Johann Hari

Interviewers: Richard Sanderson and Neil Denny

LA: Johann Hari is a columnist for The Independent and the London Evening Standard and is a contributing editor to Attitude magazine. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Le Monde, amongst others. He has written a play, Going Down In History, which was well received in the Edinburgh Festival, and a book, God Save The Queen?, a provocative look at the end of the monarchy. Since he has begun working as a journalist, Johann has been attacked in print by a wide range of institutions and people including John Pilger, Private Eye, The Socialist Worker, George Galloway, the BNP and the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain. Noam Chomsky has called him a Stalinist and “beneath contempt”. He’s probably bored by now by this so I apologise; he’s often been called precociously talented for one so young. Yohann, welcome to Little Atoms.

JH: Hello. You’ll have to add my favourite insult which is that the Dalai Lama called me fat.

LA: For a minute I thought you were going to do the Busted one.

JH: Let’s not discuss what the Busted one’s about, it’s not publishable but no, the Dalai Lama hated me. He’s such a bitch.

LA: Well, I think we’ll return to that. We’re going to talk about religion quite a lot on the show. First of all I want to talk, as I was just saying to you we’re a couple of weeks behind being only a fortnightly show, I want to talk about the Danish cartoons. Sorry, you’ve probably done this to death already. Before we do that though, there’s something I’m a little confused by. There’ve been a lot of statements made in the media after the furore by Jack Straw, Bill Clinton, Iqbal Sacranie saying…going along the lines of basically, well I suppose it’s what Christopher Hitchens called in a slightly different context the “throat clearing moment”, this idea that, you know, “Yeah, freedom of speech, freedom of speech, we love freedom of speech, it’s great, we all want freedom of speech, but…” There’s this idea sort of in the air that freedom of speech has its limits and this seems like to me a bit of a tautology; I think you either have freedom of speech or you don’t have freedom of speech. Do you think there’s a middle ground?

JH: There’s this really poisonous moral relativism that’s been put about where you’ve had quite a lot of people who are nice liberal people saying “Well, we don’t like Islamic fundamentalism but hey, we don’t like this liberal fundamentalism either,” as if there’s moral equivalence between people who think that beheading is a legitimate form of literary criticism and the system of free speech that guarantees freedom to absolutely everyone including Muslims. And to point out, as some people have, that we have laws against holocaust denial in Austria, well that’s an argument for repealing the holocaust denial laws in Austria, that’s not an argument for [censoring images of Mohammed] so I think that’s very problematic.

I think with the Mohammed cartoons, there’s some encouraging things and some discouraging things What’s obviously depressing - it doesn’t surprise me there are religious fanatics in the world who would threaten to kill people because they draw a picture; those people have always existed and they always will. What surprises me is that there are so many people who, when confronted with this, will equivocate; who will say “Yeah, but the cartoonists shouldn’t have done it. Yeah but…” Well, as it happens I don’t really like some of these cartoons. I think the one representing Mohammed’s head as a bomb implies Islam is inherently violent which I don’t think. But, you know, it doesn’t matter; you don’t have to defend someone’s use of their free speech to defend their right to free speech. Indeed, it’s precisely when you don’t like their use of free speech that you have to be tested to defend it. I despise, you know, Richard Littlejohn, the BNP, all sorts of people. But you know, it never occurs to me to say ban them, and, by the way, that goes for Islamic fundamentalists as well.

I met Abu Hamza not long after 9/11, I spent a lot of time in the Finsbury Park mosque – for work, I hasten to add – and I despised what he said, I despised the bits of the Koran he read out accurately or the bits of the other Muslim holy texts. The bit of the Shura that says if you find someone engaged in acts of homosexuality, kill him and kill the person engaging in it. Mohammed himself said that. I find that obviously disgusting. I find the bit where it’s in the Shura where it says lewd women should be imprisoned in their houses until they die disgusting. It doesn’t occur to me to say therefore you should ban chunks of the Koran and the Shura and the Hadith. What you do is you argue against it.

LA: You have an argument about it.

JH: Exactly. The solution to the problem of the offence caused by free speech is always more free speech. You don’t like what I say? Fine, argue against it, but I don’t want to see, and unfortunately the government has been quite bad on this - the British government - I don’t want to see a society filled with thought crimes and taboos and people going to jail for what they say. Obviously if somebody incites violence against a specific individual and is planning attacks upon that person, then that is a crime, you know, in any system of law. But that has got to be separate from general vilification of people which has to be part of an acceptable system of free speech.

LA: If we could just take you back to what you said a moment ago about, just a figure of speech really, but I’m surprised that you’re surprised at this some ways because it seems to me almost an exact rerun of the Salman Rushdie affair.

JH: There’s one encouraging difference. It is almost exactly 17 years since a theocratic dictator called for the murder of probably our greatest novelist and half the people in Britain said “Ah, gee, maybe Salman shouldn’t have done it”. I find that still unbelievable and there’s obvious parallels, but I’d say there’s one big and crucial difference which is that this time, moderate Muslims are fighting back.

LA: Indeed.

JH: This time, very significant numbers of moderate Muslims, mostly women although not all, are saying “Hang on, we might not like these cartoons but it disgraces Islam far more when a suicide murderer walks into a wedding party in Amman or when they get on the Circle Line and blow themselves up than to have a ridiculous picture”. And what’s really impressed me has been the range of Muslim women, both in Britain but even more bravely in places like Jordan, who’ve come forward and said “Hang on, no. There’s no moral equivalence here.”

LA: While we’re still on the cartoons, were you aware of the newspaper in Israel that’s decided, well, it’s going to have a take on the Iranian cartoons about the Holocaust and they said, “Well, if you’re going to do disgusting cartoons about the Jews, leave it to us – we do that better. They’re also doing a competition to publicise it which I think is an intriguing way of looking at it. You can invent your cartoons but we can do them better.

JH: I didn’t know that. That’s fantastic.

LA: I’ll send you a link for that.

JH: And no one’s going to be better at ridiculing the Holocaust than Mel Brooks. Perhaps the greatest defeat over Hitler of all is that you have Jews now…The Producers has just been staged in Tel Aviv and you have audiences of Jews cheering and roaring with laughter at the sight of Adolf Hitler. That is the greatest victory over tyranny and I completely agree with you.

LA: I was just going to say, not really a question but a point: that I suppose what’s sad about this thing is that it’s just the person that bellows the loudest that wins the argument. We’re only seeing the Muslim fundamentalists rioting and burning embassies. The BBC is not showing groups of Muslim women in Jordan protesting against this.

JH: Well increasingly in Europe, which is very interesting, what you’re seeing is there’s a very interesting movement in France – I won’t try to do my French accent because it’s so bad – but the translation is Neither Whores Nor Doormats, who are a very interesting group of women who grew up in the Banlieues who are fighting back against this really... It’s strange because they’re trapped in a pincer movement – they’re obviously in a society which views them with some [anti-Muslim] prejudice – but they’re also, within their own community, being attacked because they’re women. They’ve been fighting back against both and articulating a very liberal, feminist form of Islam. As it happens I don’t like any form of organised superstition but I’d rather that the battle within Islam is won by liberals and then we can have an argument with the liberals. We can’t really have an argument with Islamic fundamentalists because they’ll just kill us, so you can’t really go very far beyond saying, “I like my head, I don’t want to lose it”.

LA: Would you say that…I was looking through all the areas that you write about and, obviously, it’s a very wide range of issues that you have quite strong opinions on, but it did occur to me that religion and your attitudes to religion – you’re an atheist – underpins a lot of the opinions you’ve reached on a lot of subjects. Would that be fair to say?

JH: Yeah, well I agree with Christopher Hitchens concerning atheism. I’m an anti-theist. I believe that the idea of God has been a catastrophe for humanity. It’s not just atheism. I don’t have a great narrative of how I became an atheist. You know, lots of people say, “Ah, I went to Catholic school, I was terribly abused”, I don’t have any of that.

LA: Did you have a religious upbringing?

JH: I never had a moment of doubt about this. It always occurred to me, even as a very small child. My parents aren’t particularly religious. My dad is kind of like…just tends to swear about God every now and then periodically, and my mum has a kind-of peasant superstitious Christianity. She thinks “Ooh, don’t be nasty about Jesus”. But she told me about this recently after she’d read some particularly obnoxious thing I’d written about Christianity, she said she tried to take me to church when I was about five and she had to take me out because I attacked the Sunday school teacher with a pair of scissors shouting ‘God is shit, why are you telling me this’? And basically my view about religion, my critics would say, haven’t really evolved much since then.

But no, Richard Dawkins is probably right about this – it’s a slightly depressing thought for those of us who are atheists – there seems to be in every society fairly consistently around 10-15% of people who will be immune to the claims of transcendence in that society. Obviously, there’s a difference according to that society, so in contemporary Tehran the form of transcendence that people talk about will be Islam, in the jungles of Melanesia it will be some kind of polytheistic animism. Obviously, it differs from place to place but there will always be about 10-15% of people who just find any of those claims preposterous and there will always be - worryingly - a much bigger proportion who find them on a sliding scale more and more persuasive. So I guess with me – I’m not a great fan of genetic explanations – but there’s probably just a genetic explanation for this.

LA: Well you wrote a very staunch defence of Richard Dawkins’s recent TV series which I enjoyed enormously as well and I wonder whether you shared with me as sort of distaste for the amount of vilification he got from people I thought were on our side. It’s astonishing.

JH: It does beggar belief. And what’s really interesting is you get these - again it’s like what we were saying about free speech – people setting up completely false dichotomies by describing him as the “ayatollah of atheism”. “Why is he such an atheist?” You really have to explain it to people – that not believing in something is not itself a belief. If you tell me there are fairies at the bottom of your garden and I say, “Don’t be silly”, we don’t have equally faith-based positions. You are claiming there are fairies there and I am just saying, “Well, until there’s any evidence I’m afraid I don’t believe you”. They aren’t equally faith-based! But that’s exactly what these people are saying. “Richard Dawkins’s atheism is a matter of faith…you know, he’s so certain, how can he be so certain?” What he’s saying is: in the absence of any evidence, it’s preposterous to believe something. That’s all Dawkins is saying, and all these people acting on delusion are, you know, should be challenged. It’s actually a very simple point.

LA: This isn’t just a point about religion. I mean the same people that would argue that Richard Dawkins was an atheist fundamentalist would also say that he was a scientific fundamentalist.

JH: That’s preposterous. Firstly, science, the scientific method has built into it, indeed is fundamentally based on, doubt and scepticism. Every claim that is a scientific claim has to be tested and tested and tested and tested constantly. Religion is the polar opposite. How can you test a religious proposition by definition? You’ve heard themselves say it: it’s a matter of faith. You either believe something based on evidence or you believe something based on, you know, fantasy or nonsense or delusion.

LA: But I would like to see somebody get into an aeroplane just on faith.

JH: Exactly! Well, Richard Dawkins had the absolutely great line. He was at a conference and he was arguing about - somebody was saying that an African tribe that believed that things flew because a magical spirit was lifting them and so on just have a different and equally valid way of understanding the world, and he said, “How did you get to this conference?” and the person said “What do you mean?” “How did you get here?” “I got a plane.” “Well, show me a relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite.”

LA: Can we just…there’s something I sort of wanted to touch again on. We talk to virtually every guest I’m afraid on the show so we’re probably going to bore some listeners but I just wanted to talk to you for very, very shortly about Iraq, because I think we’ve sort of done it to death, but you’ve got one of the best positions on this which is, I think, that you were for the intervention but based purely on the idea that you’d spoken to people in Iraq and you were for what the Iraqi people wanted.

JH: If you go back to the summer of 2002 when it was becoming obvious that an invasion of Iraq was on the cards. I came at this with the view that I imagine most leftie people did, which was that transparently the claims about WMD were just lies and indeed if they had not been lies, they would’ve been a very good reason to not invade because the WMD would have been used either against the invading troops or against Israel. Secondly, hatred of George Bush. He’s abhorrent to almost everything I believe. He wasn’t elected at that time – he’d stolen an election. And I went to Iraq and I expected to find, you know, nice emotional reinforcement for my left-wing belief.

And the first few days I went around, obviously it was very difficult to talk to people about the forthcoming invasion or indeed about anything because they were just terrified and I’ve never seen people - I mean I’ve been to other countries and dictatorships - but I’ve never seen people frightened like they were frightened in that country. When you mentioned Saddam, people would, you know, pale. And I remember - it only occurred to me later, the significance of a lot of these things - I remember being in a souq in Basra and speaking to an old man and him saying to me, very bravely now looking back on it, “We really like…I spent some time in Britain in the ‘70s,” he said, and I said, “That’s nice,” and he said, “We really like British and American democracy here, we really admire that.” And stupidly, I was on my little script that I was saying to everyone, “Oh, we don’t like Bush and Blair, we don’t like Bush either. You know, we’re, you know…” And he looked quite thrown and almost upset and he repeated himself. “We like British and American democracy you know.” And I didn’t really think about it and then a couple of days later I went to see some Marsh Arabs who were living in the desert. Obviously, the Marsh Arabs had a 2000 year water-based civilisation and Saddam, in the early ‘90s, just poisoned the marshes, destroyed this civilisation, one of the great ecological catastrophes of the last 100 years. And these people were living in a shack in the middle of the desert, a tiny kind of tin shack with their kids and I remember that they had to have a portrait of Saddam Hussein on the wall. And I just remembered there were these little things that were coming to me and some people were very brave and explicit in hinting that they would’ve preferred the invasion to the alternative.

I came back to London and I thought: what if I’m wrong? What if the situation is that the majority of Iraqis would prefer the invasion? They don’t have any illusions about Bush, they don’t have any illusions about what these people are interested in, but they prefer that to the alternative which is Saddam and his sons for as long as the eye can see. I interviewed as many Iraqi exiles as I could find – not difficult when you live in London; a quarter of the Iraqi population lived in exile, slightly less now, and London was one of the great bases – it was the largest base outside the Middle East of Iraqi exiles. And I met all these Iraqi exiles and they said something quite similar. Not all, but a very significant majority said “Our families at home, they don’t like the Americans, they know Americans funded Saddam and indeed funded him more after attacks like Halabja and so on, but they would prefer this invasion to the alternative” And that basically became my position.

Now that puts a big pressure on you because what a lot of people would say, what a lot of people suspected, was that the left-wing people who supported the war were in effect just sugar-coating an oil grab, and were just kind of apologists for an imperial form of power. They way you demonstrate that’s not the case is you keep siding with the Iraqi people after the invasion, and where the interests of American power have diverged with the Iraqi people or the Venezuelan people or any other peoples across the world, I’ve tried to consistently side with them. So, for example, the Americans have imposed upon Iraq an absolutely disastrous and entirely undemocratic form of structural adjustment which has been a disaster wherever it’s been tried. And indeed the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, who’s an amazing man, who said if you look at what the IMF and World Bank have done to Iraq now, it’s as if they think what happened to Russia after the fall of the Cold War [sic] was a great success and the only problem was they didn’t go far enough. What happened in Russia is you had the fall of a horrendous form of tyranny, they then imposed this insane form of Enron capitalism that’s never been tried anywhere in a democratic country, completely against the will of the Russian people. What happened is it brought such social chaos and such massively high unemployment that the country is sagging back into a fascist dictatorship. Now that is what you do not want to see in Iraq. I mean in the Sunni areas of Iraq now, they have 80% unemployment according to the research of the Baghdad University. Well if we had 80% unemployment in this country with a stable democratic tradition, we’d have riots and bombs going off and absolute chaos, never mind in Iraq where the democrats are a much more embattled group.

LA: So where are you now on this? Where do you stand now?

JH: Several things. I’d say firstly, side with the Iraqi people. The evidence is that the Iraqi people wanted the invasion to happen and the evidence has been pretty overwhelming for the last year they want the American and British troops to leave. The British Ministry of Defence’s poll a couple of months ago found 80% want the British and American troops to leave. Now you can say isn’t there a worry that the democratically elected government in Iraq will be overthrown if that happens? But my position is well that’s a decision for the Iraqi people. If they would rather take on these jihadists themselves and if they think that the British and American troops are causing more trouble with their own centres of torture, and indeed their own chemical weapons which they have used…

LA: Lately, it’s starting to look as if that might be the case.

JH: Exactly. So my position is back the Iraqi people, call for troop withdrawal. And certainly an end to the…and by the way, a proper cancellation of Iraqi debt. One thing which has been really shamefully under-covered, under-reported in the west is, well, it was reported about a year ago that “Iraqi debt has been cancelled - Isn’t this wonderful.” It’s not what happened. Iraqi debt was forgiven for a period providing the Iraqi government, with no democratic check with the Iraqi people at all, agreed to let the IMF run their economy for the next 10 years. This is the IMF, chronic bunglers, that destroyed Argentina, destroyed Russia, destroyed great chunks of Latin America. Well that is completely unacceptable to anyone who believes in democracy.

And I would just say about - because I’m often associated with some of the other people you’ve interviewed who I like - many of them are friends of mine like David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen – I think you have to do a breakdown of the pro-war left position to see where I agree with it and where I differ from it. Just very quickly, you have to break it down basically – by the pro-war left I’m talking about Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Harry’s Place and so on, Nick Cohen, Paul Berman – because I think it’s based on three readings, readings of three different phenomena, some of which are right, some of which are wrong. There’s a reading of Islamism and Ba’athism, there’s a reading of the left and there’s a reading of neoconservatism. You’ve got some of it right and some of it wrong.

If you look at Islamism and Ba’athism, where they’re absolutely right is to say that these are forms of fascism, and the purpose of the left, the great noble tradition of the left, articulated by people like Michael Foot and George Orwell, has always been resistance to fascism. So they’re totally right on that. Where they’re wrong is to think that anyone trying to explain how this fascism came to be is apologising for it. There are some people like that, but it is in no sense apologising for Nazism to talk about the Versailles treaty and how that was a disaster in the same way that in no sense are you saying Al Qaeda is justified or is an anti-imperialist movement or Saddam Hussein is justified to point out that this is, in a very significant part, a reaction to the fact that the western powers have systematically in part murdered all the Arab and Muslim democrats over the last 60 years. You know, the Arab Chartists, people like Mossadegh were just killed by us during the Cold War.

Then you have to go onto a reading of the left. Sorry, I’m waffling a bit but very quickly. A reading of the left: where they’re right, where the pro-war left is right, is to say that very significant parts of the left are refusing to see that these movements are forms of fascism. You get ridiculous people saying, “Oh, what do you expect.” Real apologism. You get some people who are explicitly supporting the jihadi resistance in Iraq, not least Goerge Galloway. These are civilian-targeting murderers, killing people often on purely racist grounds, because they’re Shia Muslims – that’s lunacy. However, I think some people on the pro-war left have taken to exaggerating the position of the left and acting as if all of the left is George Galloway. Well George Galloway is a tiny, irrelevant, discredited, stupid, preposterous figure and to act like people like, say Polly Toynbee or Peter Tatchell or people who opposed the war, are all lumped in with them is just daft and gratuitously insulting to people on the left. They had a much more sophisticated analysis.

But I’ll say also the third reading they have, which is where they’re profoundly wrong, is their reading of neoconservatism. What they’ve done is they very rarely state their reading of neoconservatism; it’s just implicit, because they’ll often just counterpose it to the left and say “Why is the left opposing this?” What they’re assuming is – and Christopher Hitchens is explicit about it but others are more tacit – saying that neoconservatism is sincere in what it says, which is that it’s sincerely trying to spread democracy all over the world. That is just demonstrably untrue. I’ve been to Venezuela recently, a country where the neoconservatives backed a fascist coup against the most popular Venezuelan leader in the last 100 years who’s unequivocally democratically elected. It is simply not true to say there is a clear break with Kissingerian realpolitik of the 1970s. It’s just not true.

Now you can say there are other things about neoconservatism, that there are circumstances in which neoconservatism would be preferable to the alternatives which is what I think about Iraq – give me George Bush over Saddam Hussein, although acknowledge that that’s, all I would say to the pro-war left is acknowledge that that is a choice between two really bad options; don’t act though this is a good-bad fight. An American government that will go in and use white phosphorus, a chemical weapon, in a civilian city, which they did in Fallujah…this is not the armed wing of Amnesty International, which is what a lot of the pro-war left is implying, it’s really not. And it’s not good enough to say that they told people to leave Fallujah. The American government to people to leave New Orleans – you know, people don’t, or can’t.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

LA: We’ve just had a very interesting discussion on your take on what’s happening in Iraq at the moment. I’m wondering if we can move to its neighbour in the Middle East which has been in the news an awful lot recently and there seems to be a certain amount of fear in the air about it, in particular the possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons. You recently wrote about this and obviously I’ll ask you to expand on it. The impression I got from what you were saying was that perhaps that we should be too belligerent about this.

JH: It’s not that we shouldn’t be too belligerent, it’s that we’ve got to be sensible. We’re facing a very serious problem. Iran getting hold of a nuclear weapon is potentially disastrous. The moment Iran has a nuclear weapon we are going to have a West Bank missile crisis with no end in sight. There will be a nuclear stand-off in the Middle East between Israel and Iran. Given that when there was the most famous nuclear stand-off in the Cold War, it very nearly broke down at least twice, and we wouldn’t be sitting here had it. Often by fluke, it did not break down and by rare acts of good judgement by individuals. Those were fairly stable power blocks, so we have a very serious problem. I don’t want in any sense to belittle the risk of this. There’s also a significant – I don’t think it’s…I wouldn’t put it more than 50% - but there is a significant risk that Ahmadinejad really is a kind of Iranian Dr. Strangelove, a lunatic. There is some evidence that he believes quite crazy stuff about the coming of the 12th imam and that he could precipitate apocalypse. Certainly his speech to the UN last year was deeply weird and there’s been that leaking of the DVD of him speaking with the senior Iranian cleric where he appears to be saying that the end of the world could be coming soon.

LA: Bizzarely similar to the rumours that were going about Ronald Reagan in the ‘80s.

JH: Sure. For my sins, I was sent undercover to do the Christian Coalition Solidarity Tour of Israel with a group of fundamentalist Christians who believed that the rapture was coming. It is quite similar to that and to the views of a significant part of George Bush’s base. So we’ve got a very serious problem. And it’s not that we shouldn’t be too belligerent; it’s that we’ve got to look for rational solutions.

What is not a rational solution [to the nuclear question] is to propose regime change, for a very simple reason: a majority of Iranians want the bomb. So unless we’re going to change…indeed, it seems to be one of the very few policies of Ahmadinejad’s that are popular. Ahmadinejad was basically elected as far as I can tell…I know a bit about Iran; my family lived there for a time under the Shah who was an appalling American-backed dictator, such a disgustingly incompetent dictator that a city like Tehran with 6 million people didn’t even have a sewage system by the time he fell from power. But the only two popular policies Ahmadinejad seems to have are a kind of Chavez-style redistribution of oil wealth, where he’s committed to spending more of the oil wealth on ordinary people, and secondly, getting the bomb. Now the polls are pretty overwhelming – about 80% of Iranians want the bomb. So unless we’re going to change – even if we had the troops, even if etc etc which we don’t – what are you going to do? Change the regime to a dictatorship? That’s obviously a grotesque suggestion. So a regime change strategy is not a non-proliferation strategy so you push that out of the window.

Secondly, can you take them out, can you just take out the nuclear sites and set them back? Well, (a) that’s just going to make them more…even if you could make that happen, that’s going to make them even more determined to get the bomb, it’s going to consolidate even more support for nuclear weapons in Iran, and (b) all the military experts I speak to say it’s just not possible. They’ve [the Iranians have] learned the lesson of Osirask, when Saddam’s nuclear reactors were taken out in ’81.

LA: Although John Pilger seems to be fairly convinced that it’s going to happen judging by his most recent article in the…

JH: This is a man who thinks that the Americans did 9/11 themselves. It’s very sad, because John Pilger was at a time a very great journalist, in his day, and did some great things but he’s, I mean, what can you say? Just lunacy. Anyway, you can’t do regime change, you can’t do military strikes. That means we have to…and also this idea, a lot of people are saying, “Just wait for the young Iranians to rise up,” I would love to see the young Iranians rise up against the mullahs. They’re been subject to terrible forms of dictatorship, even though they have a certain amount of plebiscitary democracy, that the mullahs are effectively in charge and are now doing disgusting conservative things is certainly true. More than half of the Iranian population is under 30, they’re angry, they like rock and roll, they like all these western things. But again, if you look at the polling of them, they want the bomb too. They don’t see that as, you know, it’s one of the few things where they’re with the mullahs and they’re with Ahmadinejad, so you can’t do that.

So what you have to do is, firstly, just accept rationally those three things aren’t going to work. Then you say “So if any of them could work, I might think about being belligerent,” but there’s no point - it’s not going to happen. So what you need to ask yourself is “What do we do?” You need to then, I think, zoom back. It’s much bigger than the question of Iran versus Israel. What we are seeing happening across the world is the proliferation of mini-Cold Wars in all the world’s hotspots and that is disastrous. A lot of people think when we talk about nuclear weapons, people my age and I imagine anyone older, it seems like an issue from the past. You picture Michael Foot and his donkey jacket, you picture films about nuclear bombs over Sheffield.

LA: It seems like something out of those ‘Lefties’ programmes that have been on BBC4 recently.

JH: Exactly. Actually, that is profoundly wrong. That is, we’ve gone not from there being a nuclear age to a non-nuclear age; we’ve gone from there being the first nuclear age when there was a standoff between two relatively stable power blocs to a second nuclear age which is much more profoundly dangerous. A lot of people have forgotten it’s only 3 years since the British government advised our citizens to evacuate India and Pakistan because it looked like there was going to be a nuclear explosion. You talk to people in Downing Street or people who worked in the White House, they turn ashen when they talk about this. They really thought it was a significant chance. And you read what some of the stuff that’s been coming out in the last six months from people who were part of the BJP government who really were saying, “We could lose Delhi, we’ve got enough, we could write off Delhi, what can they do?” I mean really frightening stuff. There is a more significant chance now that a nuclear bomb will be used. It’s not just me who thinks that. Margaret Thatcher, no one’s idea of a disarmer, says in her book, Statecraft, which she wrote 3-4 years ago, that a nuclear bomb will almost certainly be used in the next 20 years.

So what you have to do is say, “Okay, given this situation where there are nuclear bombs proliferating all over the world, where Britain is renewing Trident, where the Americans are developing bunker-busting mini-nukes, which they actually explicitly describe as ‘more usable’, where Iran is getting the bomb…” This is a situation where you will end up with lots more countries getting nuclear bombs. Now we can either accept that and say, “Okay, sooner or later those bombs will be used,” and by the way these bombs are much more powerful than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of them without fail…

LA: …30 or 40 times more…

JH: …Exactly. Well, you can either say that or you can try and look for a rational solution. A rational solution exists, has existed for a very long time. It was created in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis and it’s the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and it’s really very simple. It’s not hard for anyone to understand. It was the commitment that the existing nuclear powers would gradually, multilaterally, step-by-step reduce the weapons they have and, in return for that, non-nuclear countries would agree not to start tooling up. Now from the minute it was signed the NPT was never obeyed and now it’s just used as toilet paper by the White House and by pretty much everyone else. They’re now considering even supplying nuclear materials to India to back up their existing nuclear arsenal, which would be the most grotesque defiance of the NPT, while lecturing Iran about not obeying the NPT. So we’ve got this farcical situation. What we have to do, and this sounds like sci-fi politics now but the alternative is even more disastrous, what we have to do is argue yet again for multilateral, phased nuclear disarmament involving everyone including Iran where we all do it step-by-step. I agree that’s incredibly difficult but what’s more incredibly difficult is to wait until we’ve lost Tel Aviv, Tehran, God knows where, Delhi, Karachi, and then talk about multilateral nuclear disarmament. We need to start doing it now. My theory is that we’re not going to get any traction on this until something terrible happens. Even the risk of an accident is terrible.

LA: I suppose it does seem not as bad as things used to be because a nuclear war 20 years ago would’ve pretty much wiped out the entire world.

JH: It’s worth bearing in mind that Dan Plesch, who’s done a lot of research on this, found that if India and Pakistan exchanged their full nuclear arsenals, it would precipitate a nuclear winter and we would all die. So it’s worth bearing in mind that, I mean, I was trying to talk to Martin Amis about this who was a great campaigner on, you know all these luvvies who were great campaigners in the ‘80s on nuclear disarmament, I said to him, “Why do you not talk about this now?” He said “Oh, it’s a regional nuclear war, it’s not the same thing.” Wake up! There is no such thing as a regional nuclear war.

LA: There is a general feeling that it’s all sort of disappeared and now we’re in much more danger of being hit by an asteroid. Asteroids seem to be the new nuclear explosion. My point was going to be the fact that we do feel more comfortable with it seems to make it more dangerous, to make it more likely that…we could say that, “To be honest, what would we care if they took out Delhi, it wouldn’t affect us.” That was in quotation marks by the way! That sort of thinking does make it a more dangerous climate and the chances of it happening now - where you actually think although we did come close in the Cuban Missile Crisis, closer than a lot of people think we did, to sort of a worldwide nuclear war - now it seems a lot more dangerous than it was back then.

JH: It’s interesting. Recently, I interviewed Robert McNamara who was the Secretary of Defence at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he was really freaked out when he went and read the Soviet declassified documents recently. He said, I mean, he knew that they went pretty close, he did not realise at all…I mean he thinks it actually got down to one individual Russian submarine commander, because the Russians’ nuclear submarine commanders used to have an order that if they out of contact for more than 20 minutes, they had to assume that the communication lines from Moscow had broken down because they’d been taken out by a nuke, and to launch a nuclear attack on Washington DC. And it’s because one nuclear submarine commander disobeyed that order during the Cuban Missile Crisis that we’re sitting here talking about it now. To carry on…the idea that we can…you know, even in that 40 year stretch between relatively stable powers, even then you had quite a few lunatics with their finger on the button. Whether it was a man who was taking drugs that induced psychosis – Richard Nixon as we know from the Anthony Summers biography – or Ronald Reagan who was a man with Alzheimer’s who believed that the end of the world was nigh, which we now know - and that’s just on the American side which was at least democratic, before we get on to the Soviet Union. The idea that this can carry on [with little Cold Wars like this] in mini-replica form all over the world indefinitely seems to me ridiculous. When people say to you nuclear disarmament is not realistic, well I would say, “What, your alternative? All this carrying on for ever, and just waiting? That’s realistic is it?”

LA: Do you think we should perhaps be, you know, us on our version of the left if you like, should actually be going back and embracing and perhaps changing CND which is taking a rather strange attitude over Iran.

JH: Sure, but part of the problem is that CND has become a...really sadly, has become a just a joke. I mean CND would never have been my part of the nuclear disarmament movement I suspect. I don’t know, I was too young in the ‘80s to have a position on this but the, you know, my suspicion is I would never have been a CNDer. I doubt I would have been in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament at the height of the Cold War. I think I would’ve been in favour of multilateral disarmament but CND now, a) they appear to…I mean Nick Cohen wrote a very good piece about this saying they appear to actually be against preventing Iran getting a nuclear bomb, you know, they invited the Iranian ambassador and they’re acting very weirdly. Also, their biggest campaign over the last their years is to have Tony Blair arraigned for war crimes, which you can either agree with or disagree with. I disagree with it, but you can either agree or disagree. But I fail to see what it has to do with nuclear weapons.

LA: That was basically my problem with it. We were talking about the world being wiped out in a nuclear war and a nuclear winter. You’ve written very eloquently for a period of time and seem to be, to be honest, one of the only sort of voices on what I call the sensible left who is talking about the threat posed by global warming. Would you like to talk about this for while?

JH: The best summary, the best sound bite summary of the dangers posed by global warming that I’ve heard comes from the environmentalist Mark Lynas and I’ve checked out the facts and they’re completely right. 251,000 years ago, the world warmed by 6C in the space of a century and the result was that almost everything on earth died – 95% of all the species living died. In the course of the next century, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, we will warm by between 2C and 6C. Indeed, it’s looking much more likely now that it’s going to be 6C than 2C.

LA: And 2005 was the warmest year since…

JH: Yeah, 2005 was the warmest year since records began. You know, we are talking about something very serious. There are a couple of things about this debate that you need to clarify before you get onto it – they confuse people. One is that – unfortunately I will use it because it’s a shorthand that everyone understands – global warming. Actually, it’s quite a wrong…it’s a misleading term. The world is getting warmer but a better way to understand it is to describe it as the…you know, we are “throwing the earth’s climate into chaos.” That’s…you know, the destabilisation of the planet’s climate is a much easier way to understand it because people will often find it hard… they ask, “Well hang on - how is the fact that we’re having colder winters linked to global warming? How is hurricane intensity linked to global warming?” Well, you know, it’s much better to understand it as the destabilisation of the planet’s climate in a way that will have an overall warming trend but will cause chaos more generally.

So, you know, 1) for example - it’s really worth bearing in mind - we lost a major American city last year almost certainly because of global warming. Hurricanes have doubled in intensity since 1970 because they use warm water as a fuel. Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane before she hit the Gulf of Mexico, then becomes a Category 1 hurricane – the Gulf of Mexico, which is obviously artificially warmed by global warming – and then hits New Orleans. So it’s well worth bearing that in mind.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that there are dodgy bits of the environmentalist movement. There are people who are, you know, Earth Firsters or whatever who have absurd arguments. What we have to do is have a science-based approach towards the destabilisation of the planet’s climate. There are a lot of people who are trying to read into global warming, you know, that the Enlightenment was a mistake, or whatever, or that humanity took a terrible wrong turn with the invention of the combustion engine. I don’t think any of that. I just think we’ve got far too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and we’re going to have very serious problems if we don’t deal with it. And that, I just think complicating environmentalism beyond that basic philosophy is just unnecessarily alienating. We’re in a global emergency – you’ve got to deal with it by maximizing your support, not trying to drive people out of it.

And there are…in a way, I think the important thing about global warming is that it presents us a test. It says, you know…and an amazing challenge: are we a rational species that is capable of understanding what we’re doing and turning it around or are we just kind of addled, deluded hedonists who are just going to, you know, condemn ourselves to disaster? And it’s weird as well because before I started looking into global warming as a journalist, it was one of those kind of background things like Northern Ireland – you’re kind of aware of it, it’s always rumbling on – but you just kind of think…I just thought this can’t quite be true. You know, every generation has its worries about apocalypses; they never quite happen. And it was only when I went to interview people like Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific advisor, and and they’re saying, “No, no, you don’t understand. This really is here, it’s happening, you know…”

David King explains it quite well: for 10,000 years, we’ve had this very unusual period of climactic stability. That’s almost unknown in history and often people misunderstand it. They think that 10,000 years ago someone just came along and invented agriculture. That’s not true. People were always trying to plant things, it’s just that you couldn’t grow them systematically because the climate was so mad. It would veer up to 12C variation within a decade. So then we enter this long period of stability and everything we call civilisation is based on that stable climate. You know, the fact that we’re sitting here now is because we have the leisure time that comes from a food surplus because we can grow food, you know, and predictably. We are now bringing that 10,000 year period known as the Holocene to an end and the way he describes it - I think it’s quite useful – is to think that we’re entering a new climactic period where we are - called the Anthropocene - where man makes the weather. That’s very hard to get your head around. We’re used to thinking of the weather as something that is done to us but the weather is increasingly something we do to ourselves. That’s a very big…you know, we’re not evolved to think like that so I can understand why people find this very hard to get their heads around.

LA: It doesn’t help as well that there does seem to be some disagreement with people saying, well, we’re past the tipping point, we’re virtually doomed… and then there are other people saying…

JH: Yeah, you’ve got people like James Lovelock…

LA: James Lovelock is exactly who I’m thinking of.

JH: I don’t think that’s helpful. Firstly, because there is a possibility that we’ve gone so far there is nothing we can do but, you know, even if there’s a small chance we can pull it back, well, I quite like life. You know, I think we should try pulling it back.

LA: Before we emigrate to Mars.

JH: Exactly. And I think in a way, we’ve gone in this funny way from the debate being, “Oh, it’s not happening,” you know, and that debate which is now totally discredited, got a few lunatics who still claim it almost entirely funded by the oil and gas and fossil fuel industry, but that argument is pretty much over. Even George Bush now accepts that it’s happening although he says, you know, the usual nonsense about, you know, “We’ve got to wait to see, or the technology will come along and we don’t need to set targets or anything, the technology will just come along.”

LA: I’m sorry, I mean you dismissed that quite easily, that nothing seems to be happening. I mean what are they actually doing if that’s the case, because I would’ve said, you know, one of the arguments, one of the big arguments that’s put by the people that, you know, sort of disavow the idea of global warming is that, a) that it’s just a natural climate change, it’s not necessarily man-made, it’s just something that’s happening so there’s not anything we can do about it anyway, but also there’s this whole oil lobby that you’ve just mentioned that is just basically saying…just head in the sand, there’s nothing happening, there’s nothing wrong.

JH: Well, there’s slightly more sophisticated and slightly more dangerous version like Bjorn Lomborg, who calls himself a sceptical environmentalist although he’s been found misusing the statistics quite seriously, who says – this is a much clever form of avoidance - he says, “There’s nothing we can actually do, it’s going to happen so rather than trying to stop it happening and reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, let’s just try to prepare ourselves,” which sounds superficially quite an attractive idea, you know. But actually, I don’t know what…how do you prepare for the loss of Bangladesh, a low-lying country? What do you do? Are we going to evacuate Bangladesh? You know, given that there’s already 30,000 people dying every day because of malaria [this was a slight overstatement – it’s actually around 7000 a day according to the World Health Organisation] you know, and we’re not doing anything about it, how are we going to help the people of Bangladesh? I mean, let’s be real.

And it’s worth bearing in mind also – sorry, just to go back to the same again – the other very annoying thing about the debate about global warming is it’s always couched in this very sentimental terms, as “What planet will we leave for our children, our grandchildren?” I say screw the children and grandchildren – worry about yourself. It’s happening now. You know, the people of New Orleans didn’t have to worry about their kids and grandkids – you know, they lost their homes. The Inuit, who are leaving the Arctic, their civilisation is being destroyed – they’re not worried about their kids and grandkids; they’re worried about themselves. The low-lying islands in the South Pacific, Tuvalu being the most notable example, are being evacuated. Those islands aren’t going to be there because of rising sea levels, not just in the lifetime of our children and grandchildren - in my lifetime and indeed even in my middle age. So, you know, this is not a future, wishy-washy, leave it for the next generation thing. This is urgent national security stuff.

LA: Well, my point was that I don’t actually see Bush having this as being one of his main policies.

JH: No, and sadly, not Blair. It’s worth bearing in mind as well, where we’re sitting now…I mean, after New Orleans, I looked into some of the stuff about London’s flood defences and they’re terrifying. When the Thames Barrier was built in the mid-80s, it had to be raised 4 times a year. This year so far, it’s been raised more than 40 times. We are facing a very serious problem here in London. And by the way, I went…the London Assembly after New Orleans did a - I really urge everyone to read this – did an investigation into London’s flood defences and what would happen. And for someone who lives in the East End which is the lowest-lying bit of London, albeit on the 4th floor, I found this particularly worrying. London’s flood defences are crap. At least 8% of them are either in disrepair or non-existent. Well, that’s more than the proportion of the levees in New Orleans that didn’t work. So, you know, we talk about people dying in New Orleans; well, if we get hit by something, you know, there are 4 million people who live on the flood plains of London. We’ve got a very serious urgent problem here.

But you said about what people are doing and about Bush. You see, Bush again – it’s another seductive bit of rhetoric – he says the solution is technology, as if people who believe in targets are against technology. We’re all in favour. I hope there’s a technological solution. I very much hope there’s a technological solution and I believe we need to be massively investing in a kind of Manhattan Project into renewable energies. But counterposing technology as the alternative to targets is totally disingenuous. You set the targets because that will make you develop the technology. That’s the whole point.

And what was really heartbreaking is Blair - whose rhetoric has always been very good on this – I mean he said just, I think, 2 years ago now that, rightly, that climate change – by far the most radical statement of any world leader – said climate change threatens to radically alter human existence on earth in this generation. You know, pretty impressive rhetoric. And then a year later is coming out spewing the Bush line about, “Oh, maybe we don’t need post-Kyoto targets, maybe we just need technology.” Totally bogus distinction.

LA: Well, perhaps the one country that we talked about earlier that’s actually taken a lead in actually doing something about global warming is Iran then. Where do you stand on the idea of nuclear power being the panacea to this?

JH: Well, nuclear power is not the panacea that people like James Lovelock make out. It’s not entirely carbon-neutral because you obviously have to get the nuclear fissile material and so on, and obviously I don’t like nuclear power. You know, people always say, “Would you like to live near a nuclear power station?” No, I wouldn’t. We all, all four of us in this room – we’ve got an engineer with us – have plutonium in our testicles and that’s because we live near nuclear power stations. You know, if you live within something like a 300 mile radius, you end up with plutonium in your testicles. I don’t like the idea that there’s plutonium in my testicles. However, there come situations where you have to choose between competing bad things.

LA: It’s nice to be able to find them in the dark.

JH: And cue jokes about WMD in your pants and so on, yeah. But the, you know…competing bad things. Nuclear power is bad. Global warming is considerably worse. Obviously, if you could do it all through renewable energies, then I would rather we did that. From the people who know much more about this than, far more about this than me, people like Sir David King, say that there’s a gap, about a 40 year gap, between renewables being able to cover it and us getting there. So I think the idea that we should be dismantling the nuclear power stations we already have or letting them fall into disrepair and, you know, is a very bad idea. I think we have to maintain the ones we have…

LA: As a stop gap…

JH: Exactly.

LA: …until the real technology comes along. [And perhaps expand them too].

JH: Well as Sir David King says, you’ve got to use every tool in the damn box. We’ve got a serious problem. I think ruling out a much lower carbon tool in the box now would be foolish. If we can do it through renewables, great. Sadly, I don’t think we can.

LA: Do you think that would be the best way? Have a go at that first and then, you know…because I have to admit I’m, you know, I see probably nuclear power as being the way we have to go to be honest.

JH: Well, I think nuclear power is not the solution. Renewables are the solution in the long-term and there are big problems with nuclear waste. The key with…and we’ve been quite good on renewables in this country actually. It’s one of the few areas where the government deserves some credit. On global warming, they’ve been, you know, we’ve had by far, apart from Germany, the highest spending in the world on wind power. You know, to ridiculous opposition from people like Zac Goldsmith who poses as an environmentalist – it sickens me, don’t get me started on Zac Goldsmith.

LA: Just look at his dad.

JH: Exactly. You know, people with private jets lecturing us on global warming. Please, don’t give me that. But no, it’s not nuclear power at the expense of renewables. Do both. Spend a fortune on both. We’re going to have to. And by the way, it’s a triple whammy – spending on nuclear and renewable - because not only, you know, a) there’s the problem of global warming, b) there’s the problem that oil makes us, fossil fuels make us dependent on propping up tyrannies in the Middle East like the disgusting House of Saud, and 3) the oil’s running out anyway and may well run out in…well, it’ll certainly run out in my lifetime if I don’t walk in front of a bus tomorrow or something. You know, these are 3 very serious problems so there’s actually a triple whammy effect. There really is such an overwhelming case for moving away from using fossil fuels.

LA: You mention Zac Goldsmith and I did want to talk to you about David Cameron but we’re quickly running out of time and I imagine you’ve probably got a lot to say about that so we’ll probably have to do that another time.

JH: Okay.

LA: Johann’s got a great website where he posts most of his writing. Could you give us the address?

JH: It’s www.johannhari.com.

LA: And there is a link to it from our website which is www.littleatoms.com so you can get there from there. Our website is www.littleatoms.com. You can download some of our previous interviews and eventually this one. Yep, that’ll probably be up there in the next week or so and in 2 weeks time we’ll be talking to the writer Jonathan Meades, but in the meantime, Johann Hari, thanks very much and we look forward to discussing a few other things with you at a later date. I think that would be marvellous. Thanks very much indeed.

[With special thanks to the lovely Nick Athanasiou for typing this up...]