China shows the way

IN the past, top Pakistani leaders visiting China used to come back greatly impressed by that country’s economic achievements and social progress. Asked why we could not do the same as China became free two years after us, following a fierce Japanese invasion and a prolonged civil war, the reply invariably used to be “they are communists and we are Muslims.”

But now following largely the free-market economy, China has made incredible progress in the economic sphere and in other areas. As we follow the same capitalist mode, why can’t our economic progress be more rapid and social achievements less demoralizing? Most of our leaders are non-plussed, and they shrug their shoulders, and come up with no convincing answers.

A ten per cent economic growth for ten years in the 1990s has brought China to where it is today with a per capita income of 1,025 dollars, while ours is a very low 425 dollars, with almost 40 per cent of the people living below the poverty line of a dollar a day.

Nobel prize winner for economics Amartya Sen said recently the Indians have votes but no access to education and public health services without which the people can’t feel free.

In many countries in Asia there is neither real democracy nor access to education and public health services for all, nor other human rights, whether they call themselves a democracy, a people’s democracy, or a guided democracy. In such states the people are total losers subject to various abuses.

Many of these countries depend on foreign investment now for their economic growth; but even there they are disappointed. President Musharraf told the leaders of the OIC countries in Malaysia recently that the 55 Muslim countries together got foreign investment of less than 15 billion dollars, but China got 55 billion dollars in a year.

The basic difference between Pakistan and China is in the leadership and the driving force of the leaders. Pakistan is ruled by military commanders along with feudal lords and tribal chiefs assisting them or by bureaucrats and their cronies. The assemblies are packed with their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, nephews and nieces, belonging to both the ruling party and the opposition.

President Musharraf had been on an unprecedented visit to China in terms of achievements or the number of agreements signed. As many as 28 agreements were signed within two days although the preparations for them took months. Eight of them were between the two governments and 20 between the private sectors on both sides. The private sector is to be greatly involved in the enlarged cooperation in various fields which will culminate in large scale mango export to China from Pakistan. They have agreed to strengthen the Pakistan-China business council as well.

Both sides attach a great deal of importance to the roadmap for cooperation between them in various ways.

Pakistan has been complaining that while we import a good deal from China our exports to China are small. For example while Pakistan imported goods worth 838 million dollars from China last year, it exported goods valued at 244.6 million dollars to China. That is to be rectified to some extent by the new preferential trade agreement signed between the two countries which lowers the tariff on 893 items importable from by Pakistan by China and on 200 items imported by Pakistan from China.

One of the reasons why Pakistan has not been able to export much to China is the comparative high price. The preferential trade agreement (PTA) will make such goods cheaper for China. It is for Pakistan to lower its profits enough to make them attractive to the Chinese and also to organize proper sales campaigns.

We can’t blame the private sector alone for not making enough efforts to sell more to China. We do not have a consulate or a trade centre in Shanghai so far. One is to open there soon.

The PTA is eventually to lead to free trade area between the two countries. If the Pakistani goods are truly competitive in terms of prices and quality, and the sales tactics of our businessmen are efficient and clean, they can profit by the PTA. And that holds good for our PTA negotiations with many other countries, including the US. It is a case of the survival of the fittest.

The fact is that China is the third largest importer in the world. It is for our businessmen to make the bet use of this opportunity when the two countries have been historically very close. The federation of chambers of commerce and industry should set up a special cell to promote trade with China. But one thing certain is that Pakistani businessmen have to seek lower profits than they tend to do to export more and establish their markets in China.

The EXIM Bank of China has offered a credit of 500 million dollars to Pakistan to finance various essential projects. The president of the Bank will visit Pakistan next month and the projects to be financed through this fund will be finalized then.

The Pakistan-China joint economic committee is to meet soon to review progress in economic cooperation made so far and map out the new strategy for the structured new cooperation. Now along with helping to build Gwadar port the coastal highway and develop the Saindak copper and gold project China is to help develop the Thar coal project in a big way. The project was delayed due to the break-out of Sars in East Asia. Now, to make up for that 100 engineers are to come next month for the essential hydraulic survey. Meanwhile, for the first time 1,000 tonnes of blister copper has been exported from Saindak —-the output of the last two months which will fetch 45 million dollars.

President Musharraf has also offered special zones exclusively for China to develop its industries or an export free zone. It is not clear whether China has accepted this offer.

Four more agreements were signed in South Korea during President Musharraf’s visit to that country. The bilateral agreement provides for cooperation in the fields of information technology, oil and gas and mineral sector. One agreement relates to export and commercial credit facilities. The two governments have agreed to establish the Pakistan-Korea joint working group in energy and mineral cooperation to pursue that seriously.

The fact is there have been no dearth of agreements to enlarge economic cooperation with other countries. With the fondness of our rulers to undertake frequent foreign trips they sign many agreements, and reach many understandings; but many of them are not implemented as earnestly and expeditiously as they should be. So the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank complain of our lack of institutional capacity to undertake major ventures or complete the ongoing projects quick.

We talk a great deal about economic cooperation with Central Asia, and hold the unsettled conditions in Afghanistan as a road-block. We have no such problems in the Gulf states, and yet our volume of trade with them has been very small despite the large presence of Pakistanis there.

We talk of the great role the ECO of ten states can play, but before that we had the Cento and then the RCD with Iran and Turkey as their members. And yet our volume of trade with both these Muslim states is very small. So now we talk of a one billion dollar trade, both-way, with Iran as a great goal.

China has been wanting us to make greater efforts to promote our exports to it; but we have made small efforts. The Phillips Electrical Company of the Netherlands went to China to open a factory and meet the demands of one billion people for radio and TV and they stayed back there to open 28 factories which exported their goods all around the world at a far lower price than before.

Is the reason for such poor performance the sluggishness or lack of enterprise of the private sector? Is it their desire to tread only the beaten path? Is it because of the small exportable surplus we have or the high profits our businessmen seek everywhere?

It is time we make a proper study before we sign more agreements .

When it comes to public sector projects the plans are often not ready when foreign aid is available. We then pay interest on the accumulated unutilized aid or let the aid be withdrawn. Sometimes the approval of the provinces has not been obtained for the project, as in the case of Kalabagh dam after an expensive feasibility study using foreign aid.

China does not have a trade surplus with all countries. It has a deficit with several Asian countries, including Malaysia. Although its trade surplus with the US is around 120 billion dollars, its total trade surplus with the world this year is only 19.6 billion dollars. According to the projection for the next year, it may have a trade deficit in view of its large imports. Hence if Pakistani exporters try hard, systematically and earnestly, they can certainly export far more to China.

Why Bush needs the visit badly

WE all know the feeling. You glance at the diary and realize you have guests coming to stay next week, when nothing could be less convenient. They’re coming from abroad, expecting to be entertained for several days and it’s far too late to cancel. This is the last thing you need.

So spare a thought for Tony Blair, as he scans the calendar and sighs. There are the dates, circled and unyielding: November 18 to 21 — Bush in Britain. He knows what it will mean. His guest is the most unpopular US president in living memory. The anti-war movement will be back on the march, gearing up for its biggest outing since it brought up to two million Britons onto the streets in February. Blair will have to make yet more speeches like the one at Guildhall on Monday, once again defending the war on Iraq. And for a fortnight, starting now, all eyes will focus not on the domestic agenda by which his government will eventually be judged, but on the matter which has brought him greatest grief since taking office.

A Times poll found half the public regard Blair’s closeness to George Bush as bad for Britain; next week will show the two of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, in coverage that will be wall-to-wall. Blair must want to shout up the stairs to Cherie: “I never wanted him to come here in the first place. Whose bloody idea was this?”

As well he might ask. For no one seems ready to own up to this particular invitation. “It came up as a matter of routine,” says a Foreign Office spokesman, “all American presidents get them in their first term.” Except Bush’s trip can hardly be described as routine. He will be the first US president to come to Britain on a state visit — with all the extra lashings of ceremony and royal red carpet that that term implies. (There was big hoopla for Woodrow Wilson in 1918 but even that, the protocol experts say, did not quite count.)

Working visits are common enough, but a royal welcome is not given easily: Bill Clinton had to wait till his final month in office before he had an invitation to take tea at Buckingham Palace. Bush will be staying there as a house guest.

So how did it happen? The foreign office suggests a call to the palace, who promptly insist this was not their doing. “This whole visit is being done with advice — with a capital A,” says a palace spokeswoman firmly. The royal family did not do this on their own; the government was involved. The two sides cannot even agree on when this wizard idea first surfaced. The foreign office says it was settled in June 2002; the palace and US embassy say the first they heard of it was early this year.

All of which makes you wonder if even the hosts are getting cold feet. You can hardly blame them. For who does this trip really benefit? Not Blair, who’s getting a headache he could do without. Not the Queen, who has an allergy to political controversy and, given recent events, can hardly be eager to see her already beleaguered institution tarred by association with the “toxic Texan”.

No, there is only one beneficiary of this visit and it is the Bush White House. With an election campaign looming, they are anxious to deflect the accusation that Bush is isolated. They want to show he has allies and friends around the world and few play better in the US than Tony Blair, whose American ratings put his home numbers in the shade.

That explains why Bush is keen to be seen with the PM, but not why he might want the full flummery of a state visit. A clue can be found in the text studied more closely than any other by the political operatives in the Bush White House: the campaign to re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984. That made heavy use of TV footage which cast Reagan as a statesman, at home across the globe. A favourite sequence showed the president and the Queen on horseback in Windsor Great Park during his 1982 visit. The Bush team wanted some royal shots like that of their own. Apparently they were particularly keen on an open-carriage procession down the Mall, and are said to be disheartened by London’s suggestion that that might not be possible due to “security”.

One Republican source, close to the White House, has a theory as to why the Queen is such an important catch for the image makers. “Look, Americans don’t know shit. They’re not going to recognize the prime minister of the Philippines. The only foreign leaders they could pick out are the Queen of England and the Pope — and we’ve already got those pictures.” With the Pontiff in the can, the Queen is the co-star the president needs.

Getting the first ever state visit for a US president was a big request, but team Bush had just the man to make it. William Farish, the US ambassador to London, has been the invisible man of the diplomatic circuit since he arrived here. But he has one asset: he is a genuinely close friend of the Windsors. A racing fanatic, he even trains and keeps the Queen’s horses at his Kentucky estate.

According to this version, it is Washington, not London, which is driving next week’s visit. Even the timing is designed to suit them: late November is the run-up to Thanksgiving, with Congress due to be in recess and a convenient drought of rival news. They could not wait till next year, when the election campaign will be at full throttle, and when foreign jaunts risk Bush Sr Syndrome — spending too much time abroad when the Americans want their president to fix things at home. Next week is the time that best suits the Republican re-election effort, so that is the week he is coming. My Republican source detects the hand of Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political counsellor: “Rove is driving the timing and image-making of all this.”

If this is the White House’s thinking, some UK government officials wonder if they might have blundered. The best pictures from next week may be of a giant Bush statue being toppled, Saddam style, in Trafalgar Square. If rioters on heat, rather than a president on horseback, is the defining image of the visit, won’t that be a failure? Not necessarily.

So long as the protesters look like the usual suspects — multiply pierced, Genoa-style activists in torn clothes and mohican haircuts — then, I’m told, the White House will not worry. They will be able to say Bush enjoys the global support of all but a few anarchist weirdos. If the demonstrators look like the UK equivalent of America’s “soccer moms”, regular people of all ages, including plenty of women — tricky to bring out on a weekday — then Washington may have to rethink.

It seems incredible that the White House could breezily decide to use Britain as a backdrop for a glorified ad campaign — and be granted its wish. The government insists it really wants this visit, that a relationship with the sole superpower cannot be taken for granted, but has to be, in Jack Straw’s words, “maintained and nurtured”.

But this seems a stretch. If Britain, which continues to lose soldiers in Iraq, and Blair, who has put his entire prime ministership in jeopardy, have not already done enough to maintain and nurture this relationship, then what kind of relationship is this? — Dawn/Guardian Service

Buried alive by the government

THE horrifying case of former CIA officer Edwin P. Wilson recalls the words of the great American thinker, H.L. Mencken: ‘Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.’

The Wilson case has outraged me for 20 years. In 1982, the federal court in northern Virginia — the same hang-em high, Soviet-style court the Feds now use to try terrorism cases — sentenced Wilson to 10 years in prison for selling 22 tons of explosive to Libya. He was also convicted on shaky charges of attempted murder and sentenced to another 15 years. Wilson, now 75 years old, has served 20 years in maximum security prison.

I always believed Wilson was innocent and spoke to him many times in prison. ‘I was framed by the government,’ Wilson told me, ‘they want me to disappear. I know too much.’ His words shake me to this day. ‘They buried him alive in prison,’ a former CIA official confided to me.

Last week, Federal District Judge Lynn Hughes in Houston, Texas, threw out Wilson’s two-decades old conviction. She wrote: ‘government knowingly used false evidence against him,’ concluding ‘honesty comes hard to government’.

Wilson was no angel. The veteran, tough as nails CIA field agent who specialized in running arms and mounting coups — one of the agency’s old-time ‘cowboys.’ In 1971, Wilson officially ‘retired’ from CIA and went into business on his own. In reality, CIA used Wilson for potentially explosive clandestine deals it wanted to keep ‘deniable.’

I first heard of Wilson and partner, Frank Terpil, while covering the Angolan War between Soviet and Cuban-backed Marxist forces and Jonas Savimbi’s anti-communist Unita guerilla army. Unita was secretly armed by South Africa and the US, but Washington did not want to be seen as an ally of the apartheid regime. So CIA used Wilson and Terpil to channel arms to Savimbi, using CIA-front firms and banks in Asia and Europe.

In the late 1970’s, CIA sent Wilson and Terpil to Libya to covertly strengthen the regime of Muammar Qadhafi. Washington planned to use the fiery Libyan leader as its strongman in North Africa, just as it was using longtime CIA ‘asset’ Anwar Sadat in Egypt.

Wilson sold Libya C-4 explosives and arms, and sent teams of ex-Green Berets to train Libyan commandos and ‘terminate’ some of Libya’s many enemies abroad. But while CIA was backing Qadhafi, the new Reagan Administration sought to distance itself from the soft policies of the Carter Administration by denouncing Muammar Qadhafi as the world’s leading terrorist and a threat to America.

CIA was ordered to overthrow Qadhafi, putting the agency in a frightfully embarrassing dilemma. Bureaucratic panic erupted at Langley. The Libyan operation was immediately shut down and all records destroyed. As word of secret US backing of Qadhafi leaked out, Wilson and Terpil were cut adrift and proclaimed outlaws. They fled to the Mideast. In 1982 Wilson was lured by American agents to the Dominican Republic, kidnapped to the US, and charged with gun-running.

During numerous trials, Wilson maintained he had been working for CIA. He was not allowed to cross-examine CIA witnesses for ‘security reasons’ — shades of today’s terrorism trials.

A third-ranking CIA official provided a false affidavit to justice department prosecutors that the agency ‘had no knowledge of Edwin P. Wilson.’ This was a lie, a fact discovered by Wilson’s tenacious lawyer, David Adler, by pouring through 300,000 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. A lie prosecutors were aware of, found Judge Hughes, who said the jury would have acquitted Wilson had government told the truth.

In the early 1980s, an old friend, Ed G, an Iranian-born American accountant with no intelligence experience, was convinced by CIA it was his ‘patriotic duty’ to go to Iran and build a new agent network in Tehran to replace the previous one rolled up by the Islamic revolution.

After three years of amateurish spying, Ed’s cover was blown. He fled for his life. On returning to the US, Ed called his CIA controller and was told, ‘there is no one here by that name, and we have no record of you.’ Another disaster was simply erased by throwing agents to the wolves. Penniless, Ed was reduced to begging money from friends and finally working as a shoe salesman. Compared to Wilson, he was lucky.

It is terrifying to see government’s massive weight crush an innocent man. Wilson became America’s ‘man in the iron mask.’ Judge Hughes called the case ‘double-crossing a part-time, informal government agent.’ She aptly used the term ‘framed’ to qualify this disgusting legal outrage. High justice department officials involved in this crime are today serving judges. They, and the retired CIA official, should be prosecuted.

The Wilson case should remind us of all the US justice department’s recent and ongoing ‘terrorism’ prosecutions, where individuals, mostly foreign-born, poor, and uneducated — many of them Pakistanis — have had the book thrown at them and are threatened with life terms if they do not confess to crimes. While truth is the first victim of nationalist hysteria, justice is always the second.

In spite of Judge Hughes’ ruling, The government refuses to release Wilson and is now considering an appeal. This is a disgrace.— Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2003

The challenge that beckons us

MANY people think that Islam has defined forever the contours of societal change. But Iqbal thinks that the essence of a nation’s life lies in its passion for constant change. He bemoans the fact that the Muslim community possesses no more its pristine vigour.

“Prayer, fasting, Haj, sacrifice survive

But, in thee nature’s old dower is no more.”

What has gone awry? Why does a community, the sole purpose of which is to remain alive by constant reinvigoration, seek its refuge in old familiar affirmations or glimpses into its past glory? The history of any vigorous community lies in its attempts to reinterpret and reimplement remedies designed for an earlier age:

Keen as a sword that fate holds in its hands is a folk

Mindful to reckon its deeds casting their sum afresh in each age.

Our society, which has been decaying for centuries, needs to be galvanized. To galvanize a society means to stimulate it by electric shock. We are being told that a Muslim society does not represent a constructive force and that it espouses terrorism. How do we turn this society around? We cannot sink any lower.

We have resources which some of the most advanced societies do not have. They use our oil to perpetuate their hegemony. It seems that we shall be accepted only if we resign ourselves to our decline as a law of nature. Our survival depends on accepting our status as hewers of wood and drawers of water.

For us education has become a passport to a job. The purpose of education is to prepare a society for radical regeneration. Those who dominate us have to come to their knees and accept that the course we are charting has hardly had any parallel. Other societies have risen from their decline to higher levels, but our decline is unique in the sense that we cannot descend any lower.

History for us is no longer, to quote Lord Keynes, “a peregrination in the catacombs with a guttering candle.” Old solutions cannot work. The United States and the western world have gone far beyond the old industrial economy of manufactured goods. They have become technocratic societies. They do not operate a vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner operates itself.

Our traditional leaders, Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, can unleash destructive forces. But, this is not the challenge that we face. Our old societies have to be replaced by a new society not of just peace and order, but a society which is committed to a perpetual revolution.

Have we forgotten the tradition of the Prophet which told us in no mistaken terms that water, forests and minerals should be under public control? Keeping this tradition in mind, in Iqbal’s Baal-i-Jibreel, we should ponder over “God’s Command to His angels”:

Find the field whose harvest is no peasant’s daily bread

Garner in the furnace every ripening ear of wheat!

Banish from the house of God the mumbling priest whose prayers like a veil creation from Creator separate!...

Rear for me another temple, build its walls with mud —

Wearied of their columned marbles, sickened is my sight!

We should remind ourselves constantly how Iqbal interpreted Tipu Sultan’s legacy to his succeeding generations:

O, tiny drop of water, advance and become a roaring ocean

If a seashore is granted to you do not accept the seashore.

The writer is professor emeritus of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada.

Saving Private Lynch

ANYONE curious to know more about America’s most famous POW can choose between two Jessica Lynch stories. The Jessica Lynch story being pushed by the Pentagon and US media — the latest twist of which is that Lynch was sodomised by her Iraqi captors. Or the Jessica Lynch story pieced together by those concerned with facts. The disparity between these two stories has all manner of disturbing implications.

In terms of content, the Pentagon-media story wins hands down. It is a thrilling tale of a young girl who went to fight for her country in Iraq. Disaster struck when the convoy she was travelling in was ambushed by the Iraqis. As her colleagues were killed around her, Jessica fought on with her M-16. It was a losing battle though, and eventually the Iraqis captured her. Already injured, she was then subjected to beatings, stabbing and broken bones. Her horrific ordeal came to an end when American special forces carried out a daring night-time raid to rescue her.

Jessica’s story of courage and suffering, and her fellow soldiers’ determination to rescue ‘one of our own’, touched the hearts of the Americans across the country. Jessica became a national heroine. Everyone (from the president down) was full of praise for her; everyone shared the joy of her rescue; everyone wanted to hear her story. That story is told in her authorized biography, released this week. Its title ‘I am a soldier too’ refers to what Jessica said when her rescuers told her they were American soldiers.

The Hollywood movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’ told a story quite unrelated to the reality of World War Two. ‘Saving Private Lynch’ falls into the same category, having very little to do with what actually happened to Jessica Lynch. The facts, pieced together from Lynch, American soldiers, the Iraqi doctors who treated her and others, tell a completely different story.

Considerably less thrilling, this is the story of a young woman who enlisted so she could earn money to study as a kindergarten teacher. It is the story of a convoy that took the wrong route and ended up in Iraqi-held territory. It is the story of a woman who did not fire a single shot, who got on her knees and prayed as fighting raged around her, and who suffered multiple injuries (including broken bones) when the Humvee she was travelling in crashed. Those RTA injuries were the only injuries she suffered. In this story it is the Iraqis who saved her life: Iraqi surgeons operated on her, Iraqi hospital staff donated blood for her and put her in their one specialist bed, an Iraqi nurse sang to her. An Iraqi doctor risked his life by putting Lynch in an ambulance and telling the driver to take her to the nearest American check-post. The driver had to turn back with Jessica when the Americans started firing at him.

The ‘daring’ rescue mission took place after the Americans had verified that there were no ‘fedayeen’ in the hospital. The raid could have been a Hollywood film shoot — the huge numbers of Navy Seals involved and the commando-esque manner in which it was carried out were hardly needed, given that there were no Iraqi soldiers present and the doctors were all too willing to hand Lynch over. On hand to record the ‘historic moment’ was the army’s own cameraman. Within hours journalists had been roused from their beds to hear — and see edited footage of — the ‘breaking news’ of Jessica Lynch’s rescue.

After her rescue, Lynch became a national heroine — and profited from her fame as well as lucrative interview deals. She shared a one million dollar advance with journalist Rick Bragg for writing her biography. Bragg is the journalist who resigned from the New York Times after it was discovered that he had repeatedly lied to the paper and its readers.

The sodomising rape allegation contained in his book has never before been made public. Iraqi doctors who treated Lynch vehemently deny she was raped, while she herself has no memory of what happened. The evidence for rape cited by Bragg is taken from ‘secret’ medical records. A shocking revelation, it has ensured maximum publicity as the book is released — and massive book sales. Jessica Lynch does not need to study anymore. As a celebrity her future includes appearances on Letterman and Larry King (among others), more lucrative deals — and of course, the inevitable Hollywood movie.

Seldom has a news story been so blatantly twisted. Seldom has such a huge untruth been peddled so shamelessly and for so long. The facts of Jessica Lynch’s capture and rescue are available for all, yet many in America turn a blind eye to them and persist with the fiction of heroism and courage. This distortion took place — and is being perpetuated — because of a convergence of the interests of the administration on one hand, and the media, on the other.

It is not difficult to see why the Pentagon needs an inspiring war story. The war in Iraq has gone anything but according to plan. The Iraqis initially put up more resistance than expected; Saddam disappeared and has still not been found; nor have any of the fabled weapons of mass destruction; the Iraqi people failed to welcome their American ‘liberators’; attacks against occupying forces have increased precipitously — last week’s thirty-plus American body bag toll was one of the highest since the US troops entered Iraq. Given the rising armed resistance within Iraq, and the international community’s reluctance to take over security duties in Iraq, America’s Iraq adventure is in serious trouble.

Against this gloomy backdrop, tales of ‘heroism’ like that of Jessica Lynch are a lifeline for the administration. They allow it to push a positive, ‘feel good’ story, and thereby to deflect attention from less savoury aspects of the war like American body bags, missing WMD, and the ‘intelligence’ used to justify the war. Let Americans rejoice in the release of Jessica Lynch and admire her courage; don’t let them ask awkward questions about why they are embroiled in the Iraq mess. Given this agenda, the Bush administration has to present Lynch as a heroine.

The media’s interests are more commercial. The fictional Jessica Lynch story — replete with fighting Jessica, villainous Iraqis and daring rescue — makes far better copy than the mundane reality of a non-heroine injured in a road accident and a rescue operation that was a walkover. Newspapers, magazines, TV networks, publishers, movie makers and the growing manufacturers of Jessica souvenirs, all stand to make big profits from the ‘Saving Private Lynch’ story. Given this agenda, it is not difficult to see why they go along with the administration’s distortion.

The Jessica Lynch saga — what happened to her and how it has been presented — has all manner of disturbing implications. The commercialization of the media is one; its lack of objectivity and factualness, another. A third is that if something so clearly fictional can be propagated so shamelessly and persistently, what does it say about the other information given out by the administration and the media? How much of that can be believed? And there is more.

While Lynch is feted as a heroine simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, others are forgotten. Lori Piestewa, a Native American and single mother of two, was in the same convoy as Lynch and died fighting the Iraqis. No one is telling her story. Shoshana Johnson, a black American woman, was captured like Lynch and held for three weeks before being released by advancing American troops. Her discharge payment from the army is one-third that of Lynch’s. Again, no one is telling her story.

It is clear that, as the Pentagon and the media pushed their story of American heroism they needed an all-American hero to play the lead role. White, blonde Jessica Lynch fitted the role far better than Indian Lori or black Shoshana. She became the heroine, while Lori and Shoshana were sidelined. Implicit in this ‘casting’ is a deep-seated racism and discrimination in American society, persisting in spite of laws and rights guaranteeing equality.

These then are the two Jessica Lynch stories: one a fictional tale of courage and heroism, the other a factual tale of lies, greed and discrimination. Little wonder most Americans choose to believe the former.

Reinventing California

PERHAPS just once this year did the California Legislature look more ridiculous than during its rancorous budget debates. Back in June, lawmakers came within two votes of defeating a resolution to honour fathers on Father’s Day. Fourteen lawmakers refused to vote at all, afraid of going on the record.

A change of attitude is evident now in Sacramento, almost a dazed awakening after the recall. Newly humbled Democrats fear that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election could mean that their seats are in jeopardy. Republicans promise to work hand in hand with the incoming governor, who is more moderate than most of them.

Unfortunately, the structural flaws that left the Legislature frozen are still in place. One is term limits. Another is the drawing of district boundaries so that districts are safe for the party in the seat but hostile to the moderate strain of thought that used to prevail in the Legislature and the state.

That brings us back to the Father’s Day resolution, which was a struggle of cultures as well as ideology. Four of the 80 Assembly members, including the resolution’s sponsor, San Diego Assemblywoman Christine Kehoe, are openly gay. Kehoe’s resolution honoured fathers “including single fathers, foster fathers, adoptive fathers, biological fathers, stepfathers, families headed by two fathers, grandfathers raising grandchildren, fathers in blended households and other nontraditional fathers.” — Los Angeles Times