His political endurance as prime minister was phenomenal — from 1981 to 2003 — and firm, to a fault, but perhaps because of his own humble origins, he could not abide the rise of Anwar as his most obvious challenger — nor the latter's easy level of cultural comfort with the West.

Unlike his three predecessors, the products of Malay royal families, Mahathir was the son of schoolteachers and held menial jobs as a youth. It may be that such humble roots rendered his true nature as insecure in its interior as it was steely in its public persona. Perhaps the triumphalist West only stirred up those insecurities. Mahathir struck me — on the more than one occasion we met — as a true Southeast Asian enigma who could aim for the stars but sometimes shoot himself and his country in the foot. The West- bashing and Jew-bashing, in particular, did not become him. He could and should have been better than this.

To Mahathir's credit, however, his hand-picked successor, Badawi, got off to a terrific start from the very beginning. But the political paradox now is that, as Anwar is free, the new prime minister may face a political challenge that his mentor deigned to handle only through the time-honored techniques of the autocrat. Whatever, Badawi has performed an immeasurably magnificent public service for his nation that could endure for a long time to come, no matter how short or long his PM tenure.

In the final analysis, we must understand, Malaysia transcends mediocrity on the world stage to the extent that a genuine rule of law, enforceable by the courts, underpins that which is humane and just (in the secular sense) in its society, reduces the capricious and the mendacious, and elevates the highest ethical and humanitarian principles to something akin to standard operating civic procedure.

The crucial role of a judiciary cannot be overstated in both economic as well as political terms. In Pakistan, the military rules; in China, the party predominates. But where the courts are not a joke, outsiders (such as investors) as well as citizens (such as common folk) benefit from a climate of relative equity and predictability. India, for example, is far behind China as the recipient of foreign direct investment. But that will not long be the case as long as India's court system increasingly demonstrates an appropriate judicial independence that seeks to keep this sprawling democracy on an equitable and just keel without usurping the constitutional institutions of electoral democracy.

The Malaysian and Indian examples also hold lessons for the West. We must not be complacent about our own judicial institutions. They are indeed the bedrock of civilized society. In America, the fierce debate over the constitutionality of the Guantanamo prison is not so much a question about the president's right to wage a difficult war against terrorists with special leeway, or even a partisan effort to embarrass the Republican administration. It's an honest effort to answer the question: Is there a twilight zone in which there is no applicable law? Let us dearly hope not.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that in effect insists on the applicability of constitutional guarantees even to terror suspects was, like the Malaysian high court decision, noble and right. When good things such as this happen in our troubled world, it's a big mistake not to dwell on them at length. Really good news doesn't surface that often.