Johann Hari

Welcome to the future. Low-lying islands - from the Maldives to the Nicobar Islands - are half-drowned. More than 123,000 people are dead. The number of environmental refugees could run into the millions. No, this isn't just a news report from the end of 2004. It's the story of the 21st century, as predicted by the world's most distinguished climatologists. Welcome to the era of Weather of Mass Destruction.

This week's tsunami was a fluke of geology, an accident unrelated to human activity. All we can do is grieve and give to the victims. But there is overwhelming evidence that extreme weather events are on the increase - and we humans are responsible for more and more of them.

The images from Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, India and Thailand should serve as a wake-up call about how vulnerable we are to the forces of wind, rain and sea. So why aren't we listening to the scientific experts who warn that we are slowly, certainly turning these forces against ourselves?

Tony Blair admitted this September he was "scared" by the briefings the government's chief scientists gave him about climate change. He summarised the available evidence starkly: "The 10 warmest years on record have all been since 1990. There has been the most drastic rise in temperatures for over 1,000 years in the Northern hemisphere. Extreme weather events are becoming more and more frequent. Glaciers are melting. Sea ice and snow cover is declining. Sea levels are rising and are forecast to rise by another 88cm by 2100. This will threaten 100 million people globally who currently live below this level."

So the islands currently underwater aren't going to dry out for long. I wish this was environmentalist scaremongering. I wish these warnings were the apocalyptic ramblings of a few mavericks. They are not. Blair was simply repeating the views of 95 per cent of environmental scientists. (The other 5 per cent are, mysteriously, often on the pay-roll of oil companies).

We should listen when even Blair - a famously business-friendly, optimistic Prime Minister - warns that "the emission of greenhouse gases associated with industrialisation and strong economic growth is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, became alarming and is now completely unsustainable in the long term. And by the long term, I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by unsustainable, I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. It could radically alter human existence."

Man-made climate change was claiming thousands of victims before this natural disaster reinforced our mistakes. Anybody who wants to understand the threat we face has to read Mark Lynas's extraordinary recent book High Tide: News From a Warming World. It's the only piece of non-fiction that has ever given me nightmares. The British journalist travelled across the world to visit the canaries in the environmental mine-shaft: the areas in the world already being affected by global warming.

Lynas left Britain in 2000, as we were experiencing the heaviest rainfall and worst flooding since records began. His first stop was Alaska, where temperatures are rising - as in the rest of the Arctic - 10 times faster than in the rest of the world. For the first time in millennia, the permanently frozen ground on which Alaska was built is thawing. Houses are sagging. Roads are collapsing. He saw entire buildings that have been swallowed up by holes in the ground.

From there he travelled to Tuvalu, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific. Tuvalu should be in our thoughts this week, because its 10,000 people are going to permanently face the fate temporarily doled out by nature to the Maldives: being swallowed by the sea. More than 70 per cent of the world's sandy shorelines are retreating, and Tuvalu will - if current trends continue - vanish beneath the waves within the next 50 years, a new Atlantis existing for humans only in myth.

The people of Tuvalu are currently evacuating their beloved island to live in exile. "Climate change," they say, "is slowly drowning our island." I wonder how they feel about the elaborate displays of Western sympathy for the victims of this week's tsunami. Do they ask why we cry for those victims yet condemn them to a slow-motion version of the same movie? Anybody who thinks Weather of Mass Destruction is only wrecking human lives in short, sharp tsunami-lashings isn't paying attention.

So if we want to reverse this man-made slide into disaster - if we don't want the events of this week to be just the first of many - what can we do? Some environmentalists seem to relish the fact that these disasters force us to rethink the way we live. They seem to think it was always immoral to live apart from nature. I don't agree. I love industrial civilisation. I love big cities and the rootless cosmopolitan culture that comes with them. I don't get moist thinking about meadows and rainbows and forests.

But whether we like it or not, we are going to have to make some massive concessions to the planet we live on. You don't have to love nature to admit this; you just have to love life. Yes, changing the way we live is going to be a wrenching and problematic process - but it will be far more painful to deal with rapid climate change and face many more weeks like this one.

The best-known solution is woefully inadequate. The Kyoto Treaty promises a real cut in the world's carbon emissions of just 2 per cent within a decade. The Royal Commission on Environmental Protection found that, in fact, a 60 per cent reduction by 2050 is necessary if we are to seriously reduce the dangers of climate change.

Yet even Kyoto's paltry step in the right direction has been rejected by the SUV-stuffed United States, which pumps out 25 per cent of the world's carbon emissions despite having only 4 per cent of the world's population. Some brave campaigners are taking legal steps to try to force the US to take responsibility. The Inuit - facing the melting of their Arctic environment - are considering lawsuits against major US polluters, as are the people of Tuvalu.

But this is urgent. We cannot wait. If the US cannot be forced or shamed into cutting back its carbon emissions, the rest of the world needs to take responsibility and consider technological solutions. One proposal being widely discussed in the scientific community is carbon sequestration. This involves the capturing of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at the point of emission and storing it in underground reservoirs, injecting it into deep oceans, or converting it into rock-like solid materials.

It's a way of continuing to use fossil fuels while holding down the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. It's not a perfect solution - but it might buy us enough time for the Americans to see sense and for all of us to begin the transition to renewable sources of energy.

Take a good look at the newspapers' front pages this week. Unless there is drastic action to tackle climate change, you will have to get used to extreme weather events. Get used to drowned tourists. Get used to armies of children orphaned by the weather. Get used to huge outflows of refugees running from an encroaching sea. Next time, we won't have the comfort of knowing it had nothing to do with us.

POSTSCRIPT: There's an interesting response to this piece at http://deadmenleft.blogspot.com/2005/01/kyoto-and-development.html

For us atheists, something strange just happened. The entire Western world ground to a halt three days ago - at the start of the twenty-first century - to celebrate the birth of a 2000 year-old cult leader. If you read the great anti-theist writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - men like Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud - Jesus Christ and the Judaeo-Christian God should be a fading memory by now. They should have joined Zeus, Thor and Ra in the Cemetery for Dead Deities. Humanity should be entering a post-religious era of reason and enlightenment any moment now.

Instead, Christianity - along with the other major world religions - is resurgent. The United States is undergoing a "Second Great Awakening", where opinion polls suggest more Americans believe in creationism than evolution. The Arab world is pickled in an angry Islam. Jewish fundamentalists are even today building houses on stolen Palestinian land, on the grounds that it was given to them by God.

It used to be assumed that Western Europe set the pattern for the rest of the world, with our swelling secularism and closing churches. In fact, we look increasingly anomalous. Britain - with 12 per cent of the population declaring themselves atheist and another 43% per cent agnostic - is one of the few places where we non-believers can feel any hope at all. But even here, the religious faiths that do persist are becoming more extreme. Church of England mildness - the kind that admits most of the Bible is a metaphor - is waning, while faiths like Pentecostalism, which encourages speaking in tongues, are rising.

So how did an intellectual wave that seemed to be washing over the world suddenly recede? Why is atheism failing as a mass movement? Alister McGrath, author of the fascinating new book The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, suggests an answer.

He believes that we don't need passionate, campaigning atheism any more because organised religion has been weakened. Personal faith has become largely privatised, a minor matter of individual consumer choice. It's easy to see why Galileo Galilei would despise a Vatican that incarcerated him for revealing basic scientific truths - but why would anybody get so upset about their watered-down ancestors?

So "in the Western European context, at least, a swelling public indifference toward religion has led to the loss of potency at both poles - Christianity and atheism," McGrath writes.

But is this true? It's certainly the case that, say, the Vatican no longer has tyrannical powers. A few lingering theocracies force their faith onto their citizens - Iran is a good example - but they are few and they are tottering. Yet it doesn't take long to list the victims of religion in the world today.

Let me name just a smattering of the people who will die next year as a direct result of the religious beliefs of others. Evangelical Christians in America have successfully campaigned to deny all US funding for abortion to developing countries, based on the archaic religious belief that "a soul" appears at the moment a sperm fertilises an egg. The result? The UN's population fund has been forced to close reproductive health clinics for some of the poorest women in the world - and condemned them in many cases to die in childbirth. Aid agencies working in the developing world estimate this religious policy is killing 10,000 women and children a year; some estimates run as high as 150,000.

Then there's the religious fundamentalist movement we have all been thinking about: al-Qa'ida. I've never been persuaded by the notion that they are not "true Muslims". It's certainly the case that most Muslims in the world don't agree with their interpretation of the Koran, and are as appalled as the rest of us by the murder of civilians. But the Koran is - like all religious texts - the vague and contradictory work of human beings. There are indeed passages that seem to support what Osama Bin Laden advocates; there are other passages that support the idea that Islam is a religion of peace. To say one is right and has stumbled onto the "true" essence of Islam is to make an unacceptable concession to the idea that there is a divine coherence to the Koran.

It's tempting to say extremists from Osama to Jerry Falwell are somehow "distorting" or "perverting" their religions - but often, they are simply following the guidance of the ugliest parts of their religious texts.

And on the list of religious victims goes. Does anybody think the Israel/Palestine conflict would be so hard to solve if the settlers, Hamas and everybody in between were atheists? Religion has inflated this conflict over real estate into a Holy War - and this pattern is repeated in trouble-spots across the world. So I don't buy McGrath's idea that there is no need for angry, proselytising anti-theists. The reason why atheism has failed must lie elsewhere.

McGarth does offer one other explanation. He believes atheism has been discredited by its association with the atheocracies of the twentieth century, particularly the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Regimes committed to destroying religion are, it turns out, just as heinous as regimes committed to imposing it. The notion that the end of religion would be twinned with the end of human discord died in the Gulags.

Well, there's a glimmer of truth to this argument. The most naive forms of eighteenth and nineteenth century atheism - which argued the end of superstition would bring the end of human misery and a shimmering world of reason and utopia - are indeed discredited by the horrors of the twentieth century. Stalin's inquisition was as cruel as the Vatican's, and - given the greater technology at his disposal - even more bloody.

But this is hardly a blow to a more mature atheism. I don't imagine for a moment that the end of religion - if it ever did happen - would solve all the world's problems. It would simply solve the problems caused by religious superstition. There would still be the problems of tyranny, cruelty and human rights abuses committed by atheists, just as eradicating smallpox did not cure cancer.

All religions believe that human ethics should be derived from a supernatural, non-human source. This is inherently dangerous. Removing this danger does nothing more than remove this danger; it isn't a universal balm. Other deranged beliefs which do not draw upon divine authority will also have to be eroded and dealt with - but getting rid of the divine ones would be a good start.

So McGrath's second explanation for the failure of atheism is no more persuasive than his first. An alternative and more persuasive case has, however, emerged this year. The distinguished molecular biologist Dean Hamer claims to have discovered "a God gene" - a part of the brain that strongly correlates with feelings of spirituality. He believes some of us - a majority - are hard-wired to feel spiritual and to be open to a sense of transcendence. The sense there is something beyond and above them is encoded onto their DNA. Only a minority lacking this gene - that 12 per cent of Brits - can ever that we live in a totally material universe.

So is atheism doomed to be a minority pursuit for the next few millennia until we evolve a new set of genes? Richard Dawkins, Britain's most distinguished scientist-atheist, is very sceptical about the possibility of a God gene, but he has speculated that religious belief might be so persistent because at some point in the development of our species it gave humans an evolutionary advantage. The religious might have been more able to cope with stress or with the fear of death than the non-religious, or they might have been able to bond together more effectively in groups.

So, he explains, "The [persistence of] religious behaviour may be a misfiring, an unfortunate manifestation of an underlying psychological propensity that in other circumstances was once useful." I like the irony of this theory: evolution makes it possible for religious delusions like creationism to persist.

I'm not qualified to judge if these scientific theories are correct, but I fear the answer might be more depressing. It might just be that atheism is cold and tough and hard to live with.

It isn't easy to accept that we are arbitrarily evolved creatures living in an empty void, condemned to search for meaning where there is none. Life is more bearable if we enter into the comforting illusion that there is a source of meaning Somewhere Out There, just beyond our grasp.

So perhaps the great mistake Feuerbach, Marx and Freud made was to assume that people would prefer cold atheist truths to warm religious myths. Simone de Beauvoir described the process of losing her faith as "the world going silent". I can live with the silence - but most people, it seems, can't.

POSTSCRIPT: There's an interesting blog comment on this article at http://citystate.reger.com/entry-logid6006-eventid23666-The-slow-grind-of-mammon.log

and at
http://insertjokehere.blogspot.com/2004/12/charming-lad.html

and another smart response at
http://tachyphrenia.blogspot.com/2005/01/motivations-for-religion.html

[This article accompanied a spread of photos of the year. For copyright reasons I can't reprint the pictures here I'm afraid]

THE IMAGES that will remain with me from 2004 are the ones that I will never see. The Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh dared to make a film about the high levels of violence against women within some Muslim communities in Europe. For exercising his right to free speech in a free country at the heart of Europe, Van Gogh was hacked to death by an Islamic fundamentalist. Even in countries such as Spain, which have a strong stomach for gore, images of his nearly beheaded corpse have not been published.

Nor will we ever see truthful images from the battle of Fallujah, where all remaining journalists were "embedded" with coalition troops. We are left with the sexy, scary image of the swaggering Marlboro Man marine. Yet some of the residents of the city claim that an illegal napalm-like substance - one which clings to the skin and burns, burns, burns - was used as a weapon by coalition troops. The British Government is stonewalling enquiries by the MP Alice Mahon about this.

Nor have we seen any uncensored images from
North Korea, the most vicious police-state on earth.
The emaciated refugees who are trickling into China
are talking about gulag concentration-camps stuffed
with tens of thousands of innocent people. They talk
about roads built entirely with the labour of stunted,
starving children. Perhaps there are secret
photographs hoarded in a Pyongyang cellar capturing
the visual evidence of these crimes, and one day they
will emerge - but for now we have no images, and therefore we feel little.

News photographs channel our capacity for empathy better than prose ever can. When we look at Viktor Yushchenko's poisoned, pocked flesh, when we see the assault on Ukrainian democracy etched on his skin, we feel more indignation than readers of even the finest polemic. When we see that beaming neo-Klanswoman Lynndie England holding a broken Iraqi on a leash, we feel more rage than a hundred eyewitness reports could provoke. Yet this - the greatest attribute of the photograph - is also its greatest weakness. It engages our emotions at the expense of offering us context. When we see Saddam Hussein, chained and pained in an Iraqi court, it is easy to feel as much sympathy for him as we feel affection for Nadia Almada, the glorious weeping winner of this year's Big Brother. His victims are not represented in the picture; the camera narrows our focus and makes us blind to anything below the surface.

This can be seen in our reaction to the most resonant, visceral, cruel images of the year: the victims of the Beslan massacre. We remember Russian mothers clutching images of their slain toddlers, and we feel hatred for their Chechen murderers. But we do not see the bigger picture that cannot be captured through a lens: that while 300 Russian children have been murdered, 40,000 Chechen children have been killed by the Russian occupiers since 1991. The strong feelings that photographs can provoke often blind us to more sober thoughts. Photographs make us feel; but we must also remember to think.

THIS WAS the year that another holocaust struck Africa, and the world's solemn incantations - "Never again, never again" - melted into air. A decade after the Rwandan genocide - when 800,000 people died in six weeks - another African holocaust began in Darfur, western Sudan.

At least 75,000 have died as a result of the pogroms perpetrated by the Janjaweed militias, according to the World Health Organisation. Nearly 1.2 million people have been driven from their homes while their villages were burned and cattle slaughtered. Many of the women were raped. And the world's response?

The UN offered empty words of condemnation, and leaders such as Tony Blair - who declared three years ago that "if Rwanda happened again, we would have a moral duty to act" - did nothing.

A small number of African Union troops have been dispatched. Their mission is so limited that they have, on several occasions, stood by while refugee camps were "raided" by the Janjaweed. Many of Europe's top corporations have continued to trade with the Janjaweed-loving tyranny in Khartoum, even though Human Rights Watch has told them that their money is blatantly being used to continue the genocide. Some citizens of democratic countries have launched a campaign to disinvest from Sudan (www.disinvestsudan.org). The rest of the world has, yet again, stood by while an African minority is being exterminated.

Incredibly, even this may not to be the worst news from Africa this year. The civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has shed more innocent blood than any conflict since Hitler's armies ravaged Europe. A total of 3.8 million people have died as a direct result of the conflict since 1998. This December, it seemed that the government of Rwanda - once a universally acknowledged victim - had decided to destroy the fragile peace that has emerged in Congo over the past two years. It used its troops to invade the north-east and grab some of the lucrative supplies of coltan (used in mobile phones and laptops) and diamonds. According to Felix Bamezon of the UN Food Programme in Congo: "There's a new war brewing. People are really gearing up for a major confrontation."

Once more, Western corporations have played a key role in fuelling this mass murder by buying these blood-soaked commodities. American and European companies - with the acquiescence of their governments - fuel these wars by providing a market for the resources they seize.

There is much hand-wringing about Darfur and Congo, along the lines that "we" - Westerners - do nothing. But the truth is worse. "We" do something all right; we stoke these wars through greed. "We" put our material needs far above the lives of millions of black people.

This might feed the idea that Africa creates nothing but problems. In fact, when it comes to the biggest problem - ecological destruction - African women are far ahead of the West. This year, Wangar Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Since the 1970s, Maathai has led the Green Belt Movement, a campaign of Kenyan women to plant millions of trees across the continent to slow deforestation. She saw that Africa's wars were increasingly the result of ecological damage and the ensuing shortage of resources.

By creating a mass movement to protect the environment, the women of Kenya are far ahead of their Western cousins.

[Postscript: The Indie's Review of the Year - in which this article appeared - goes to press earlier than the rest of the paper, and had to be written a week ago. Since this appeared, it has emerged that Tony Blair is considering sending 3000 British troops to Darfur to back up the aid convoys. If this happens, then the statement here that he has not seen through his rhetoric on Rwanda will be wrong.]

So 2004 ends with Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, admitting: "Quite frankly, our approach towards Darfur isn't working." The 75,000 people killed in the genocide in Darfur this year would probably agree. The "solution" agreed in the summer by the UN Security Council has had no effect at all. In fact, the situation in the killing fields is getting worse: Save the Children has been forced to withdraw its aid workers this week.

Ah yes, you shrug - more remote statistics and terrible stories from Africa. Well, 12-year-old Adam Erenga Tribe knew some of those statistics. He called them family. This August, he came home from school to find the corpses of his big brothers rotting in the yard. Inside, his mother and father had been shot through the neck by the Janjaweed militias. These men on horseback have been scything through the black population of Darfur for more than a year now, destroying black villages. But don't worry: Adam didn't have much time to dwell on his grief. The next day, he was captured by the Janjaweed and enslaved.

While the lives of thousands of Adams have been wrecked across Darfur, two gross distortions about the crimes against humanity in the afflicted region have become popular in the complacent West.

This is a racist holocaust, where people are targetted for slaughter because of their ethnicity - yet many people deny this basic truth. I was recently on a phone-in show in South Africa, where a white caller asked: "Look at the pictures. Both sides are black. How can it be a genocide when black people kill black people?" This argument has been echoed in many Western countries, even in the pages of the liberal press, and it shows an extremely naïve understanding of what "race" means.

Racial and ethnic categories are the arbitrary products of history, not fixed biological categories. The Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland, for example, are physically indistinguishable. Apartheid South Africa provided some vivid examples of how farcical "racial" categories are. Japanese businessmen were named as "honorary whites", because the regime wanted to do business with them. If a black family gave birth to a pale-skinned child, he or she could apply to a government panel to be "reclassified".

So "race" is a fluid category, and in Darfur it is a relatively new one. This isn't some "age-old conflict" or "ancient tribal battle", as patronising Westerners often assume. Until very recently, the tribes of Darfur had high levels of inter-marriage, and didn't think of themselves in the simplistic racialised categories of Arab vs African. That has been changing only in the past few years, since the National Islamic Front government in Khartoum began to arm Arab militiamen - the Janjaweed - to slaughter the rebellious African population.

The Janjaweed has been immersed in an openly racist Arab supremacist ideology since the early 1980s. The militiamen believe all Africans are on a par with slaves, and still use the derogatory name "abid". (It's like white South Africans still calling black people kaffir.) The Janjaweed's propaganda openly states that Africans like Adam are sub-human. The Aegis Trust - a group dedicated to ending genocide - explains just how new this ideology is. "While the notion of African inferiority has been a feature in Sudanese society for centuries, the emergence of an aggressive Arab supremacist ideology in Sudan began in the early 1980s," it writes. And it emerged because a group of highly dedicated ideologues in the Sudanese government decided to promote it.

This leads us neatly to the second myth that is developing about Darfur: that the government in Khartoum isn't responsible for the Janjaweed pogroms. Some Western journalists opposed to doing anything about Darfur - and those like the Chinese government and large, Western multinationals who want to carry on merrily trading with the genocidaires - have made this argument.

It sounds reasonable at first. Since the beginning of the genocide, the Sudanese government has claimed that the Janjaweed militias are freelance operators - random lunatics wrecking Darfur without any encouragement from the folks back home.

We are the weak government of a poor country facing a rebellion and anarchy, they protest.

Yet the regime has a record of promoting the genocidal ideology now followed so enthusiastically by the Janjaweed. The regime committed genocide against African tribes in the 1980s and 1990s; the Janjaweed didn't have to look far for inspiration.

But Khartoum's role extends far beyond the world of ideas. In the past few months, evidence has emerged of blatant links with the militias. Human Rights Watch has documents in which the Khartoum government explicitly directs the actions of the Janjaweed. Women kidnapped from Darfur have even been taken to Khartoum for forced marriages to Sudanese government officials.

So: a genocide is happening, and the government in Khartoum is involved. Where do we go from here? The UN is deadlocked. Because it wants access to Sudan's oil supplies, the Chinese government has made clear that it will veto any attempt at a UN military intervention.

The range of people across the world who have betrayed Adam and his countrymen is staggering. Nearly 100 corporations have continued trading with Khartoum. This includes a British company, Glasgow Weir Pumps, that is helping to develop Sudan's oil fields - and therefore to funnel money to the genocidaires. As Human Rights Watch explains: "Oil revenues have been used by the [Sudanese] government to obtain weapons and ammunition that have enabled it to intensify the war." This corporate activity is not a cause of the genocide, but it is an essential ingredient. Why aren't there protests outside this company's offices every day they put their profits before the lives of innocent people?

Glasgow Weir Pumps claims it has consulted with the UK Government and it was not told by the Department for Trade and Industry to stop dealing with these murderers. If so, we can add another name to the list of people who have betrayed Darfur.

Anybody who is serious about ending genocide - the worst crime of all, according to the UN - must now adopt a two-pronged strategy. First, we need to lobby our governments to isolate the Khartoum regime. Don't let its leaders visit the West. Don't sell it arms. Indict any businessman who deals with it before the International Criminal Court as an accomplice to crimes against humanity.

But if our governments fail us - if they show yet again that they don't give a toss about human rights - we, as democratic citizens, will have to act alone. There is currently a campaign to force multinational corporations to disinvest from Sudan, just as they were forced by consumer pressure to disinvest from Apartheid South Africa. You can join the campaign at www.divestsudan.org.

If we don't stop the genocide, what will the world say to Adam when this holocaust is over? Let me guess: never again.

So Tony Blair finally made it to Baghdad. None of us who supported the war imagined it would happen like this: a year-and-a-half after the fall of Saddam, the Prime Minister flew in secret to Baghdad's tiny and imperilled "safe zone". In his press conference, he talked about his feelings of "humility", and admitted: "You can feel the sense of danger people live with every day".

How did a prime minister used to being fêted after military action - remember the cheering crowds in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Kabul? - end up scrambling around Iraq in fear?

A great deal has been written about the failure of military strategy in Iraq. Even in the timid, 'balanced' American media, Donald Rumsfeld’s disastrous decision to fight the war on the cheap has been exposed. The Defence Secretary provided far too few troops to secure Iraq’s borders or basic civilian infrastructure, and for the ugliest of reasons: George Bush wanted to save the money so he could dole out massive tax cuts for American millionaires. Rumsfeld has been reduced to petulantly snapping at his own troops, and Bush has resorted to defending him - in irrelevant and imbecile terms - as having "a good heart".

But an even more important reason for the failure of the occupation has barely been discussed: the coalition's economic strategy. Following the Second World War, the Allied forces understood that fascism arose in conditions of unemployment, poverty and desperation. That's why there was a massive effort to reflate the German economy; by early 1947, unemployment was down to 10 per cent. In Iraq today, unemployment stands at an incredible 60 per cent. For young Sunni men - the main recruiting pool for the insurgency - it has soared to 80 per cent. This is a recipe for rage and rebellion.

It would be bad enough if the coalition had simply done nothing to reflate and re-energise the Iraqi economy. Incredibly, the truth is even worse: they have imposed on Iraq a programme of ultra-neoliberal reforms that have brought economic collapse to every country they have been inflicted upon. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former chief economist at the World Bank, describes the economic policies of the coalition as "a proven and predictable catastrophe". They imposed a form of capitalism more extreme than anything tried in a democratic country: immediate privatisation of almost all services (without any debate), non-competitive contracts, and a 15 per cent flat tax. This is not democracy. It is market fundamentalism.

Nobody should be surprised this has created chaos. It has all been tried before. In post-communist Russia, the "shock therapy" now being forced on Iraqis was such a catastrophe that life expectancy actually fell below the dismal levels of late Soviet communism. The resulting economic anarchy and corporate looting made the Russian people lose faith in democracy and turn to the incipient fascism of Vladimir Putin.

The same policies - often formulated by the same economists - have created vast Iraqi slums stuffed with disaffected young men with nothing to do. Tony Blair spoke yesterday about how important it is for Iraqi democracy to succeed - "for the security not just of the region but of Britain and the world". He's right. A democracy at the heart of the Arab world would be a massive blow against both Islamic fundamentalism and secular tyranny. But the economic model spread by the US and British governments - and their proxy, the IMF - cannot bring democracy. Indeed, it has been proven repeatedly to spread unemployment, disaffection and the hollowing out of meaningful self-government.

When Blair talks movingly about Iraq's brave election monitors, risking their lives to set up polling booths, he cannot simply leave out economic issues. Meaningful democracy means the freedom to set economic policy - and Iraq's capacity to do this has just been locked in a dark and undemocratic cage. Last month, the rich nations of the world - including Britain - agreed to cancel 80 per cent of the blood-soaked debt racked up by Saddam Hussein. Sounds like good news? Ah, but there was a condition. The next Iraqi government - whatever the Iraqi people say at the polls - will have to agree to allow the Iraqi economy to be run by the IMF for the next decade. That's right - the same IMF that, to quote Stiglitz again, "brought disaster to Russia and Argentina and leaves a trail of devastated developing economies in its wake".

Some readers might remember I supported the invasion of Iraq, despite my terrible fears about the Bush administration. This was because - after visiting Iraq and studying the limited surveys of Iraqi opinion available before the invasion - I knew a majority of Iraqis would rather take their chances with an Anglo-American occupation than with the rule of Saddam and his sons forever. That turned out to be true: just look at the Iraqi opinion polls.

But that creates a massive obligation to keep siding with the Iraqi people afterwards. If you support an invasion - and the slaughter of 100,000 people - because you believe you are siding with Iraqis, then you had damn well better keep supporting them. I think left-wing people should try to find out what the Iraqi majority wants and stick with them: against Saddam and against the Sunni insurgency, as Blair argues. But also - crucially - against the IMF-ing of their economy, and for real democracy. Blair won't go there.

You can only understand why the IMF belongs in this triumvirate if you look at the human stories behind the economic jargon. Stiglitz - after working with the IMF for nearly a decade - explained that the fund consists of remote bankers "almost entirely ignorant of the countries they are creating policy for. They do not ask themselves, in meetings, what a country's democratically elected politicians say, much less ordinary people. They simply impose whatever policies best serve the interests of large multinational corporations". This usually means the sacking of tens of thousands of desperately needed nurses and teachers and racking up unemployment. They aren't sadists; they are blinded by neoliberal economics, which sees no difference between what massive businesses require and the needs of real, flesh-and-blood people.

The IMF agenda being imposed on Iraq over the next decade - irrespective of what Iraqis say at the polls - will have a warping effect on the country's politics. Iraqi politicians will not be able to argue about schools, hospitals or taxation, the bread-and-butter of politics in every successful democracy. No; those decisions will be taken by the IMF in Washington. So what will happen? The political vacuum will almost certainly be filled by tribal resentment and religious disputes - it's all that is left. This pattern has been established in Kosovo, where IMF economic rule over the past five years had led to a resurgence of sectarian disputes and far-right tribalism.

So when Tony Blair spoke yesterday about this being a simple fight between "democrats and terrorists", I feel stirred but manipulated. He's right that the Sunni fundamentalists blowing up election offices and Shia children must be defeated if there is to be any hope of a decent Iraq. But the IMF-dominated Allawi-land he is offering Iraqis - while somewhat better - is not democracy and it is not freedom.

Given a choice between Saddam and Blair-Bush, I think I supported the better side. But it's become clear over the past 18 months what a lousy choice that was. It's up to all of us now to slowly, carefully, try to create a world where there can be far better options and the possibility of real democracy. There's only one super-power that can create that: it's called global public opinion. It's only when we understand the world we live in - without illusions - that we can build real alternatives. I can feel a new year's resolution coming on ...