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. And they made it look easy. The whitewash, that is.
Here are a few of the bad guys: Daniel Pipes, Elliot Abrams, Douglas J. Feith, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman and John Podhoretz, the Kagan brothers, Dick Cheney and, of course, the Bobsy twins, Bush and Blair. None of the above is a stupid or unread man except for John ‘four pizzas’ Podhoretz. George W. Bush sounds dumb but is not. Kristol is a tiny, ugly rat of a man who always backs the wrong horse but is very clever. Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Pipes and Abrams are ardent Zionists. Cheney was in it for business reasons.
Yet despite their smarts, none of the above listened to what history had to say. They ignored what happened to the French in Algeria, to the British in Aden and Palestine, to the Russians in Afghanistan and the Americans in Somalia.
My magazine cost me millions and I thought it was worth it at the time, but I didn’t take into account the ability of rats to abandon a sinking ship. When the disaster became obvious there was no calling to account for the guilty, however loudly we protested. Just look at Blair. He got rich and even sits in on Israeli–Palestinian peace talks. The neo-cons played everyone like the proverbial fiddle. They accused the critics of the war of being anti-Semitic, because — now get this — neo-con was a codeword for Jew. Although most of the neo-cons were Jewish, we knew enough to differentiate between Judaism and Zionism, the latter being the reason the neo-cons wanted non-stop war. The debate on anti-Semitism that ensued was the emergency button the neo-cons pushed the moment the war turned ugly and they decided to slither out of their responsibilities.
After the surge, which I compared to Hitler’s Battle of the Bulge — good headlines, lousy results — I sold my equity in the magazine to the editors for one dollar and became an elder statesman. (A Tony Blair-like figure wandering the world like the Flying Dutchman on my yacht, except that I have no blood on my hands and pay my own way.) Looking back, it was a brave if expensive effort to make Americans see reason, but we got nowhere. Many friends disagreed with what we were trying to do. I have remained on good terms with them because although results show that I was right to try, the game ain’t over yet. But the forecast is not good. For example: did the French efforts in Indochina end up in disaster or not? What about the Dutch in Indonesia? The British and the Russians in Afghanistan? Or the Americans in Vietnam? Military power in foreign, hostile lands simply does not work. Military power used in self-defence, however, always does. Think 1776 in certain British colonies overseas, and world war two.
So, to recapitulate the new improved Taki message: when I looked at the first edition of the magazine I launched, I read my first column. It was all about Ayn Rand. I quoted her saying that ‘one man’s need is not another man’s obligation’. Bush believed that Iraqis wanted freedom from Saddam. He obliged and they got chaos, death and destruction instead. Rand 1; Bush 0. She also wrote, ‘No man can ask another man’s brain to do his thinking, any more than he can ask another man’s lungs to do his breathing.’ Rand may have been a bitch, but the neo-cons were the ones who expected other men’s lungs to do their breathing. Next time, listen to Taki.
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