Azmin Ali’s Madman Theory

Team AI is closing in on Azmin Ali and the Langkah Kajang 2.0 is about to checkmate him. If Rafizi’s corruption allegation fails to stick, they are going to raise the allegation of Azmin’s affair with another woman, which many in Selangor are already aware of. Azmin has retaliated by threatening “Mutually Assured Destruction”. Let’s see who blinks first in this “Mexican standoff”.

THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

Raja Petra Kamarudin

This write-up (above) certainly makes very interesting reading. I don’t mean the fact that there is a conspiracy against Selangor Menteri Besar Azmin Ali because everyone already knows about that (and some have even named the conspiracy “Langkah Kajang 2.0”). Everyone also all already knows that PKR is divided into two camps, the AI camp and the AA camp.

In fact, what was then merely a suspicion and mainly rumours were confirmed as fact when Anwar Ibrahim’s letter from prison surfaced. The letter was first of all denied and alleged to be a fake. And then Rafizi Ramli countered that denial and confirmed that the letter was indeed authentic. Ambiga then announced that the letter was meant for internal purposes only and not for public consumption — without explaining what business it was of hers and why was she doing the announcing on behalf of PKR.

Rafizi then announced that there was corruption in Selangor that not only involved money but women as well. Party President Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail then asked Rafizi to lodge a report with the MACC, which he did. I was informed that thus far seven people said he to linked to Azmin in one way or another have been called in for interrogation by the MACC and this is worrying Azmin.

Azmin is having visions that he may face the same fate as Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng — or worse, the same fate as ex-Selangor Menteri Besar Khir Toyo. And in case the corruption involving money and women allegation will not stick, they are using a second bullet on Azmin and are alleging that he is having an affair with one of the PKR officers in charge of policy matters.

The PKR person who sent me the above write-up also sent me the photograph below and has told me to watch out for the next explosion involving Azmin’s affair with a certain woman. It seems the girl’s father is very upset and had approached Khalid Ibrahim for help to persuade Azmin to marry his daughter but Khalid refused to get involved.

Anyway, what is more important than the kickbacks and women allegation would be the way Azmin is responding to the Langkah Kajang 2.0 conspiracy to oust him. If you read that write-up (above) you can see that Azmin is adopting the Madman Theory.

The Madman Theory was a feature of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. Nixon and his administration tried to make the leaders of the Communist Bloc think that Nixon was irrational and volatile (sort of crazy or, as the Chinese would say, taufung). According to the theory, those Communist leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response.

H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, the White House Chief of Staff who was later implicated in the Watergate scandal, said that this was what Nixon confided in him:

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

Thomas C. Schelling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences for his work “in helping us to enhance our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”

This was what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in October 2005:

“Against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict [1960] set forth his vision of game theory as a unifying framework for the social sciences. Schelling showed that a party can strengthen its position by overtly worsening its own options, that the capability to retaliate can be more useful than the ability to resist an attack, and that uncertain retaliation is more credible and more efficient than certain retaliation. These insights have proven to be of great relevance for conflict resolution and efforts to avoid war. . . . Notably, his analysis of strategic commitments has explained a wide range of phenomena, from the competitive strategies of firms to the delegation of political decision power.”

In short, what that means is, offense (attack) is the best form of defence. When someone attacks you, you defend yourself by counterattacking even more or even worse. When they bomb your Twin Towers you retaliate by bombing their whole country.

But you must not be predictable. You must be seen as irrational so that no one really knows what you might do. And that is the real value here. People do not really know what you might do so they would rather leave you alone and not take the risk of finding out.

The Madman Theory, however, is more than just that. It is not just about counterattacking even harder. It is about a suicide mission. It is about dying and in that process result in the death of your adversary as well.

MAD means “Mutually Assured Destruction”. It means if you kill me then you die together with me. We both go down, not just me alone. So you destroy me at your own peril because in the process I will bring you down with me and destroy you as well.

Basically this is what Azmin is saying. He knows so many things about Anwar Ibrahim, his family and the party — he is privy to so much of their secrets — that he has the ability to bring everyone down with him and destroy them if they try to destroy him.

In a way Azmin is resorting to blackmail. But blackmail is only useful as long as it remains a threat. Once you actually expose what you threaten to expose then blackmail becomes worthless and of no value.

The ‘power’ in blackmail is that the person(s) being blackmailed have to be kept guessing. If they think that you may actually do what you threaten to do then the power of blackmail gets eroded. The bottom line is: who blinks first? In the Kennedy-Khrushchev Cuban Missile Crisis ‘Mexican standoff’, which was also Kennedy’s Madman strategy, Khrushchev blinked first and lost.

So the question here would be if both press the trigger and we see a situation of Mutually Assured Destruction, who has the most to lose, Team AI or Team AA? Azmin is basically Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s proxy to take over PKR, with Azmin as President to replace Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, of course.

So, Azmin’s value to Mahathir is only as far as PKR is concerned. If Azmin destroys PKR, like he threatens to do, then his value disappears because with no longer any PKR around Mahathir does not really need Azmin.

So my money is on the scenario that Azmin will not dare destroy PKR. They might still get him on the corruption matter (unless Mahathir can get MACC to back off) or on that affair with that girl whose father wants him to marry (has anyone really ever been brought down because of affairs with women?). But Azmin will need to keep PKR intact because that is all he will have left to use to horse-trade with Mahathir. And without PKR Mahathir might just throw him under the bus and leave him there to die

Anyway, it will be very interesting to see who wins Langkah Kajang 2.0 and whether Team AI or Team AA emerges the winner. But rest assured there can never be two tigers on one mountain. And with Papa Tiger in the Sungai Buloh Prison, Proxy Tiger might just swallow Mama Tiger and Girlie Tiger for dinner.

Don’t you just love Malaysian politics?