Johann Hari

Several years ago, I was waiting, endlessly waiting, at the Qualquiliya checkpoint while a bored, surly Israeli soldier checked my journalists’ credentials. It was to be my first visit to the Occupied Territories, and I found myself sitting beside a grizzled journalistic veteran of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Do you know what you’re doing by going into the West Bank?” he asked, sucking on his millionth Arab cigarette. “Palestine is like a bad drug. One dose and you’re hooked. Step over that crossing and you never really come back.”

Well, Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg have done it. They’ve got the craving, the need for a Palestine fix. ‘The Road to Martyrs’ Square’ is a strange, seductive hybrid – a work of sociology-memoir – recounting the years from 1988 to 1996 (and intermittent visits ever since) they have spent feeding their habit. They chose as their research project the photographing and study of Palestinian graffiti. If you’ve never been to the territories, this might sound like an esoteric or trivial subject. They’re studying wall-scribbling while there’s a war going on? But in fact, Palestinian graffiti has been a central component of the Intifadah. There is scarcely a single bare surface in all of the Occupied Territories. Any hint of brick, any inch of exposed wall, will be swiftly smothered by a spray-can. Graffiti is the bill-board of the Intifada, the Google where protests are planned, slogans are tested, and rage is vented. Palestinians call it – with a wink – “our newspaper.” It became so central to the conflict that masked graffitists have been shot and killed by Israeli troops.

By studying the changing nature of Palestinian rhetoric – the way Palestinians talk about their suffering to each other – Oliver and Steinberg have created a unique history of life in the Territories in the 1990s. Crucially, it is not just a journey into the world of suicide-bombers, as the book’s sub-title suggests. It is the story of the introduction of suicide-bombing to the Palestinians’ struggle, and the simultaneous Islamicization of the Palestinian cause.

When the authors arrived in Gaza in 1988, Palestinian suicide bombing was unheard of; it was to be six years before Hamas began to adopt this murderous tactic. Oliver and Sternberg stumbled, then, into a resistance movement that was undergoing a mutation. There have been three dominant waves of Palestinian identity. The first was Nasserite pan-Arabism, where Palestinians saw themselves primarily as Arabs and looked to the rest of the Arab world to destroy the "Zionist entity" and restore them to their homes. Pan-Arabism died on the battlefields of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

By the time Oliver and Steinberg arrived, this was a distant memory. There was now an incipient conflict between two other ways for Palestinians to self-identify: Palestinian nationalism (flecked occassionally with Marxist-Leninism in the 1970s) and Islamic jihadism.

The dominant nationalist ideas of Palestinian life had clearly failed to deliver liberation. The first (and largely peaceful) Intifadah had prompted the Oslo Peace Process, which only led to a doubling of the number of Settlers and renewed disaster for the Palestinians.

But the Islamic model of resistance – epitomized by Hamas and the late Sheikh Ahmad Yassin – had not yet been popularized. “When we first moved to Gaza… Sheikh Ahmad Yassin was virtually unknown,” they explain. “By the time we left the area five years later, a series of suicide bombings had made him famous throughout the world, and ordinary people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip had begun to express some degree of sympathy with the man and his movement.”

How did it happen? How did tens of thousands of young men (and growing numbers of women) become drawn to an elaborate death-cult? The headline figures explaining Palestinian suffering are shocking enough. For example, the US Agency for International Development – hardly a pro Palestinian pressure group – found this summer that 22% of Palestinian under-5s are suffering from malnutrition. For 13%, this is so chronic they are likely to suffer problems with their growth and mental development. Oliver and Sternberg show the more stifling truths behind these numbers.

Palestinian life is marked by grinding, ceaseless boredom. There are endless curfews and military check-points; it is a life of waiting in queues that may never lead anywhere at all. They note, “It’s so boring you think you might die of boredom.” And then there is the destruction of Palestinian civil society. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz has recently described the “destruction of the Palestinian middle class” by a wicked hybrid creature he calls ‘Sharafat’ – the twin lunacies of Yassir Arafat and Ariel Sharon.

Even all this, surely, is not enough to explain an ideology that promotes suicide-bombings targetted at civilians. But political ideas are viral. They spread in insanitary conditions, and – whatever the other causes – there can be no question that decades of brutal military occupation created a soil in which jihadism would thrive. When the authors first arrived, Islamist ideas were fairly marginal, and most Palestinians subscribed to a nationalist ideology. “In the early years of the [first] Intifadah, it was easy to distinguish between the [majority] nationalists and [minority] Islamists. Their lexicons were different. Their conception of the world was different… Pick almost any topic, and the difference would become manifest. Whereas the Islamists called for jihad, the nationalists used less loaded terms… like ‘armed struggle’ or ‘popular war.’”

Nationalists revere the peasant and the shepherd, and talk in a romantic way about the land. Islamists revere the hajj, the religious pilgrim who relinquishes his earthly possessions in order to fulfill the commands of God. They scorn nationalism as a distraction from the Islamic revolution. Hamas and other Islamist groups seek to spiritually transform the individual as well as transforming Palestinian society. They demand personal salvation as a prerequisite to political salvation; they are totalitarian, because they see every aspect of life as political.

Nationalism is, of course, far easier to deal with, because nationalists are merely bidding –however aggressively – for real estate. Jihadism is, by contrast, unquenchable. They are bidding for souls.

Jihadism is also far more corrosive of Palestinian society itself. The greatest victims of the Hamas-ing of Palestinian life have been not just Israeli civilians (although they have paid a horrific price) but Palestinian women. “Under constant surveillance from Hamas-sponsored ‘morality squads’, women soon abandoned their American jeans for long black skirts and capes, and kept their heads and mouths covered,” the authors explain. “Profligate behavior” – which means music, singing, dancing, unveiled women – was also policed. Female freedom is seen by jihadists as a symbol of decadence; women are symbols of the purity of the Palestinian cause. This is seen in the book through the prism of Nuha, a female friend of the authors who had once dreamed about going to college and read poetry. Now she is “not allowed” to leave the house. When they visit her, she had not stepped outside “for several years… She lived behind a heavy iron door that opened only when [her husband] Muhammed came and went.”

The growth of Islamism coincided with an intensification of the Israeli occupation. Despite the Oslo Peace Process, the number of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land doubled during the 1990s. Oliver and Steinberg saw Palestinian life change around them; nationalist moustaches gave way to Islamist beards, and women became less visible and vocal. This becomes clear by looking at snapshots the authors present of two historical moments. When Arafat was welcomed back from exile in 1994, “whole families had stood on the dusty streets of Gaza… husbands and wives and children.” But when Sheikh Yassin was released from prison just three years later, the crowd was “almost entirely male.” Women celebrated “behind chain-link fences on the sidelines of the action”, if at all.

The further away a solution – and real Palestinian statehood – has seemed, the more Palestinians have turned to irrational and often psychotic political movements like Yassin’s. A quote from the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani opens the book and captures this mood well: “O madmen of Gaza/ A thousand welcomes/ To madmen/ If they liberate us. / Truly, the age of political reason/ Slipped away long ago/ So, then, teach us madness…” The twin horrors of Israeli occupation and Arafat’s corruption trapped ordinary Palestinians in a terrible pincer movement; it seemed to many that the only way out was to choose ascetic Islamic fundamentalism.

It was in these unique historical circumstances that the tactic of suicide-bombing was first introduced to this conflict. Oliver and Steinberg – by decoding the graffiti that reveres suicide-bombing, and interviewing the families of ‘martyrs’ – manage to pry open the imaginative universe of the young men blowing themselves up on Israel’s streets. A suicide-bomber, they explain, “sees himself not only as an avenging Ninja, but also as something of a movie star, maybe even a sex symbol – a romantic figure at the very least, larger than life.” They are referred to as “Giants”. Once a decision is taken to become a ‘martyr’, “Cards would be printed with your picture on them, your face surrounded by guns and roses, to be given to friends, relatives, and fellow activists.”

The notion – popular on the American right – that suicide-bombers are ‘brain-washed’ or manipulated by a few wicked men turns out to be incorrect. These killers seek “ecstatic obliteration” because of more familiar human flaws: superstitious delusion, vanity, tribal identification and rage. One suicide bomber declares in a videoed ‘final testament’ watched by the authors that “we have seen the dunya [physical world], and it doesn’t amount to anything.” It’s not hard to understand – amidst the revulsion at his decision to murder innocent civilians – why this young man reached this conclusion after a life trapped in occupied Gaza.

Yet the descriptions of quite how far the death-cult has gone in masochistically embracing violence are still shocking. “We are in love with the color of blood,” declares one poster. “Break my bones and shed my blood/ I am a Muslim and Allah named me,” cries another. Blood is everywhere in Hamas’ imagery; in one slogan, the land is said to be “hemorrhaging.”

This vision of Gaza and the West Bank should be strangely familiar to inhabitants of Los Angeles. The graffiti; the tribal warfare; the random violence; the misogyny; the reverence for death and the fetishisation of slain young men who lived fast and died young – sound familiar yet? When African-American young men are choked off from economic opportunity, when they have no way to advance but through crime, when they feel they have no safe space to call their own, they form gangs, create alternative value structures, and behave like maniacs. Are Hamas and Islamic Jihad so different to the Bloods and the Crips, except that they operate in even more extreme circumstances? Perhaps the most revealing moment in ‘The Road to Martyrs’ Square’ is when Ali, a friend of the authors, watches a pirate copy of Boyz N The Hood. He is entranced; afterwards, he refers to his own pathetic slice of the West Bank as his “hood”, without a trace of irony.

All of this is captured in sparse prose refreshingly free of academese. Oliver and Sternberg have an almost Proustian ability to capturing the essence of a situation through describing a simple sense experience or visual image. Gaza smells of “guava and night-blooming jasmine” but also “trash and rats and tear-gas.” Israel is epitomized by a woman during the first Gulf War who refuses to be cowed by the possibility of poison gas attacks from Saddam Hussein. She totters about “in a gas mask and high heels.”

The book is at its best when – along with its intellectual analysis – it also conveys the surreal, phantasmagoric nature of ordinary Palestinian life. For example, the videos of suicide-bombers’ final testimonies passed from Palestinian to Palestinian are invariably grainy copies of copies. As the authors watch one video, sounds from the film that used to be on the tape keep breaking through. “This house is a mess!” cries an Egyptian actress again and again. It also has appealing touches of black humor. They are told of Sheikh Yassin – who was permanently confined to a wheelchair after a childhood accident – “His entire body is in constant spasm. Nothing works but the brain and the genital system. But he thinks very, very clearly. And he has very many children.”

It is also valuable for the novelistic character sketches that pepper the text. Several stayed with me, but one – Ra’id – springs immediately to mind. He is an ordinary Palestinian man torn between the brutal asceticism of Hamas and his fond memories of studying in the United States. He confides to the authors “a forbidden thought. He’d been thinking of buying a boat, he would say... When his newborn daughter was a little older, he was going to take her out on it and let her swim to her heart’s content – in a bikini, no less! He didn’t care what anyone said. The more you heard him talk about it, the clearer it became that the boat was Ra’id’s fantasy island, his own little USA, floating in the Gazan sea.”

The only flaw in this superb study lies in the authors’ conclusions. They demonstrate clearly that the Palestinians have moved in an Islamist direction – but is really true to say that “the fundamentalization of Gaza [is now] a fact”? The people of Gaza – along with their West Bank cousins – just voted overwhelmingly for Mahmoud Abbas as the new chairman of the Palestinian Authority. He is one of the nationalist old guard, a man who condemns suicide bombing and seeks an accommodation with Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad command the support of 30-40% of the Palestinian population. Palestinians are divided – and with Arafat and Yassin dying within the same year, the allegiance of the population remains fluid and could tip in either direction.

Steinberg and Oliver’s focus on graffiti and other ‘alternative’ forms of communication is instructive, but it skews their vision. They admit that these media have been used more successfully by Hamas and other Islamists than by nationalist groups, but they don’t seem to realize how this might have blurred their reading of the wider situation. It also leaves the reader with an unduly pessimistic picture. The Palestinians can still be rescued from a descent into total jihadist madness if the Israeli occupation ends soon; a majority has remained sane for a surprisingly long time.

True, in a Palestinian state there will still be a battle between the Islamists who believe in the rule of god and the nationalist who believe in the rule of man. But the longer the illegal occupation continues, the stronger the jihadist virus becomes. If it eventually seizes the allegiance of most Palestinians, it will be a disaster for Palestinian democrats, Palestinian women – who will be jailed in their own homes - and for Israelis, who will be condemned to live next to a menacing Islamist theocracy. That might be good new for us Palestine junkies addicted to the conflict – but we will be the only winners.

POSTSCRIPT: There's a critical response to this article at http://guanubian.blogspot.com/2005/02/liberation-through-obliteration_07.html

There have been a few write-ups of that ICA debate I did (sorry, no transcript).

This one is from the Friday Project, an excellent weekly e-mail newsletter at www.thefridayproject.co.uk:

"TFT Goes To: Election countdown at the ICA

January 30 2005

Kicking off its General Election Countdown, the Institute of Contemporary Arts staged a debate on Monday night entitled How Will You Vote? Chaired by John Harris, journalist and author of the eerily appropriate So Now Who Do We Vote For?, the debate featured seven notable speakers and a crowd of about a hundred audience members crammed into the ICA bar.

The thrust of the debate centred on the question of what might be the best option in the upcoming election for traditional Labour supporters who feel betrayed by the right wing tendencies of New Labour and Blairism. And what do you know, it was actually rather good fun, albeit punctuated with occasional stretches of frustrated irritated boredom. Nevertheless, here we present the TFT lowdown on each of the participants.

...

NEAL LAWSON, Labour Party member and chair of party pressure group Compass

Neal Lawson looked a little glum. When he wasn't speaking, he could often be spied with his head in his hands, seemingly weighed down by what looked to be either disillusionment or acid indigestion. He kicked off his bit with a couple of rather stale gags, and even though they went over surprisingly well, you could see his heart wasn't really in it. Then he kind of rambled for five minutes about principles, freedom, equality and people being able to self-manage their lives. It has to be said he wasn't exactly setting the room on fire. In the end he got round to the point.

'I'm not going to tell you all how to vote,' he said. 'You'll make up your own mind about that.' Ah. OK. Thanks. 'But let me just say this.' Come here. There's more. And there was. Lawson went on to voice his concerns that if Labour are returned at the next election with a large majority 'it will give Blair an endorsement I don't want him to have'. Furthermore he worries that Labour is 'representing seats in places that it shouldn't be representing.' He recounted an experience in Enfield where people with 'long gravel paths and three Mercedes' were 'enthusiastically voting Labour, and you start to wonder what the hell's going on. Are these really Labour people?'

Something like a shiver of bizarre repulsion ran through the room. Labour people? 'Do they share our values of progressiveness, of equality, of liberty, of fraternity, eksetra?' Ah, Labour people. Lawson also worries that Labour will 'start representing *their* interests' and not the interests of the people he thinks it ought to represent. Then, after another short ramble into New Politics, New Collectivism and life self-management strategies, he ended with this: 'If you want a politics of solidarity and a politics of equality, the Labour Party is still the best place to go to.' He was greeted with a smattering of lukewarm totally unconvinced applause. Also, he was a bit whiny. 1 out of 5.

MORE: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/welcome.asp

...

CHINA MIÉVILLE, Respect Party

Miéville began with an amendment to Harris's earlier description of the Respect Party. 'I don't think we so much as came out of the bowels of the Stop the War movement,' he said, 'as we were distilled in the cleansing fires of the struggle.' It got a big laugh and thankfully, was clearly intended to. Then he was straight into the war, chanting staccato, 'We - were - lied - to - by - our - Prime - Minister - and - thousands - of - people - died. That's really big. There is nothing bigger than that. And someone has to be held to account for that.... People,' he continued, 'are incandescent. And in many areas they are making an extremely rational decision. They're looking at the major parties and saying 'all of these people are saying the same thing. I'm not going to vote.' That's not apathy. That's political analysis. And so there's nothing more important than being able to present an alternative....' The alternative he favoured of course, was the Respect Party, and it is his party's shameless desire to tap into the anger felt by 'highly intelligent, pissed-off people around the country who feel they've been disenfranchised' and to turn them onto Respect Party policies.

Miéville noted a few. The Respect Party are: 'Firmly committed to trade unions, against privatisation, absolutely the only party to say troops out now... no erosion of abortion rights, no discrimination against people on grounds of sexuality.' And so on. He also managed to drop in a Bill Hicks quote ('It's irony on a bass level, but I like it.'), which has got to be a good sign. Got a little too carried away by his 'line in the sand' analogy, but was quite convincing on the whole 'new kind of politics' thing. On the whole, a fine performance. 4 out of 5.

MORE: http://www.respectcoalition.org/index.php?sec=39

...

SIMON THOMAS, MP, Plaid Cymru

Not unlike a slightly neurotic but still utterly insouciant club performer, Simon Thomas could be really quite charming if he wasn't in politics. Like a Welsh Max Bygraves, he dragged the audience into his world, drugging them on his Aberdare lilt. 'Plaid Cymru,' he sang. 'That's the name of the party, and it is the Party of Wales. I'll tell you a little about Wales and a little about politics.' And that's exactly what he did. What relevance it had to the proceedings was difficult to identify, but it was painless enough. Then he launched a couple of attacks at Labour, referencing Robert Jackson and Silvio Berlusconi. 'And this is why we do need alternatives,' he said, before pointing out, 'You don't live in Wales. You can't vote for Plaid Cymru. I'm the man you want but you can't vote for me.' When the applause died down, there was a bit more chat about Wales, followed by a reminder that Plaid Cymru were always very much against the war and were also responsible for the campaign to impeach Tony Blair 'for misconduct in relation to the Iraq war'. Very tidy. But really, it is difficult to know what Simon Thomas was doing there, entertaining though he might on occasion have proved. 3 out of 5.

MORE: http://www.plaidcymru.org

...

JOHANN HARI, regular columnist for the Independent, playwright and last year's Young Journalist of the Year

Johann Hari kicked off with a warning that he might have to disappear at short notice due to a run-in with a bad kebab. From there he moved into five reasons not to vote Labour. Good reasons they were too. Then he went on to list three reasons why Labour are better than the Tories. Also good reasons. From this equation however, he concluded that Labour should be voted back in at the next election but with a tactically engineered much-reduced majority, illustrating perfectly perhaps, the problem with British politics in most people's minds: that there really are no decent alternatives.

Most entertaining Hari moment was his recounting of the only line of his that the Independent has ever refused to print. It concerns Blair's record on gay issues and is as follows: 'Tony Blair has done everything that the gay rights lobby could possibly ask except take it up the arse himself.' A woman in the audience was heard to remark, 'He's hilarious!' Things got a tad heated however, in the Q&A following his bit when Hari stated that the war in Iraq was justified as it was the only possible way to unseat Saddam, and shortly after that, as promised, he was himself briefly unseated by last night's dodgy kebab. Fiery stuff. Passionate, personal and sincere. Shame Hari's not in politics. 4 out of 5.

MORE: http://www.johannhari.com/index.php

...

KEITH TAYLOR, Principal Speaker for the Green Party of England & Wales, Brighton Counsellor

Cuddly kindly uncle figure. Kicked off with some rose-tinted green spiel which was all fine and dandy and well and good, then focussed on the discrepancy between what New Labour *say* and what new Labour *do*. Was rather tedious about it on the whole. Stammered a bit. Pointed out that the Greens were not about 'cuddling trees', but were really about people. Wanted a strong Green voice in parliament. Really went on a bit. Nice enough bloke of course, well-intentioned and impossible not to warm to in a vague, slightly bored way. In truth, the only thing he really had going for him was climate change. 2 out of 5.

MORE: http://www.greenparty.org.uk

...

BRENDAN O'NEILL, Deputy Editor of Spiked Online

Brendan O'Neill is a stocky, slightly pugnacious character. Has the sneaking physical aggression of someone who suspects deep down that he is probably wrong about most things. 'I shall tell you what I'm going to do. I am not going to vote in the general lection, which I believe to be a rather degrading charade, and I don't think any of you should vote either. And I'll explain why.' Unfortunately he never really got round to the explanation. At least not a satisfactory one. Early on, he got wrapped up in the twee little conceit that the evening should not have been about *who* we should vote for now, but rather *what* should we vote for now.

He seemed inordinately proud of this and repeated it a few times with some rather generic supporting rhetoric. 'I think we've had quite a bit of 'who' in politics,' he concluded. 'We need a bit more of 'what' in politics.' What? What what? Well, this was apparently the point. 'It is exactly this absence of 'what', this absence of any kind of substance or real debate which means that I will not - certainly not - be taking part in this forthcoming general election which I just think is a sham.' He wasn't coming across as awfully constructive, it has to be said. Then he moved into a five-minute nanny-state riff, which led directly to his staggeringly insipid contention that people should be able to eat what they want, smoke what they want and weigh what they want.

Then, but seemingly not for comic effect, he declared in a quite sinister voice, 'All parties use the politics of fear.' He finished with the following summation: 'Politics is in such a degraded state... that it would be worse to take part in this general election than it would be to abstain from it.' And furthermore, 'There is no party in the forthcoming general election that I think is worthy of my vote.' Then came the question from the audience that had been on everyone's inner lips: 'How do you change anything if you do nothing?' And that pretty much finished O'Neill off. No amount of insistence that he was actually 'passionate about politics' could make him sound anything other than an utter berk. 1 out of 5.

MORE: http://www.spiked-online.com

...

BEN RAMM, editor of The Liberal magazine, 'a magazine devoted to poetry, politics and culture'

Oozing charmlessness and viscous nasality, Ben Ramm is a hunched smarmy figure with little presence. He actually sounds like some kind of goblin, hepped up on goofballs and liberalism. We don't mean to get unnecessarily personal but if it came to a choice between sharing a lift with Shane Richie or Ben Ramm, we'd plump for Richie every time. Ramm's thrust, when he could finally manage to slither around to it, was that 'The Lib-Dems represent the only real viable coherent alternative' in British politics. From then on it was merely a case of alternately bigging up the Libs and dissing the government and getting slightly flustered when a sideswipe at George Galloway brought in a few mini- heckles. Ramm's only redeeming moment was a nice remark he made about the Lib Dems not being interested in whether you have three Mercedes or not. Other than that, he was rubbish. Ungraded.

MORE: http://www.theliberal.co.uk/current_issue

...

JOHN HARRIS

Harris on the other hand, in his role of debate host and moderator, was on excellent form throughout the evening. Highlights included him refusing to get bogged down in Iraq when it seemed inevitable; rapping O'Neill firmly on the knuckles when he started to get all shouty and mic-hogging; expertly taking the piss out of the pomposity of David Aaronavic; rather sensitively encouraging the audience to give a round of applause to O'Neill when they really didn't want to; and reigning in the Respect and Stop the War audience members who were in danger of becoming an unruly and slightly supercilious mob. Harris helped turn what could have been just a bunch of privileged white men sucking their own cocks on stage all night into a fun and informative debate. 5 out of 5."

The second is from the smart blogger Lenin, whose work can be read at http://www.leninology.blogspot.com/

"Hari vs Melville Debate.

It is wrong, hideously wrong, to abbreviate the debate in the way suggested in the title. Nevertheless, that was where the action was at as far as I was concerned. To set the background, a debate about Who Do We Vote For Now? was held at the ICA for pissed-off lefties. It was hosted by John Harris, who did his best under the circumstances, and made a few decent points himself into the bargain. Speaking for Labour were Neal Lawson and Johann Hari; for Respect, China Mieville (he would have been joined by Salma Yaqoob, who was sick - but would have been the only woman speaker of the night); for the Liberal Democrats, the truly awful Ben Ramm, editor of The Liberal; for for the Greens, someone whose face looked lovely and lived in but whose bloody name I forget; for Plaid Cymru, a very witty and charming guy whose name I forget (and who couldn't really account for his presence at such a meeting in London anyway); for not voting, Brendan O'Neill, former RCP groupie, now suited libertarian of Sp!ked Online.

I arrived in the crowded bar area (where the debate was held), slightly early. I met Johann as he came in ("ooh, er, now I know you don't I...? Ooh, yes, it's Lenin!"), and also a friend of his who was very nice about my haranguing of Hari. Johann mistook me for a Scottish person, explained that he had reheated a kebab recently and was laying out intestinal pie with odious frequency. He would buy me a drink afterward as previously promised on his website, (he didn't, although I have to be fair to him and say that he never had the chance). I sat down with the proprietor of Dead Men Left who was looking rather dapper. The dry humour was more or less as you find it on his blog. Guy Taylor, of Globalise Resistance, was there, as was John Rees of the Stop the War Coalition .

There were probably a few people there whose names I don't know but are equally deserving of mention as the motley crew discussed above, but this is where I was situated.

The debate began with Neal Lawson indicting new Labour, hoping to reclaim old Labour (though not too old), and saying that he wouldn't advise anyone on who to vote for, that was a judgement call and so on. He was loyal to a set of values, not to a tribe or a party. ("What?" We tittered. "A prominent member of Labour can't even recommend his own party?" He later threw caution to the wind, frustrated by the trajectory of debate, and said that - in fact - Labour was the best, the only way to achieve real change in Britain).

Johann Hari spoke, told the funny story about the kebab again (I think he really meant it), passionately denounced Blair's stand on asylum seekers, on civil rights, on drugs, on free markets and so forth. He was eloquent on some of it, stumbled on a few points, but was generally wittier and more impressive in person than in writing. He explained, for instance, that "the only line The Independent ever censored of mine was a suggestion that 'Tony Blair has done everything for the gay rights movement except take one up the arse himself'". That's not true, but it's funny. He did not talk about Iraq, at first, preferring to be drawn in the course of debate. He smoked and drank copiously, a youthful Christopher Hitchens. I waited for a mention of Galloway. Go on, Johann. Repeat your slanders. I have a mental folder the size of Ceredigion. Unfortunately, he constrained himself to some general points on why we should vote for whoever our hearts desired in safe Labour seats, but stick with Blair in the marginals. The reasons were, in a way, quite solid. Howard was a bastard; the Tories would be even harder on asylum seekers than new Labour, and had a policy of turning away genuine applicants; they would cut benefits like the Working Families Tax Credit. These things made a difference; they couldn't be dismissed, because thousands of lives and livelihoods hung in the balance. Many questions were asked from the floor (Hari was the star of the night in at least that respect), most of them dissenting. Hari apostrophised, polarised, ostracised...

The Plaid Cymru guy spoke. Loveable, affable, as witty and charming as any politician has a right to be. He poured scorn on new Labour, denounced sectarianism on the Left, dissed the Tories and bigged up the Greens and Respect. I couldn't have liked him more. But I still can't remember his name or work out what the fuck he was doing there.

China Mieville is a stange sort of speaker. He looks like he could knock you out, but his voice is full of youthful enthusiasm. Let's not forget, first of all, that it is one thing for a politician to lie; it is quite another to lie at the expense of tens of thousands of lives. That's a big thing. Blair lied; thousands died. And we still have some people hinting that they may yet vote Labour, that all governments are terrible, the Tories would be worse. China talked about Iraq and Palestine, but also about privatisation, selection in schools (which is also known as 'rejection' for most kids), tuition fees, increasing inequality, the statistical tricks used to suppress waiting list numbers and unemployment figures etc. All of which was a way of getting round to the fact that we desperately need a new kind of politics, one that reflects the needs of ordinary people, that won't scapegoat asylum seekers or play populist games on crime, that will call for the troops to come home. China also laid into the 'pointing and whispering campaign' about Respect, referred to the recent resolutions overwhelmingly passed in support of gay rights and abortion rights.

An interesting debate began at this point. On the question of withdrawing the troops, someone suggested that it would simply be a bloodbath if they were withdrawn. How could one justify this. I wish someone had said that there was already a bloodbath. What China did say was that a) we've heard that argument before (take your pick), b) withdrawing troops doesn't mean withdrawing support - we owe Iraqis, big time, and that includes money, reconstruction and anything else that doesn't involve murder and torture. On Respect, someone asked Johann if he might come out and express his criticisms so that there could be a debate. Very well. Johann cited two comments, one by Yvonne Ridley, the other by George Galloway. Ridley's comment was about the Taliban, and was construed as supporting them; Galloway's comment was the one made in the Mail on Sunday about the dictatorship in Pakistan (I've never been able to read this, as it is unavailable online). John Rees countered that he disagreed with Yvonne Ridley's comment, but believed it was less an expression of faith in theocracy than an expression of relief that she had been released unharmed; he suggested that Galloway's comment was made in the context of not wishing to see Pakistan broken up, which was being suggested at the time - but again, he emphasised that he disagreed. China also suggested that Ridley's point was being taken out of context.

At which time, Johann Hari leaned forward into the mic and sputtered that China was an apologist for an apologist for the Taliban. This wasn't his finest moment of the evening. For one thing, even if you put the worst possible construction on Ridley and Galloway's comments, you are still left with ad hominem abuse and not political analysis. The Labour Party has a preacher for its leader and one of its senior ministers is associated with a far right Catholic sect, but that isn't a particularly good reason not to vote for it. Etc.

Brendan O'Neill was alarmingly poor, and his speech was riddled with inconsistency. He insisted at one point that he would not vote at the next election (almost everyone attacked this point), and would urge everyone else to avoid doing so as well; he later comically claimed that he would never urge anyone else not to vote. He insisted that all political parties, even the smaller ones, were obsessed with things like anti-smoking, fatty foods and what-not - yet he was the only one to discuss such things the whole night. He said he wanted a "total war of ideas", yet later insisted that certain things were outside of politics (fuel consumption, fox-hunting etc). When challenged on his anti-voting fatwa, he became hopelessly incoherent, saying that there are other ways of conducting political struggle - which is true. But it only takes five minutes and a pencil stroke to go and vote. And why not do so, just with tactics in mind? If nothing else, to send a message to the political elite whom O'Neill and his internet comrades so rightly despise? Er, well, there are better ways of conveying your disgust and, er... Yeah yeah. Move one. Next speaker.

The Green was sweet, had many interesting things to say. Unfortunately, I was onto my third pint by then and his anti-charismatic performance caused me to fall into temporary day-dreams. What would happen if I became President, I began to idly wonder? Suffice to say, I had nothing against the Green, and he would probably survive my inauguration.

Yet more controversy. Challenged about the Iraq war, John Rees had said that the antiwar Left was not against intervention. We would have favoured building solidarity with Iraqis, along precisely the lines that the South African resistance built ties - through unions, political organisations etc. The same way, in fact, we organise around Palestine. The Iraqis, with international working class support, could topple the dictatorship themselves - and gain a great deal more than the few crumbs of colonial freedom that the Americans would proffer amid the carnage. Johann Hari countered that there had been an uprising in 1991, and Saddam had been able to crush that, slaughtering about 100,000 people into the bargain.

The mic was handed out. I rose, and waved my hand. "Johann," I announced with a bit of smugness, "you are far too modest. What you ought to say is that the Iraqis were crushed by Saddam with our help. The rebels were blocked by the Americans at the height of their uprising, when they had successfully taken much of the country. The reason, we now know, was because if Saddam was to be ousted it should be by the military as far as those who waged the first Gulf War were concerned. Now, on the point about Family Tax Credit, you say the Tories will cut it: don't worry, Johann, Labour will get round to it." How I tittered. Polite laughter in reply. "And on asylum seekers, you mention that Michael Howard will turn back legitimate asylum seekers, but Blair's government already does that. When we were allegedly bombing Serbia to save the Kosovans, we were also turning them back at the British embassy and obliging them to remain in a country that was being bombed. Blair has said that if migrants can't support themselves, they will be removed. If they can't support themselves, they are in most need of help! New Labour is not a force for liberation or poverty relief, it is a force that needs to be defeated."

At least, I thought that's what I had said. What I seem to have said is "Errh, fnuccking, Johann, bloody Blair and schtuff..." I also seem to have said it at about 300 decibels, thus almost rendering the mic inoperative. Three pints, that's all it takes with me. Remember that, potential seducers! Polite applause.

The editor of The Liberal, Ben Ramm, was the most unbearable speaker of the whole night. Snide, cocky and actually insistent on a return to Free Trade - Victorian England style! Why he was invited, I shall never know. He was uncompromisingly for the Liberal Democrats, of course, and was heckled by those who are familiar with the Liberal record in Sheffield, Liverpool and elsewhere. I tuned out.

Other people spoke, but I can't be bothered recounting what they said. A vote was taken on who people would vote for - which Respect won overwhelmingly. The MC, John Harris, didn't bother to acknowledge this fact. I hung around and shook Johann's hand, insulted the guys who were selling The Liberal (update: it turns out I was actually insulting Ben Ramm who now hides behind a bushy little beard to conceal the fact that he's only twenty-two), accosted China and offered my expert advice on what he should have said to this and this. Meaders was silently seething that he hadn't got to speak, as he had been eager to demonstrate that not everyone standing near the bar was pissed and stentorian. I was broke, and had to get home. Other stuff happened of course, but you don't want to hear about that. Oh you do? Well, Johann Hari returned from the toilet and joined China in trashing the place while screaming "FUCK THE BOURGEOIS STATE!!" What? You dare to doubt me?"

Millions of Iraqis will risk their lives this Sunday to go to the polling booths and vote. Here in Britain, half of us couldn't even be bothered to stroll up the road in perfect safety at the 2001 election - so have we reacted with awe and admiration for Iraqis? Not quite. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times, speaks for much of conservative England when he jeers that "Iraqi democracy will merely serve as a transition to Shia theocracy, Iran-style." In this newspaper, Robert Fisk speaks for much of progressive opinion when he discusses "the Arab inability to seize democracy", declaring that "Arabs have confidence only in their tribes."

The Iraqis who die voting this week - and some of them will - will not die for nothing. For the first time, every single Iraqi will be free to vote - and 80 per cent of them want to, according to the latest polls. No political parties are banned except the Baath - so anybody and everybody is running for office.

And the idea they will vote for a theocracy has been conclusively proven wrong. The main Shia parties declared this week that there will be no clerics in government - not as prime minister, nor even as minister for paperclips. "There will be no turbans in the government. Everybody agrees on that. Iraqis do not want a theocracy. We want democracy," explained Aadnan Ali. He is the leader of the Dawa Party, and he was speaking on behalf of the entire Shia electoral list.

Nobody should doubt that Iraqis are capable of democracy. The real question is: will they be allowed to exercise it? It is one thing for an election to be held, and another for the popular will to be translated into action. There are two major forces converging on Iraq who seek to destroy meaningful democracy and negate the will of Iraqis: Islamic fundamentalists and market fundamentalists. The first will try to prevent the elections; the second will simply ignore them.

The jihadist "resistance" has made its position clear. Musab al-Zarqawi - blessed by Osama bin Laden as his man in Baghdad - declared this week, "Those who vote are infidels. We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it." He jeers that the Shia are "lurking snakes" and "crafty scorpions" and "the most evil of mankind." This ‘resistance’ wants to create a fascist-Taliban state in Iraq where music is banned, women are jailed in their own homes and their own burquas and the Shia are second-class citizens in their own country again. The only nation ever governed by such jihadists is Afghanistan - and it may never recover.

But another philosophy - not as bad, but still disastrous and anti-democratic - is being imposed on Iraq right now: market fundamentalism. This is a far more extreme and vicious social system than the capitalism practised in Britain or the US. For over two decades, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been thrusting on poor nations a system where all government restrictions on corporations - universal healthcare, significant levels of taxation and spending, moves to tackle unemployment - are seen as "burdens"and ruthlessly stripped away. This approach has reduced several countries to riots, hunger and even revolution. They have brought disaster to countries as diverse as Russia, Argentina, Thailand and Bolivia.

A deal levered in Paris last month by the US and other countries guaranteed that the elected Iraqi government will not be able to escape this market fundamentalism. The Western governments agreed to cancel 80 per cent of the odious debts Iraq has inherited from Saddam Hussein - on one condition. Iraq's economy must be controlled by the IMF for the next decade.

So the elected Iraqi government will have to battle the Zarqawi jihadists with its hands tied. It will be unable, for example, to do anything about the cause of much of the instability: unemployment. After two years of IMF economic "management", Iraq now has 70 per cent unemployment - just as Argentina and Russia did under IMF rule. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in economics, warned back in June 2003 that the IMF's plans would have precisely this effect - but he was ignored. If there had been this kind of wild and unrestrained marketization in post-war Germany or Japan, the legacy of fascism would never have been flushed out. Even in Britain - a country with a fairly robust democratic tradition - we would have mass civil unrest and rising fascist movements if most of us were unemployed.

An effective anti-insurgency policy would be multi-pronged. It is impossible to hunt down and kill every insurgent (didn't Fallujah teach us that?). The best way to wear down the insurency is to simultaneously target their ringmasters like Zarquawi and to gradually undermine its pool of support through policies to revive the economy and increase employment. The best remedy is not fear but hope. Yet this is precisely what the IMF conditions prevent the elected Iraqi government from offering. All the economic tools to tackle the insurgents have been taken away; they will be left with nothing but raw force, which aggravate the situation in most instances.

That's why these two fundamentalisms ravaging Iraq cannot be considered in isolation. Market fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism reinforce one another: jihadists feed on the extreme marketisation of the IMF. Mass unemployment provides a recruiting ground for maniacal death-cults like Zarqawi's. Mass unemployment provides a recruiting ground for maniacal death-cults like Zarquawi’s. Amy Chua, a Professor at Yale University, has shown how in her award winning book ‘World on Fire’ how this happens, explaining that "the IMF model has been shown to inflame situations in dozens of countries and breed extremist movements."

Yet somewhere - beyond these twinned bankrupt ideologies, and beyond Baathism - are the Iraqi people, eager to express their desire for democracy. How can we ensure they prevail? The pre-emptive sneering at the elections is not the way to do it. If you dismiss the elections, you dismiss 80 per cent of the Iraqi people. No: the better option is to watch the elections closely and lobby to ensure that its results are respected.

Some opponents have argued that voting will legitimise the on-going occupation. Precisely the opposite is the truth. The mainstream Shia parties will almost certainly demand a timetable for the withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq if they win. They know that foreign troops blundering and torturing their way across an unemployed country will only breed more resistance. They know that only a strategy involving trained Iraqi troops, accountable to an elected government, will ever have a hope of catching the Sunni fundamentalists. So if your main aim is to ensure an end to the occupation - a process most Iraqis now want, according to opinion polls - then you should back the elections and the victors.

Of course we cannot trust the Bush administration (or, sadly, the Blair government) to respect the election results, given their anti-democratic behaviour in several parts of the world. I don't believe there will be any rigging of the vote itself, because it would be too blatant and would cause scandals even in the US. Instead, pressure will be brought to bear in the weeks following the election, when the elected parties come together to choose a prime minister. The US will no doubt lobby hard for a candidate friendly to its oil and business interests. This will be the time for protests and jeering, not as Iraqis gaze on posters saying "You vote, you die."

But the withdrawal of coalition troops - at the request of an elected Iraqi government - is only one part of the fight to make sure the democratic will of Iraqis is respected. Physical occupation can end while economic occupation through the IMF continues. Those of us in Britain who want to see real Iraqi democracy must battle to reform the IMF and other anti-democratic international bodies, and for a real, no-conditions cancellation of Iraq's debt.

The Iraqi people are about to risk their lives to show the world how much they want real democracy. It will be a savage trick if, after that, it is still denied to them.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article can also be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

POST-POSTSCRIPT: There's an intelligent and sensitive partial response to this article at http://modies.blogspot.com/2005/01/confessions-of-pro-war-skeptic.html

Whatever happened to the Labour government's lofty words on arms policy? Tony Blair declared unequivocally a few years ago: "We don't sell arms that could be used in human rights abuses. We have one of the strictest regulatory frameworks in the world." Although they might sell to dictatorial regimes, the Government would ensure they were used only for "legitimate purposes" and "not internal repression".

Tell that to the people of Aceh, a South-east Asian province that washed to the world's attention on Boxing Day and is now ebbing from our minds again. Three years ago, the heroic Indonesian human rights group Tapol took photographs of British-supplied tanks and weaponry being used by the Indonesian military to incinerate Acinese civilians, including children. Their crime? They had declared they want independence from an Indonesian government that has plundered, tortured and trashed their home-province for decades. And the British government's response? We kept on arming Indonesia to the hilt. So much for our "regulatory framework" and "strict rules".

It seems that our government has a neat policy for this battered chunk of South-east Asia. Cry for the people of Aceh when they are massacred by a tsunami - and arm their murderers when they are massacred by the Indonesian government.

And Britain's arms policy is just about to get worse. Since the gunning down of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the European Union has maintained a strict arms embargo against the Chinese government - until now.

The French and German governments are eager for better access to Chinese markets, and Tony Blair and Jack Straw - after a brief period of wobbling - are now backing them with full-frontal force. The crude Dick Cheney-style xenophobia against the French over the past few years has been disgusting - but that shouldn't inhibit us from criticising the role of the French government in this deal. Jacques Chirac argues in practice for the hardcore realpolitik of arming any tyrant, any time, anyhow - and Tony Blair is now backing his stance. Chirac has vandalised even the pitifully mild proposal that countries should have to declare what they are selling to the Chinese dictatorship.

Ah yes, the defenders of lifting the ban reply, but China is not what it was in 1989. It would be one thing to arm Deng Xiaoping straight after the massacre - but today, China is a modernising, prosperous country that will cave in to democracy sooner or later.

The people forced to mourn in secret for Zhao Ziyang last week would not agree. In 1989, he was head of China's ruling Communist Party - but he appreciated a democratic revolution when he saw one. He headed straight to Tiananmen Square to address the students and explain that their calls for democracy represented "the future of China". He was seized by the police and taken to Deng Xiaoping. Deng demanded to know why he was supporting the "counter-revolutionary" principle of democracy. "I have the people on my side," Zhao replied. Deng sneered: "Then you have nothing."

Zhao was never seen in public again. He died under house arrest in this supposedly "new" China. The country's dictators remain so terrified of the lure of democracy and its defenders that they ordered a total blackout on the news. Readers of Chinese newspapers and viewers of their TV bulletins know nothing of his demise - which gives you some idea of quite how free their press is.

Nobody should kid themselves: China remains a dictatorship. The political structures of Maoism remain, even as the policies they enact have (thankfully) changed drastically. Today, an incredible proportion of China's state resources is dedicated to persecuting the eccentric but harmless Falun Gong spiritual sect. Nobody knows for sure how many pro-democracy protesters remain held without trial, but most human rights groups believe it runs into thousands - and a crackdown is expected ahead of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Some Western apologists for the Chinese government (and lifting the arms ban) argue that the country's growing openness to Western corporations is evidence of greater freedom. This only shows how debased the idea of freedom has become, even in Europe. In fact, Chinese workers - forbidden to vote, join trade unions or defy their employers - are somewhat wealthier today, but scarcely more free.

The shock capitalism imposed on China by its dictators and by Western corporations - with none of the protections and restraints taken for granted in democracies - is provoking growing unrest even in the repressive climate of that country. Over 2 million Chinese people will be on illegal strike or demonstrations this month alone, even though they risk being jailed or beaten by the police. The cheap Chinese goods we all devour are so inexpensive precisely because their workers have a police state suppressing their demands.

But the biggest victims of the European Union's renewed arms sales will be the people of Taiwan, who might hear the crack and boom of European weapons attacking their homes very soon. Over the past decade, Taiwan has become a fairly sophisticated democracy, with all that involves: elections, a free press, trade unions and a gay rights movement.

The Chinese dictators find this unbearable. They claim that Taiwan is a "renegade province" that "belongs" to China, even though it broke away over 50 years ago and opinion polls show fat majorities of Taiwanese people do not want reunification.The real reason for the Chinese rulers' hatred of Taiwan is not just crude nationalism. No; the island just off their coast exposes the Chinese government's rationale for remaining in power to be a lie. Hu Jintao, China's current dictator, says that democracy is a "Western idea" not suited to "Asian values."

Taiwan shows that this is a self-serving fiction. If the people of Taiwan can choose their own government and exercise free speech, why can't China's? And their argument that China's economic development will be held back by democracy is also proven to be false: Taiwan is more prosperous than China. Enraged by these truths, the Chinese government announced last month might invade Taiwan if the country's elections produced a result they did not like.

So the loudest protests against the lifting of the embargo have come from Taiwan - but the Bush administration comes a close second. Of course, this US policy is not motivated by some benign desire to support democracy; if it was, they would not have supported an anti-democratic coup attempt in Venezuela just two years ago.

No - the Bush administration's concern is to diminish China's power and influence by any means possible. But the new European policy - backed by Blair - is motivated by motives just as base: greed. The divisions between Europe and America on this issue are those of raw geopolitical influence; neither side cares much for the people of Taiwan and China and their basic human rights. It's a startling reminder of how statecraft is detached from basic human morality.

Are we really happy to drag the European dream - a dream which should inspire the world, and offer a social democratic alternative to America - down to this? To arming men who jail democrats? Next time Tony Blair or the EU claims to have a moral arms policy, they should be drowned out by sad, cynical laughter.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article can also be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

The campaign against the arms trade is at http://www.caat.org.uk/

In his second inaugural address yesterday, George Bush presented America as the armed wing of Amnesty International. "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

After 11 September, some of the political thinkers I most respect started unexpectedly reading from this script about US foreign policy. Christopher Hitchens is a good example. For decades, he had exposed the monstrous anti-democratic policies of the US, from the Nixon-Kissinger years to Reagan's dirty wars in South America. But after the attacks on the Twin Towers, Hitchens argued that the vicious American foreign policy he opposed had died with Bin Laden's victims.

As downtown Manhattan burned, even Republicans in Washington accepted that supporting authoritarian regimes outside America's borders would breed anti-American death cults and, sooner or later, backfire onto the homeland. Hitchens said his contacts deep within the Bush administration had decided the only solution was "a forward strategy of freedom". This would mean reversing support for dictators and planting the seeds of democracy in some of the world's worst tyrant-infested wastelands.

Even more crucially, Tony Blair believes the Bushies share thisanalysis. He said recently: "When the Americans say we want to extend democracy to these countries, or extend democracy and human rights throughout the Middle East, people say, well, that is part of the neoconservative agenda. Actually, if you put it in a different language, it is a progressive agenda." Although I was often wary, I wanted both Blair and Hitchens to be right.

At first glance, Bush's address on Capitol Hill yesterday is a restatement of this Blair-Hitchens view. The President said: "For as long as whole regions of the world fester in tyranny ... violence will raise a mortal threat." He declared that "the only force in history that can break the reign of terror" is "the expansion of human freedom".

So why do I feel so despairing and so foolish? Because the rhetoric is flatly contradicted by US action on the ground, and we simply have to be honest about it. If Bush was serious about "exporting democracy and freedom", the best place to start would be with the authoritarian regimes he currently funds, supports and deals weaponry to. Egypt - which receives a $2bn handout from the US Treasury every year - has been under 'Emergency Rule' for 25 years now. Political dissidents are routinely tortured. Pro-democracy activists are jailed. The current President, Hosni Mubarak, expects his son to succeed him as head of state. A US president committed to spreading democracy and freedom would withhold the vast sums he sprays on this authoritarian state until there is an Egyptian perestroika.

Does Bush condemn the Saud Crime Family who oversee public beheadings and commit "widespread torture with complete impunity", according to Amnesty? Not exactly. The award-winning journalist Craig Unger has shown that the House of Bush and the House of Saud have been intimate friends for over 30 years, enjoying luxury holidays and deeply intertwined business relationships. The Saudi "royals" have donated an amazing $1.4bn to the Bush family and their (mostly failed) business projects over the years. Far from urging democracy upon his petroleum-soaked buddies, Bush lauds them as "loyal allies" and "friends of America". And the list of vile governments Bush embraces goes on: Uzbekistan and Colombia are especially disturbing examples.

And it gets worse. Not only does the Bush administration support several existing dictatorships; the administration has also acted to liquidate democracy when it is incompatible with its geostrategic interests. Look at Venezuela, where the leftist government of Hugo Chavez has been supported by the electorate an extraordinary six times since 1998, often with landslide victories. Chavez - backed by a majority of the Venezuelan people - has insisted on state ownership of the nation's oil industry, the fifth-largest in the world. Unlike in every other oil-rich country - especially the ones backed by the US - much of the profit has been ploughed into schools and hospitals for the people trapped in the country's slums.

There is a lot about Chavez I find extremely worrying - he has embraced both Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and he has eroded some media freedoms - but it is impossible to argue that he does not enjoy massive democratic support.

So what has the Bush administration's response been to this flowering of Venezuelan democracy and freedom? In 2002 - after the supposed sea-change of 11 September - they backed an anti-democratic coup to install a pro-American, pro-business candidate with little popular support. It was only massive protests on the streets of Venezuela - and a refusal by much of the Venezuelan army to act against their own country's democracy - that restored Chavez to power.

This begs the question: what does the Bush administration mean by spreading democracy? Let's look at the country where its "forward strategy of freedom" has been most aggressively pursued: Iraq. The US Defence Department is, according to Newsweek, currently considering the "Salvador option": sending in death squads to kill Sunni civilians to make them "pay a price" for possibly supporting the insurgency. So much for human rights. And democracy? Even after next week's elections, Iraqis will have no say in the running of their own country's economy. Under a US-brokered deal, the next Iraqi government - whatever its character - has to agree to allow the economy to be run by unelected, unaccountable, usually disastrous bankers from the International Monetary Fund for the next decade if they want to be freed from the burden of Saddam's swollen debts. Is there a democracy in the world that does not control its own taxes?

Yes, this neoconservative semi-democracy is somewhat better than, say, Saddam's Baathism - but it is still an affront to true democracy and human rights. There always will be some countries like Iraq where the situation is so awful that people will prefer even a US invasion to the status quo - but is that the best we can hope for?

Sadly, George Bush talked yesterday about spreading US values - democracy and freedom - only to sugar-coat the raw expansion of US corporate and strategic interests. Tony Blair and the liberals who thought we could ride neoconservatism to a better world have been duped. It is painful, but we cannot live in a dream world.

Nothing would make me happier than if the most powerful state in the world was committed to spreading democracy and toppling vicious governments. It is not; in many places, it is doing precisely the opposite. As George Bush begins his second term with another false cry, it is time to wake up.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article can also be e-mailed to letters@independent.co.uk

There's a chunk of the British middle class that lives in a warm, comforting bath called "meritocracy". They believe that Britain is already a Land of Hope and Opportunity, where the rich get ahead by working hard and the poor fall behind because ... well ... nobody likes to say it, but they don't work hard, do they? Wherever this British bourgeoisie gathers, there is a mood of quiet triumphalism. I earned my Mercedes; they earned their Burberry hats and their scuzzy flats. And when - just occasionally - this belief is shaken, they reach for the soap. They scrub themselves down with the argument that nobody in Britain is really poor. They've all got fridges and jaunts to Ibiza and PlayStations, haven't they?

The plug can be pulled on this fantasy by a simple, hard fact. Today, End Child Poverty - a coalition of children's charities including Barnardo's, the NSPCC and Save the Children - issues a report filled with startling figures, but one of them, in particular, drains all this middle-class self-congratulation away in a second.

Most people know that low-weight babies are less likely to have a high IQ, less likely to live long, healthy lives, and less likely to succeed in life. But how many people know that, in Britain today, women in social class 5 - the women of the council estates - are 60 per cent more likely to have a low-weight baby than their (distant) cousins in social class 1?

So even as they develop in the womb, the life-chances of the British poor get whittled down, because their skint mothers suffer worse nutrition, weaker public services and greater stress. From conception onwards, a thick middle-class kid is advantaged over a smart-but-poor child. The idea that Britain is already a meritocracy - that you earned your place and the street-sweeper earned his - is a bad joke.

In the fourth richest country in the world, it doesn't have to be like this. It's easy to sink into nihilistic despair and complain that "the poor are always with us" - the incessant moan of reactionaries in every generation. In fact, poverty has been eroded many times, many ways.

There's no mystery and we don't need any magic. The best remedy for poverty is twofold: a dynamic market economy that generates wealth, and a strong state that redistributes that wealth to the poorest. It's called social democracy, and it works. Under the much-reviled Harold Wilson, the poorest tenth of Brits saw their real income rise by 29 per cent, while the rest of the country grew by just 16 per cent. It was effective: only 8.2 per cent of Brits were in poverty in 1979, the lowest level since records began.

Under the Conservatives, the market economy continued but state redistribution was battered and broken. The result was simple: contrary to Thatcherite myth, the chances of a child from a poor family making it into the highest income bracket fell by 40 per cent. For the first time in the 20th century, Britain's agonisingly slow progress towards meritocracy went into reverse.

But the underlying truth remains: we can end child poverty if we want to by redistributing wealth. This country has enjoyed a decade of soaring economic growth, at the top of the world's tables of riches. If we don't end child poverty when the sun is shining, when will we ever do it?

First, however, we need to understand quite how bad the problem is. The poor look so similar to the wealthy - they no longer wear rags or (very often) beg in the streets - that even many well-intentioned people doubt they exist. Yet in Britain today, half of all kids from low-income families cannot afford to go on school trips. Worse, the Citizens' Advice Bureau found last year that 30 per cent of poor children have been sent away from school or turned away from the classroom because their parents couldn't afford the correct uniform. Every week, I see my nephews playing with kids who haven't been on holiday in years, or with children who live in homes that don't have carpets fitted, so they toddle about instead on concrete floors. If you can't properly clothe your kids or send them for a day out, if you can't even afford a carpet, then I'd say it's fair to call you poor.

And this isn't a matter - as the Tories and the right-wing press would have you believe - of lazy parents refusing to work. Half of all poor kids today have a parent going out to work, and they're still poor.

If, like me, you sometimes experience a gloomy fear that Britain will always be this way, then today's report by End Child Poverty is an essential dose of Prozac. It's a practical, carefully researched blueprint for a Britain with no poor children - and it shows how we have been silently, slowly progressing towards this goal for the past five years. No airy rhetoric; no wild aspirations; just facts - and 10 ways to achieve the Government's goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020

Last year, the Government hit its quarter-way target for achieving its 2020 vision. The proportion of poor children is down from 34 per cent to 28 per cent, with more than a million children pushed over the poverty line. It's been achieved by tax credits that top-up the wages of low-income parents. It's a smart tactic, because it redistributes wealth without creating the classic problem of the welfare state: a "benefit trap" that discourages work.

But the poverty experts agree: this first step has been the easiest. The Government has so far reached the million children who were hovering close to the poverty line. But if they are to continue meeting the incredibly ambitious target of lifting up all kids - the ones who play with my nephews included - they need to burrow far deeper. And there's no point dodging the truth: it will require more money - and higher taxes. Redistribution cannot be done on the cheap, and it can't be done for much longer on the quiet.

Most of the measures recommended by End Child Poverty are simple - like extending child benefit to pregnant women. At the moment, a pregnant 20-year-old on benefits has just £6 a day to survive. She can't afford the food and vitamin supplements that middle-class parents take for granted - and her child suffers. Only a cascade of dozens of poverty-busting initiatives like this will - in combination - pull up enough children to make child poverty in this country history.

This should be a defining purpose for this government, a cause as great as the Attlee government's creation of the NHS. It showcases the best and the worst of a social democratic approach to politics. It is frustratingly slow and, at times, dry and technical - but, if it is fought for, it works.

As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski explained: "The trouble with the social democratic ideal is that it does not stock and does not sell any of the exciting commodities which various totalitarian movements - communist, fascist, or leftist - offer dream-hungry youth ... It has no prescription for the total salvation of mankind. It is, instead, an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed and vindictive envy."

Now there's an opening - and an agenda - for a real Labour manifesto.

POSTSCRIPT: You can e-mail comments for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk

POST-POSTSCRIPT: There's a comment on this article at http://www.everythingispolitics.com/2005/01/we-are-not-all-equal-and-im-glad-of-it.htm

and at
http://deadmenleft.blogspot.com/2005/01/education-we-dont-get-no.html