Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Will Najib flunk final test as liberal? By Terence Netto
Monday, April 08, 2013
COMMENT Has Ibrahim Ali been a stalking
horse for Umno that the party won't renounce for reasons of strategic
manoeuvre, or is he an unrepresentative outlier of merely nuisance
value? That this moving force behind the Malay right-wing group,
Perkasa, was a convenient vent for Dr Mahathir Mohamad to air views that
the former prime minister would consider inappropriate to own up to in
public has been evident for a long time. That Ibrahim was also a
stalking horse for the hardliners of Umno said to be allied to deputy
president Muhyiddin Yassin was also inferred for some time.There
was doubt, however, as to whether the Pasir Mas MP was also channeling
for BN chief Najib Abdul Razak, putative Umno reformer and liberal whose
measures in that mode are believed to have been opposed by Umno
hardliners and has drawn flak from Perkasa.
Those doubts would be removed when and if Ibrahim's name appears on the Umno list of candidates for Parliament.
We shall soon know as GE13 waits to get on the road with the Election
Commission meeting on Wednesday to set the dates for nominations and
polling.
Over the weekend, Mahathir openly backed
Ibrahim's inclusion on the list, rationalising the move as gratitude
for what the maverick politician has done, presumably in the interests
of Umno as these are conceived by the former PM. That Mahathir
had to come out in the open to support Ibrahim's inclusion somewhat
suggests that the latter may have tried to obtain selection on his own
but was rebuffed.Three-way fight
Some time ago Umno secretary-general Tengku Adnan Tunku Mansor let it
be known that people should not assume his party would not field a
candidate for the Pasir Mas seat in Kelantan. Everyone knows
that if Umno fields a candidate in Pasir Mas, there would then be a
three-cornered fight for the seat, with Ibrahim and a PAS candidate as
the other two contestants.Such a battle's likely upshot: Ibrahim (left)
would lose the seat to PAS under whose banner the maverick politician
had campaigned and won the last election by a comfortable 8,000-plus
vote majority.
In the 2008 election, PAS had deliberately
stepped aside to allow Ibrahim through to contest Pasir Mas in a
one-on-one tussle with Umno candidate on the assumption that a
three-cornered fight could issue in an Umno victory.To
PAS it was better to have Ibrahim - who has always had his share of
hardcore support in a constituency from which he hails - as the winner
than to allow Umno the chance of gaining ground in Kelantan in a general
election in which the latter nurtured hopes of ousting PAS, after
coming close to doing so at the previous election in 2004.
As
GE12's results turned out, PAS not only retained their state assembly
and parliamentary grip on Kelantan; they strengthened it.
Tengku
Adnan's signal that Umno had not ruled out contesting in Pasir Mas was
the strongest sign yet that Najib's reluctance to publicly repudiate
Ibrahim's rants did not imply tacit acquiescence in the latter's
hardline positions on Malay rights.
Mahathir's public espousal of
Ibrahim's selection as Umno candidate in Pasir Mas is seen as putting
pressure on Najib to include Ibrahim.
If there is an Umno
candidate other than Ibrahim in the fight for Pasir Mas, the ensuing
three-cornered fight is likely to result in a PAS victory.An Ibrahim defeat, sustained in his own backyard, would seriously undermine his position as a loudhailer for Malay rights.
That
Najib is afraid to antagonise Mahathir was quite clear from the start
of his premiership in April 2009. He did not include Umno Youth chief
Khairy Jamaluddin in his cabinet, a slight that would have pleased
Mahathir especially when it was accompanied by the selection of
Mahathir's son, Mukhriz (above), as a deputy minister.
Mahathir would like to see Khairy out of the way to smooth Mukhriz's climb up the Umno hierarchy. Displeasing Dr M
There is only one instance since his assumption of the prime
ministerial office four years ago that Najib has been in clear breach of
Mahathir's wishes. This was in allowing a royal commission of
inquiry (RCI) into the question of illegal residents in Sabah who have
been given citizenship papers under a project in the mid-1990s that was
widely suspected to have had Mahathir's blessings. Throughout
2012 Najib struggled to stave off pressure from BN MPs from Sabah to
empower an RCI on the illegal residents' issue that is the cause of much
discontent among locals in the state. Last July this
restiveness led to the abandonment of BN of two MPs from Sabah's
otherwise solid support of BN. The two crossed over to the independent
benches, a move that semaphored a stampede.
To squelch the
threat posed by more crossovers to BN dominance of Sabah, a state
hitherto regarded as a fixed deposit by the federal BN, Najib had to
yield to the pressure by setting up the RCI.Predictably,
revelations emanating from the inquiry have cast grave doubt on
Mahathir's denial of responsibility for the fraudulent grant of
citizenship to Sabah's illegals, an action that savours of treason,
particularly in the wake of the intrusion at Lahad Datu of armed men
from the littoral islands of the Philippines.
Reports indicate
that assorted members of this armed group hold Malaysian citizenship
papers, a matter that would place Mahathir smack in the dock as having
allegedly approved an operation that has redounded in grave peril to our
national security.
After having yielded to the formation of a
RCI that has placed Mahathir in extremely bad light, would Najib now
displease Umno's eminence grise further by not including Ibrahim on the
party's candidate list for GE13? Although Ibrahim's inclusion
would not mollify Mahathir completely, it would mitigate his displeasure
at Najib for empowering the RCI.
But that would also mean that
the last shreds of Najib's claim to being an Umno liberal would have
gone up in smoke with the attendant conclusion that Ibrahim was also a
stalking horse for the PM.
End of charade. Malaysiakini TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades. He likes the occupation
because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the
necessity to admire them.
There
was doubt, however, as to whether the Pasir Mas MP was also channeling
for BN chief Najib Abdul Razak, putative Umno reformer and liberal whose
measures in that mode are believed to have been opposed by Umno
hardliners and has drawn flak from Perkasa.
Such a battle's likely upshot: Ibrahim (left)
would lose the seat to PAS under whose banner the maverick politician
had campaigned and won the last election by a comfortable 8,000-plus
vote majority.
To
PAS it was better to have Ibrahim - who has always had his share of
hardcore support in a constituency from which he hails - as the winner
than to allow Umno the chance of gaining ground in Kelantan in a general
election in which the latter nurtured hopes of ousting PAS, after
coming close to doing so at the previous election in 2004.
An Ibrahim defeat, sustained in his own backyard, would seriously undermine his position as a loudhailer for Malay rights.
Predictably,
revelations emanating from the inquiry have cast grave doubt on
Mahathir's denial of responsibility for the fraudulent grant of
citizenship to Sabah's illegals, an action that savours of treason,
particularly in the wake of the intrusion at Lahad Datu of armed men
from the littoral islands of the Philippines.
