Johann Hari
Award-winning British journalist and writer.
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We have been living in an ideological bubble one of market fundamentalism.
The outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe became a symbol of that country's collapse but who noticed the spread of cholera across Iraq? The McCainiacs chorused that "the surge worked" but a study by the journal Environment and Planning found the truth. Between 2003 and 2007, Iraq was ripped by a massive ethnic cleansing. The mixed Sunni-Shia areas were destroyed. By the time the surge started, there was nobody left to purge: the country was carved into ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods. All the surge did was build vast concrete walls between the collapsing hoods, cementing the cleansing. That's success?
My feeling about the war was given a choice between these two things obviously I want to see a world with much better choices than that but given that was the choice we were confronted with, the best way through it was to try to find out what Iraqis prefer.
The lamest defence I could offer one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear is that I still support the principle of invasion, it's just the Bush administration screwed it up. ... The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster.
The greatest trick the rich and their cheerleaders on the right ever pulled was convincing the world that class didnt exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.
The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we dont begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives and millions may die there.
The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers... They are denying the reality of a force that unless we change the way we live pretty fast will kill millions.
The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.
For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.
We are entering a world of rapidly multiplying nuclear stand-offs like this. India vs Pakistan. Iran vs Israel. America vs.China. Within decades, North Korea vs Japan and South Korea. Not one Cold War, but many and the risk is doubled each time.
We now have a global business system that is virtually unregulated, with trade unions crippled and politicians largely bought by the super-rich to serve their interests. And what is the result? Inequality has returned to 1920s levels, and movement between the classes has collapsed. We have bank runs unseen in a century. And now even senior Wall Street figures mutter with only a hint of hyperbole about a looming Depression and "the worst crisis since 1929." All we need now is rising unemployment and Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald boozily waltzing through Wall Street, and we are back where this story began.
There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.
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