change policy has had remarkable success so far. Perhaps, there’s a “method in madness’ approach here.

Myanmar, the rogue state of South East Asia and labelled an international pariah state by Washington, was eventually brought to heel.

What has all this got to do with Anwar? Plenty, but again not really Anwar per se. The US is careful not to put all its eggs in one basket.

The principle, in Malaysia’s case, is that the ruling BN would have to decide how long it’s going to hang on to political power. No political party in the history of the world has managed to hang on to political power for more than 70 years. The most extreme example was the communists in the former USSR.

Generally, others bit the dust after somewhere between 20 (Marcos in the Philippines), 30 (Suharto of Indonesia, Mubarak in Egypt) and 50 years (Tito in Yugoslavia).

Washington is determined to see political power in Malaysia shift from the BN to the opposition alliance, the Pakatan Rakyat, there being no other viable alternative. How this regime change will be achieved remains to be seen.

The principle in all this is the sovereignty of the people. If elections cannot oust a ruling party, Washington will conclude that the people have lost their sovereignty to a handful in power. In that case, international law would be evoked.

However, the trigger, as seen in the WMD case, could be anything. It could be economic i.e. government debts, the ringgit, trade pressures, or human rights issues including the question of Sabah and Sarawak, or the state of the organs of state, especially the judiciary and Parliament and government agencies like the Election Commission and the police.

The entry of international bodies like the UN Security Council, the UN Secretary-General, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Commonwealth, Asean, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice cannot be ruled out.

Whatever it is, the script is being written in Washington, and Mahathir knows that and has plans of his own which interest no one except his small circle.