America The rescue of American soldier Jessica Lynch from captivity in southern Iraq has caused great jubilation in her home town of Palestine, West Virginia, writes Conor O'Clery
It has also underlined how many American children from impoverished communities use the army not as a career but as a stepping stone to higher education. Jessica, whose ancestors came from Derry, lived in a tin-roofed wood framed house on a gravel road in the county of Wirt.
About 15 per cent of the 5,000 population there are unemployed. Her father Gregory Lynch is a self-employed truck driver and the family could not afford to send her to college. She joined up to get a college education and qualify as a nursery school teacher. Jessica visited Charleston 70 miles away to buy clothes before reporting to the army base at Fort Bliss, Texas.
She had never been to Charleston before and wondered to a friend if that was what New York looked like. The 19-year-old was not meant to be involved in combat and was in a supply column which ran into an ambush on March 24th. Now she is an all-American heroine. Universities are queuing up to offer her scholarships and West Virginia's Governor Bob Wise is planning to proclaim a "Jessica Lynch Day". A movie is inevitable: Rescuing Private Lynch.
* * * * * *
The broadcast on Al-Jazeera television of pictures of Jessica Lynch and other American prisoners of war, along with the corpses of US and British soldiers, was followed by a ban on the Arab news channel by the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The exchange cited "security reasons" and said the news channel was not providing "responsible" coverage. This had not concerned Wall Street before.
Indeed the NYSE boasts that "in addition to television heavyweights CNBC, CNNfn, Bloomberg and Reuters, multiple broadcasters from around the world are represented at the exchange, including, for example, Al Jazeera, an Arabic-language news channel based in Qatar . . ." Media watchdogs in the US expressed outrage, saying the decision flew in the face of the very freedoms the US claims to be promoting in Iraq.
By banning Al Jazeera, the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world watched by 35 million people, the NYSE is in good company. Iraq threw out an Al-Jazeera correspondent this week. Richard Grasso, chairman and chief executive of the NYSE, who made news himself in 1999 when he was photographed in Columbia embracing Raul Reyes, head of finances for the Marxist guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), has had to deal with other controversies this week that have clouded NYSE's image.
Citigroup boss Sanford Weill was nominated as a director to represent public investors on the NYSE's 27-member board, despite a conflict of interest scandal among stock research analysts at Citigroup's Salomon Smith Barney unit which forced the company to agree to pay $400 million in fines. After outrage from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Weill withdrew his name this week. Goldman Sachs executive Todd Christie also withdrew his nomination as one of six new board members. Critics say the NYSE, which has promoted corporate reform, needs to review its own governance policies.
* * * * * *
The display of POWs in the media is a violation of the Geneva Convention, as Donald Rumsfeld was quick to point out, but there has been quite a bit of it in the US. On NBC Nightly News a camera crew shone lights in the faces of kneeling and handcuffed Iraqis as embedded correspondent Kerry Sanders showed the "humanitarian daily ration" supplied by US forces.
After two weeks of war, the Pentagon has begun to analyse its decision to "embed" 600 war correspondents - including some from Al-Jazeera. Some they don't have to worry about, like Oliver North who is reporting for Fox News. North, the former colonel who master-minded the Iran-Contra scandal (travelling on an Irish passport), talked on air about a "remarkable display of military prowess and might" on the part of "my Marines".
Other professional reporters identify with their units. CNN's Walter Rodgers regularly uses "we" to describe military movements. But many of the journalists are not easily co-opted and their reports have often contradicted Pentagon accounts. After a US army spokesman said on Wednesday that fedayeen fighters were firing on US soldiers from a mosque in Najaf, Jim Dwyer of the New York Times reported area commander Lieut Col Ben Hodges saying: "I have yet to find a soldier or leader who heard or saw firings from the mosque."
The firing of Peter Arnett by NBC and National Geographic as their Baghdad correspondent came after he gave an interview to state-controlled Iraqi television. It was a stupid thing to do and the New Zealand-born Arnett apologised. NBC at first agreed to keep him on but then succumbed to a chorus of "treason" from the right. Arnett is no lover of totalitarian regimes.
I saw him get roughed up in Moscow by KGB thugs as he filmed Soviet dissidents. NBC's decision has cost American TV viewers a unique commentary and valuable insight into the city's plight. The same can hardly be said for Fox News's Geraldo Rivera, who when he was with the 101st Airborne drew a map in the sand for the camera showing battle plans after which the US forces drew a line in the sand and booted the former talk show host turned gun-toting reporter out of Iraq.
* * * * * *
Yesterday the first embedded American journalist died in Iraq. Michael Kelly was killed in a humvee accident. He was Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and a columnist for the Washington Post. Kelly was a former editor of the New Republic and National Journal who had decided to go back to reporting. He told the New York Times this week that he and other reporters enlisted as embeds because "there was a real sense after the last Gulf war that witness had been lost. The people in the military care about that history a great deal."
Kelly was a nationally-known pro-Bush columnist who was fired as editor of the New Republic in 1997 over his strident criticisms of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. In his war columns in the Washington Post he reported on the setbacks that embarrassed the Pentagon. Last week he wrote: "The planners of this war considered a range of scenarios. At the most optimistic, they hoped that the imminent threat of invasion would trigger the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. At the next rosiest level, they thought a regime collapse would follow an invasion in a matter of days. On the next rung was the idea that the American advance would be met by little armed resistance, which would allow for a swift advance and a possibly hard but brief battle . . . south of Baghdad. What actually happened in the first five days was a surprise and made the American advance significantly more difficult and dangerous."
* * * * * *
The most prominent of a handful of American diplomats who resigned over Iraq is attracting adoring fans as he addresses academic gatherings at Berkeley, Stanford, Georgetown and Harvard. John Brady Kiesling is telling audiences why he quit after a successful 19-year carreer with the State Department. The tall, slightly stooped diplomat says he is not a pacifist, and recalls that he supported the first Gulf War. However he believed the White House was serious about seeking a diplomatic solution in Iraq. When Congress approved the use of force against Iraq last autumn, Kiesling assured officials in Athens, where he was stationed as political officer, that it was just to put pressure on Saddam Hussein. "Now I am convinced the President lied to the US Congress, he never had any intention of stopping short of war. And now he's cashing the blank cheque Congress gave him," Mr Kiesling said at Harvard.
The State Department can ill afford to lose diplomats like Kiesling who speaks Greek, Armenian, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew.
A turning point for him came when at a diplomatic party in October, an old Greek friend said to him "America's going to war" and walked away. He said Bush policies had made the world perceive America since 9/11 as a "wounded rogue elephant, trampling everything in its path". He hopes that US forces are not greeted in Baghdad with the "outraged nationalism that we would show if we were in the Iraqi's place."