Should we fear China?

ONE constant theme that came up in my discussions with the business people during my recent visit to Pakistan was their great fear of China. I was told that official data on trade with the country’s giant neighbour do not reflect the true picture. Pakistan was importing much more from China than was recorded in official statistics since a great deal was being smuggled across the difficult-to-patrol border between the two countries. A number of industries had already been affected while several more were seriously threatened. What should Pakistan do?

Pakistan’s concerns are also those of other trading partners of China, most notably the United States. Before suggesting how Pakistan’s policy-makers, its industry, agriculture and service sector should deal with China’s growing presence in the global economy, I will first offer some broad data on China’s export performance. I will then indicate how the demise of the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) next year is likely to affect China and a country like Pakistan that must compete with Chinese exports. Finally, I will indicate how the United States is trying to protect some of the sectors threatened by China and why such an approach would not work for Pakistan.

Over the last couple of years, China has become a world trade superpower. Chinese officials expect total trade — exports as well as imports — to amount to $800 billion in 2003. This is equivalent to 80 per cent of China’s GDP of just over one trillion dollars and eleven per cent of world trade estimated at $7.25 trillion.

China is now a major exporter of textiles but its trade has been constrained by the MFA. The MFA took effect in 1974, principally to protect the textile industries of the developed world. In 1995, the members of the World Trade organization, including textile manufacturing developing countries, agreed to do away with the MFA by December 31, 2004. Beginning in 2005, there will be a more open textile and garment market not governed by quotas. However, individual countries could use duties to protect local textile and garment industries. The only country that will be subject to an implicit quota by the U.S. is China — a point I will discuss a little later.

How will the end of MFA affect countries such as Pakistan? The major impact of this change will be from increased competition from China. The World Bank estimates that China will control nearly half of the world’s clothing exports by 2010, up from about 20 per cent today. This increase will amount to some $120 billion worth of additional exports and these will come at the expense of other textile producers including Pakistan. The country likely to be hurt the most is Bangladesh, which currently exports $2 billion worth of garments to the United States.

While Pakistan and a number of other countries are being affected by China’s relentless export drive, it is the United States that has developed the largest trade deficit with that country. In 2002, China racked up a trade surplus of $103 billion with America. In 2003 it is likely to come up with an equal amount of surplus in its favour. This has created an enormous amount of political pressure on the administration of President George W. Bush to apply some controls on imports from China.

Given that President Bush will most likely face a serious challenge in the elections due in less than a year, it is not surprising that his administration has succumbed to political pressures to restrain China’s exports. On November 18, Washington announced that it would restrict a half-billion dollars’ worth of Chinese textile imports. It did not contend that China had broken any rules. Instead Washington made use of a proviso it had incorporated in the agreement it signed with Beijing as a condition for China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001. This agreement allowed the United States to limit the growth of Chinese textile imports to 7.5 per cent a year “if they were deemed to be disruptive to American producers.” This implicit quota could be applied until 2008.

The Chinese exports to the United States went well beyond that limit. In 2002, it imported $10.3 billion worth of textiles and clothing from China, representing a 41.7 per cent increase over the level reached in 1998. In other words, for this particular category of goods, Chinese exports had increased at the annual rate of nine per cent a year. American textile companies claim that they have been forced to cut 316,000 jobs over the last three years and blame Chinese exports rather than the slowdown in the American economy for this loss of jobs.

With the US now in an election year, the textile states — in particular the two Carolinas — exerted pressure on Washington to constraint Chinese imports. In announcing the decision to limit imports from China, Donald L. Evans, the US Commerce Secretary, said that his country had not trespassed international trade rules. “This decision demonstrates the Bush administration’s commitment to our trade rules and America’s workers” he said. But the politicians form the textile producing states wanted more. Senator Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina and a long-time supporter of protection for domestic textile companies and other industries, said that the administration had to go beyond the decision it had taken. “Without a comprehensive approach to limit imports of Chinese textiles and imports into this country, this is just another election year gimmick. It will last until the election and then it will be set aside,” he declared.

Pakistani textile exporters will remember that it was the same textile lobby and the same senator who successfully blocked their efforts to gain a better access for their products to large and lucrative US market in 2001. What they got instead was an insignificant concession which eventually led to additional exports of some items valued at about $50 million. This was not sufficient to compensate the Pakistani textile industry for the market it had lost when the American buyers, citing security concerns, pulled out of Pakistan. The US action against China is symptomatic of the overall approach of the developed world towards trade with poor countries.

That the US chose to act against China in the textile sector rather than in the sector of “computers, accessories and semi-conductors” is a reflection of the developed countries’ unease at poor nations’ encroachment upon their labour intensive sectors. Chinese exports in computers and related products are more than that of textiles, $15.5 billion as compared to $14.8 billion. It is in textiles that dozens of developing nations have a distinctive comparative advantage but, along with agriculture, this is the sector that remains most protected by rich nations.

Resort to protectionist policies in order to deal with the growing challenge from China is a short-sighted approach not only on the part of developed nations such as the United States. It would also be counter-productive for countries in Pakistan’s position which are increasingly feeling the impact of China’s growing economy and the rapid growth of its exports. China should be viewed as an opportunity, not as a problem.

We should take a more careful look at the rapidly changing Chinese economy and determine how it can benefit us. It has not been fully appreciated by those troubled by China’s seeming relentless export drive that its imports are growing even more rapidly than its exports. In the first nine months of this year, China’s imports have grown by 40.5 per cent to almost $300 billion. They may reach $395 billion for 2003. This sharp increase in imports reflects a fundamental change in China’s economic strategy — a shift from the post-Asian crisis policy of “using 1000 strategies and 100 plans to propel exports.”

Now with $400 billion of accumulated reserves, the Chinese authorities feel that they are in the comfortable position to increase investments in the domestic economy that would result in growth in imports. In fact, Wang Mengku, minister at the State Council Development Research Centre, an important government think-tank, said that “in the next three years, China’s imports would reach $1,000 billion, far out-pacing exports which would reach $1,000 billion only by 2020.” In other words, China in the coming years will have a significant trade deficit rather than a trade surplus.

There are two immediate reasons for this change. One, China is conscious of the fact that with the economy growing at seven per cent a year — perhaps at a rate even faster than that — its requirements for investment in infrastructure will increase enormously. Unless China improves its physical infrastructure, it will run into severe growth constraints. Even today, in spite of the massive public sector outlays on roads and bridges, China’s highways are chocked with traffic. This will worsen over time if investments don’t outpace the growing demand for road space. The same is true for railways and airports. Increased investment in infrastructure will inevitably lead to increased imports.

Second, China’s brisk pace of economic growth has been highly skewed in favour of the several cities and provinces strung along the east coast. This has caused a growing disparity in regional incomes. One way of addressing this problem is to allow more people to move towards the areas of economic strength. According to Wang Dayong, a director at China Development Bank, the largest policy bank in the country, China plans to shift 500 million people from the countryside to cities. “These people will need houses, sewage systems, water, heating, transport, electricity, telephones and many other amenities.” Meeting their needs will mean more imports, particularly of commodities and food.

The country already consumes between a fifth and a third of the world’s traded aluminium, copper, iron ore, stainless steel and zinc. This explains why Beijing has expressed a strong interest in investing in Balochistan’s Saindak copper mines. The rapidly growing demand in China for the goods and commodities Pakistan could supply presents us with an enormous opportunity that we should be able to exploit. As the Mexicans have discovered living next to a great economic power does not necessary hurt. It can, instead, be enormously helpful.

How to turn this potential into a reality? We need a three-pronged approach. First, the government, with the help of the private sector, should develop a multiyear strategy for developing trade with China. We should remember that China is rapidly running out of cultivable land while its increasingly prosperous population is demanding high value-added agricultural products. China could become a major market for Pakistan’s fruits and vegetables. Second, Pakistan should negotiate a trading arrangement with China with the ultimate objective of establishing a free trade area patterned after the North American Free Trade Agreement.

It is Nafta that has helped Mexico so much over the last several years. Finally, with Chinese assistance we should invest in improving our physical infrastructure that would help to develop trade with our neighbours. This will mean improving road and air links with China and also developing a multi-mode arrangement that would allow easy transfer of containers pulled by trucks to be put on wagon beds on the Pakistani railway system.

In other words, instead of losing our nerve at the prospect of increasing competition from China we should begin to develop a strategy in association with the Chinese to benefit from the presence of an economic colossus on our eastern border.

Safe New Year

ASSASSINATION is the political name for murder. There are, of course, several degrees of murder but an assassination is always pre-meditated and cold-blooded. No matter how lofty the cause or how noble the intent, it is murder most foul.

There have been, in the past fortnight, two attempts on the life of President Musharraf and they were close calls, some determined enemy or enemies of Pakistan out to eliminate him and in the process to create chaos and mayhem in the country. It is easy to look around and make a list of likely suspects but prima facie there appears to be some dark and deep conspiracy and the modus operandi of suicide-killings may lead the investigations in one direction but it is important that all options are kept open and there should be no rush to judgment.

The investigations should be thorough and should get to the core of the conspiracy. The person or persons who carry out the actual deed may be the least important elements in some grand design. These are truly trying and testing times for Pakistan, critical and extremely dangerous. This is a time too for some introspection. Have the people of Pakistan, the real people, been taken for granted so long that they feel that they do not have any stakes in the country? This is called alienation and it can lead to disconnect with the established order.

In addition to the war on terror in which we find ourselves embroiled as a front-line state, there is a deeply ingrained gun culture that we inherited from our earlier engagement in Afghanistan when the present day terrorists were glowingly described as Mujahideen who were fighting the godless Russians who had invaded their country. The Americans had embraced the Mujahideen as one of their own and money and guns had flowed like a torrent. Then too we had become a front-line state.

And when the guns had been silenced in that particular war and the Russians had fled in disarray, the Americans had left and we had to do the tidying up. What was left behind was not only a fractured Afghanistan but much weaponry and a flourishing heroin trade, both of which found their way into Pakistan.

Suddenly, Pakistan was awash with Kalashnikovs and they could be bought across the counter, far easier than buying illicit booze. At first, this gun became a status symbol much in the way that the VCR had become. It was openly displayed and people acquired bodyguards and Pajero jeeps and strutted about. Of course it was against the law but who cared?

Then groups began to acquire guns and political parties started to have an armed wing and criminal gangs started to branch out with armed dacoities and car-lifters pulled out pistols and it went on and on. Add to this the sophistication of rocket-launchers and bombs, all in private and illegal hands. No government has made any sort of attempt to disarm these private armies and the free-lance operators. When there has been law, there has been no order and when there has been order, there has been no law. The only ones who showed some respect for the gun laws were those who posed no sort of danger.

All this has been written about in the past, it is old hat. So too is the fact that we started to accept guns in our midst and the seeds were sown of a violent society and of the vigilante mindset.

Like heroin, guns are a flourishing business and many private fortunes were made and continue to be made. I saw a BBC documentary on the arms trade and the point was made that it was the AK-47 which was the real weapon of mass destruction being responsible for more than half a million deaths annually and the number is not getting less. Merge this gun culture with a variety of causes — criminal, political or ideological — and you get a lawless society and no matter what sort of spin we may want to put on it, this is what we have been for a long time.

We have had one kind of terrorism or the other and we have tended to dismiss it with the far too convenient “ hidden hand” and this has been seen to have been good enough to justify inaction. The perception is that there is some kind of official collusion in this general lawlessness for armed gangs seem to operate with impunity. Before we take on the external terrorists, we need to look within, at this gun culture. When a lowly car-jacker can pull out a pistol on a busy street and in broad daylight and make good his escape, something is seriously wrong. We don’t need tougher laws. We need to enforce those already on the books.

2003 has been a wretched year and a good riddance to it. There is nothing to suggest that 2004 will be any better. Indeed, after 9/11, the world has been transformed so that each day has become a new day in the horrors it brings. It is not just Iraq and the killings. It is not just the Israeli and Palestinian murders, it is not just Kashmir. These are specifics.

It is the mindset that has developed. Our sense of humanity has been numbed. A certain fatalism has crept in and even in countries that consider themselves to be advanced societies with institutional safeguards and traditions of political accountability, there is a certain fatigue. During the holiday season, the United States went on Orange Alert, which was the ringing of alarm bells. This was based on credible intelligence.

There is a thin line between vigilance and paranoia. And this line seems to be drawn on sand. 2003 was a bad year for intelligence. The Orange Alert cost one billion dollars a week. It is not for us mere mortals to say whether this was justified or whether such precautions would have been able to prevent a terrorist attack. One thing seems reasonably certain. An investment of a billion dollars in an Afghan and a Palestine refugee camp would lessen the number of terrorists. Compliments of the season all the same and not only a happy new year but a safe one as well.

In a gilded cage

AFTER yet another attempt on his life, President General Pervez Musharraf perhaps feels like a man who may have to live for a long time in a gilded cage known as the presidency of Pakistan.

Over the past four years — in the US, the natural life span of a presidency — President Musharraf has moved with such rapid speed forward that he has left behind many of those who collaborated with him in the task of changing the polity of Pakistan. The blueprints of that political revolution, the roadmap for social reconstruction down to the lowest level of responsible self-government, and the prescription for economic revival that he and his original team had sought to achieve have lost the first sharpness of their initial focus.

Since 1999, Pervez Musharraf has evolved from being a sectoral chief into a national head and now an international statesman, rubbing shoulders with superpowers. He has also become a prime target, a president in fear of his life within his own country. It cannot be a comfortable position for any man; it is an impossible position for a self-appointed leader of 150 million people.

It is a strange reality that at the moment, all Musharraf’s dependable friends are abroad, while at home he is beset by gratuitous enemies. For this he has both misfortune and himself to blame. Over the past four years, the justification he once offered a forlorn public for removing and exiling the political leadership has evaporated. Ms Benazir Bhutto continues to live in Dubai and London with the consummate skill of a levitationist, with no visible means of support. Her husband Asif Zaradari remains in antiseptic custody, suffering from ailments that no doctors can cure and only an obliging judiciary can ameliorate. Mian Nawaz Sharif resides in Jeddah, an honoured guest of the Saudis who allow him to make more money running a steel mill there and to pay fewer taxes than he did while resident in Pakistan.

Many of those whom the accountability bureau had vowed to bring to book appear to have turned over a new leaf. Some are enjoying ministerial positions (prime, national or provincial) or seats in the Senate. Others are free and as unencumbered as their assets. And those who thought they had bought justice by sharing a hefty percentage of their spoils with their prosecutors are flailing themselves for their naivety.

To many ordinary Pakistanis standing outside this magic circle, the past four years have been no more than a mirage. Nothing is as it should be; nothing is as it was promised to be. As to the future, nothing will be what Musharraf wants it to be, for there is a growing feeling within the country that although he continues to be everyone’s second choice as leader, he is no longer in command of the volatile situation.

And yet he ought to be, at least within his own borders. But there are within the very constituencies he relies upon to remain in power — the armed forces, the security apparatus, and the parliamentarians — rogue elements that would appear to be inimical to his policies. When he openly sided with the United States and its allies over the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, he alienated a very cross cross-section of local Muslim brotherhood. When his stage-managed elections yielded a barren harvest of familiar names and feudal archetypes, he became like his predecessors, simply another amateur magician waving his swagger stick over a box of tricks.

And significantly, when recently at a press conference with Reuters (held at his home late on December 17), he announced that he was prepared to ‘be bold and flexible’ over the UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir, ‘beyond stated positions, meeting halfway somewhere’, he caused many hardliners to wonder what had prompted him to be suddenly so accommodating. And if this concession had not been sudden, why such flexibility could not have been demonstrated when he met Indian prime minister Vajpayee at Agra?

The forthcoming Saarc meeting, scheduled in the first week of January 2004 at Islamabad and which prime minister Vajpayee has agreed to attend, cannot be the only reason. Saarc, as the Indians continually remind their Pakistani counterparts, is an aggregation of seven nations, each with a sovereign identity. Geography and their mutually antagonistic policies have made two of them — India and Pakistan — uncomfortably large, irascible co-occupants of the same regional womb.

No matter what President Musharraf and his advisers may expect, it will be unlikely that prime minister Vajpayeee would allow the Saarc meeting to shrink to bilateral levels. Unlike president Musharraf who went to Agra with the single point agenda of Kashmir, Mr Vajpayee is unlikely to allow himself to be similarly hamstrung. Instead, he is likely to insulate himself within the mundane inconsequence of Saarc-related matters. No matter what the expectations from the Pakistani side, the Indian stand on Saarc has been too consistent for too long to change overnight now.

At that same interview with Reuters, president Musharraf indicated that a meeting between him and prime minister Vajpayee was possible: ‘The ball is in his court. If he wants to meet me, I’ll meet him. If he doesn’t want to meet me, I am not that keen.’ The dictates of protocol though may not leave much room for such a choice. They will meet not because they necessarily want to, but because they have to; and when they do meet, they might well decide on a future course of action not because they have to, but because they want to.

Parallel to president Musharraf’s ricochet style of personal diplomacy is the subtler Twin Track II diplomacy being undertaken by Pakistan’s former foreign secretary Niaz A. Naik with some equally high-level Indian counterparts. The day before Musharraf’s dramatic and albeit conditional offer of flexibility, Mr Naik revealed that both the Pakistan and the Indian governments had given their respective negotiating teams a clearance to develop ‘an early understanding for the mutual reduction of defence expenditures.’ Echoing Mr Vajpayee’s vision of a common currency in the region, Mr Naik announced that the two teams ‘had proposed a common currency to be named as Rupa by 2010 for India and Pakistan.’

It would not be unthinkable therefore for Mr Vajpayee to use his forthcoming visit to Islamabad (an economical use of the return half of his bus-yatra ticket to Lahore) as a litmus test of the receptivity of these radical suggestions. They are extremely daring in their significance — militarily, politically and economically. They could not have been made casually, for Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee is a consummate strategist who has learned, over more than half a century of political vicissitudes, to look above the ordinary, and to act beyond the expected.

Does Atal Behari Vajpayee, one wonders, regard Pervez Musharraf as a proactive or a reactive person? Mr Vajpayee must know the answer, which is why he has agreed — Lahore, Kargil, and Agra notwithstanding — to travel to Islamabad, despite the risks. He wishes to retain the initiative in his own hands. He will speak his mind if he has to, and listen to his hosts empty theirs.

By just being in Islamabad, though, he will be able to assess for himself the extent to which president Musharraf’s position of unquestioned absolutism has been eroded since he assumed power in 1999, since 1990 when he met Mr Vajpayee in Agra, since 9/11, since he sided with the US and its allies against Iraq, since the recent agreement with the unlikely bedfellows of the rightist MMA, and since this bloody December of two near-miss assassination attempts.

He will undoubtedly notice that the president no longer rules; instead, he may see him more as a neo-constitutional monarch who now reigns in a neo-constitutional realm, a prisoner of his presidency.

A symbol for Afghanistan

DECADES of coups, invasions and war have devastated Afghanistan and left it measuring progress by the mile.

Last week, President Hamid Karzai cut a ribbon on the rebuilt road from Kabul, the capital, to Kandahar, the major southern city. The 300-mile journey, which had taken 30 hours, now should require six, an encouraging symbol of reconstruction. But the extraordinary security around the event showed how far the country must go to overcome resurgent Taliban fighters and how dependent it remains on foreign aid.

Afghanistan dropped off the radar screen of too many countries once they pledged billions to rebuild damage caused by war against Soviet invaders, civil conflict and the U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban rulers who opened the country to Al Qaeda. A 2002 international conference brought pledges of more than $5 billion. United Nations agencies estimated rebuilding would require twice that; the Afghan government this year said it would need $15 billion.

Most of the money spent went to feed and shelter refugees. Funds for reconstruction have been slower in coming. The United States has pledged well over $1 billion this year and should urge other nations to increase their aid.

Support for war on the Taliban after 9/11 was nearly unanimous, with none of the rancour that marked the war in Iraq. —Los Angeles Times

Saddam succeeds as he survives

SADDAM Hussein succeeded when he survived. The safest place, and certainly one more comfortable than a “rat-hole”, for Saddam Hussein after his defeat is a prison. A grave might have been safe, but not as comfortable. On the other hand, George Bush and Tony Blair might have been far comfortable if Saddam was in a grave instead of in their custody.

As reports of early interrogation indicate, Saddam was reduced to a hunted, dishevelled and lonely existence. The idea that he was in some kind of alternative headquarters, commanding a fine-tuned resistance is a myth put out partly to explain the high casualties that Americans have suffered ever since George Bush thought his mission had been accomplished with the fall of Saddam’s statue on April 9. The Iraqi fidayeen is a shadow army of the kind that has existed in other struggles against actual or perceived colonialism. It is a network of cells held together by conviction. Those who commit their lives in suicide missions do so for motives more substantial than Saddam Hussein.

Although Saddam Hussein was picked up on December 13, the story was missed by the Sunday papers because Washington held on to the news. The story was in fact broken by the official Iranian news agency, indicating, if nothing else, that Tehran knows as much about the neighbourhood as Baghdad. The Sunday Times, published from London, did not have Saddam, but it had a pretty good alternative on the 14th: an interview with Saddam’s second wife, Samira Shahbandar.

The interview was done at a restaurant called La Cottage, in Ba’albeck, near Beirut. Samira provided some interesting details. Saddam visited her on April 9, when he broke down while claiming that he had been betrayed. She last saw him at the Syrian border, when he said his farewells, and gave her a briefcase with $5 million in cash and 10 kg of gold bars before she went across with her son, Ali. (She has got permission to live in France and is headed for Paris in January.) But the most significant revelation was elsewhere. Saddam, she said, was in regular touch with her, and either called her or wrote to her at least once a week.

The most elementary fact about modern telecommunications is that the location of any call can be traced. Samira did not reach Lebanon on a flying carpet. She was helped by Syrian and Lebanese intelligence agencies; so they knew where she was. The best intelligence in the Arab region is with the Egyptians; it is highly unlikely that they were unaware of Samira’s whereabouts. It would be equally unlikely that CIA would not have sought such information, and got it as well. Samira’s alias would not have fooled the juniormost operator.

If The Sunday Times could locate Samira, surely it was not beyond the CIA’s abilities to do so. It is common sense that the surest way to Saddam would be through his family, if he kept in touch with them. Her telephone would certainly have been tapped, and by more than just the CIA. Every European power would have a vested interest in every scrap of information. This is inference, of course, not fact; but the CIA would have to be incompetent if it could not locate the precise whereabouts of Saddam Hussein through those telephone conversations with Samira.

The question, after that, would be what to do with Saddam. It would make eminent sense to keep him under surveillance in order to trace through him all those who were in touch with him. This would be vital intelligence if Saddam did in fact control a network of fidayeen who were leading the deathly resistance against the American occupation. The manner in which Saddam was picked up by a detachment of 600 troops indicates that those who gave the order for the mission knew exactly who the target was, and where the target was located.

The decision to arrest Saddam was taken when his use as a trapped prisoner was over; and his use as a “coward” who did not have the decency to die fighting could begin. The decision might, of course, have also been prompted by fears that someone else in the know (Mossad? the Iranians intelligence agency?) was ready to leak the story.

Saddam could not have expected to survive capture, particularly after the way his sons, Uday and Qusay, were gunned down in July. At the very least he must have expected the Americans to treat him in the way he treated his own enemies. The security of a cell must seem like a miracle. As a prisoner of war, Saddam can only be vilified, not arbitrarily eliminated. He is safe not only from American troops, but also from the thousands of Iraqis, particularly Shias, who have reasons for personal revenge. Some Washington voices are already hoping that he might be killed in prison by someone thirsting for personal revenge, but that would be an amateurish ploy. Saddam is not a conventional prisoner in an open, light-security rehabilitation centre.

Nor can Saddam Hussein be sent to Guantanamo Bay. He is going to be the world’s most famous prisoner as long as he lives, and he will now live longer than he might have expected on April 9. He will be tried in Iraq; that is non-negotiable. His trial will be the biggest story of the coming year — assuming it does begin next year. It will be covered in ways that may not entirely fit Tony Blair’s vision of the future of the Muslim world. Most Arabic television channels will not be reporting the trial of Saddam the tyrant, but of Saddam the symbol of anti-Americanism. Saddam was not much of a fox during his eight months in the desert, but he could become one during the years ahead in prison.

Saddam in power was a tyrant; Saddam in jail will be a victim. The Americans did themselves little good by putting out pictures of Saddam’s teeth being tested. Any suggestion of humiliation always invites sympathy, particularly on the Arab street. As we have learnt from other instances of history, the difference between tyrant and hero can sometimes be just a matter of circumstance. It would be dangerous for the Americans to permit one image to morph into the other.

Saddam will have enough opportunity to reposition himself during his trial, whenever that starts. Some very good legal minds will enjoy the opportunity of defending him, with fame as sufficient reward for their efforts. He is sharp enough to know how to handle his own space in the limelight. Saddam was forced to communicate with the world through amateurish audio or video tapes sent to media. He is an author of sorts, having inflicted bad fiction on Iraqis when in power. He could turn to non-fiction during the long hours of isolation.

The trial will be a formal opportunity for him to tell his side of the story, something that we have been denied. The great mystery of the weapons-of-mass-destruction could finally end, since there is no scientist now in Iraq who need fear Saddam’s return to power. Saddam himself will doubtless say, if given a chance, that what he had was exhausted after the end of the first Gulf war. He will of course happily provide the names of the American and European companies which helped to equip him with such weapons during the days when it was intended for the Iranians.

There are other questions. Was there, for instance, a last-minute deal offered through a Lebanese businessman that could have averted war? We do not know what went on in the shadows, but it is a safe guess that some of the revelations might not play very well in an election year in Peoria, not after Howard Dean has made full use of it in a one-to-one debate with George Bush.

But the most important consequence of Saddam’s capture is the shift in the political chessboard of Iraq. The Shias, so far, have been quiet, almost neutral, in the conflict between the Americans and the resistance, waiting for the antagonists of the first round to exhaust each other. They hated Saddam. The televised scenes of joy in Baghdad that were shown on Saddam’s arrest did not mention that most of those rejoicing were Shias. That did not mean that they were celebrating the American presence.

George Bush has said that America wants to hand over power to Iraqis by June 1 and go home. Saddam Hussein’s arrest should make this process easier, because he is definitely out of play. But which Iraqis will inherit and how will their legitimacy be defined? If the means is going to be popular will then the ends might suit Tehran better than Washington. Such an evolution could become troublesome in an election year. If the Americans stay, the body bags will mount; if they leave, the chant from Baghdad’s streets will leave the American voter wondering what precisely George Bush achieved in Iraq.

The thought refuses to go away: has Saddam Hussein been caught too soon for Bush’s electoral comfort? Has the applause come too early? The capture of Saddam next August or September would have given the defining bounce in opinion polls, without ebb-time.

There is another high-profile fugitive on the White House’s wish list. Perhaps a quiet word to Kabul and Islamabad should be passed on is that the best time to get lucky is the middle of next year. George Bush once said, Texas-style, that he wanted Osama dead or alive. Would he now prefer to delete one of those options?

The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.