Najib Greases His Way To Washington D.C

ARCHIVES 2010

By admin-s On Apr 17, 2010

By Tunku Abdul Aziz

And so it has finally happened. What a great honour for Malaysia. Najib, the Prime Minister of 1Malaysia fame was thrown a few crumbs, a few brief moment to savour, exchanging pleasantries with US President Obama on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit.

Naturally, it was not quite the same as being driven down Pennsylvania Avenue to be welcomed at the portal of the White House, but I am being churlish as usual where Najib is concerned. Najib did get to see Obama via the tradesman’s entrance.

What irks me about this non-event meeting is that we had to resort to employing a very expensive public relations firm, for which read grubby Washington lobbyists, for close to 25 million dollars, give or take a million dollars here and there. Small change I suppose when it is not your hard-earned money.

We maintain, for a small country, far too many embassies, all the result of Mahathir Mohamad’s megalomaniac years when he developed a special interest in trafficking with some of the vilest and most violent regimes particularly in North and Sub-Saharan Africa that others would not have touched with a long barge pole. For maverick Mahathir, that was his regular breakfast fare.

Maintaining diplomatic missions abroad requires a huge budget, and ours in Washington D.C must cost us an arm and a leg. So Malaysian tax payers have every right to expect to get value for money, especially when we were assured by Prime Minister Najib that his choice of our ambassador to the US was based on the gentleman’s credentials, whatever those might be.

One of his qualifications, so we were told, was that he had developed extensive networking, Washington D.C style, into a fine art, and could be reasonably expected to pave the way for getting Malaysia into the inside track. Our man in D.C. could not, on this occasion, even arrange a fleeting “hello and goodbye” meeting without resorting, in the time honoured Malaysian culture of corruption, to that offensive practice euphemistically referred to as “cheque book diplomacy.” The Prime Minister could not have picked a better candidate for the job, and I wonder if there would ever be an end to the perceived sleaziness, rightly or wrongly, that has come to be associated with Najib. For the all our sakes, the Prime Minister has to be a little more circumspect and open in his dealings.

What has this visit achieved for the money and time expended? A photo opportunity at most for Najib, but for Malaysia, toeing submissively the American/Israeli policy against Iran. We decried Junior Bush’s attack on Iraq because we were not convinced that the claimed weapons of mass destruction really existed. Why are we so quick of the mark this time to believe the Israeli-inspired conspiracy against Iran? Where is the incontrovertible evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons? What have we done to urge the Americans to dismantle Israeli nuclear warheads? On this issue, there has to be a great deal of soul-searching to be done on our part if we are to remain true to our sense of justice and if we wish enhance our standing among the morally decent nations of the world. I am not suggesting that we should oppose every American policy that impacts on global peace and security. We have to resist the temptation, however, of living in each other’s pockets in our relations whether with mighty America or pinhead Singapore.