Just go read it - brilliant:

Like most people, I saw the divide between Baghdad’s Green and Red zones as a simple by-product of the war: This is what happens when the richest country in the world sets up camp in one of the poorest. But now, after years spent visiting other disaster zones, from post-tsunami Sri Lanka to post-Katrina New Orleans, I’ve come to think of these Green Zone/Red Zone worlds as something else: fast-forward versions of what “free market” forces are doing to our societies even in the absence of war. In Iraq the phones, pipes, and roads had been destroyed by weapons and trade embargoes. In many other parts of the world, including the United States, they have been demolished by ideology, the war on “big government,” the religion of tax cuts, the fetish for privatization. When that crumbling infrastructure is blasted with increasingly intense weather, the effects can be as devastating as war.

"A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead