High life

Gstaad

The new look requires a new, improved Taki. From now on gravitas will be my middle name. There will be no more of this jet-set stuff. Constant classical themes will mix with references to songs by Schubert, and stories inspired by Horace and Racine. Taki the social commentator is dead; long live Taki the philosopher, humanist and classical scholar. (And if you believe that, it’s time for the men in white coats.) But let me try, for this time only at least, to justify my new middle name.

Eight years ago Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell and I founded the American Conservative, a national biweekly whose purpose was to expose what nation-building does to those stupid enough to want to build. It was my idea and I put up the moolah, Pat lent his famous name, and Scott edited. The first cover’s headline was ‘How victory could spell American defeat’. This was six months before the invasion of Iraq, and Buchanan got it spot-on when he wrote that we would be there for at least five to ten years and that the war would cost hundreds of billions.

We all know the rest. There was no ‘slam dunk’. It’s $750 billion and counting, 4,500 American dead and 35,000 wounded, 100,000 to 300,000 Iraqis dead, two million in exile and uncounted lives wrecked. And there’s no end in sight. Iraq is split in three between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, there is no freedom except for those with the gun, and an oil-rich area has failed to provide even reliable electricity. Yet Bush and Blair have declared they would do it all over again, that it’s a victory over tyranny, etc., etc., etc. Iraq is lawless and swarming with terrorists, yet the real architects of the war, the neo-cons, have managed to whitewash their part in Uncle Sam’s greatest foreign policy disaster ever.