Taki: My main gripe with Gaddafi is the quality of his cocaine

 New York

Libyans are among the most civilised people on earth. When a Russian hooker (I assume) killed a Libyan Air Force officer, a mob stormed the Russian embassy seeking revenge. They failed, but not for lack of trying. This time last year, another mob murdered the American ambassador and three others in a similar attack, although no Yankee gal had harmed any Libyan flier. The civilised Libyans also did democracy proud when they captured Gaddafi. They shot him up the bum with an AK47, dispensing with a boring trial. The bad guy that got away is Hannibal Gaddafi, who with wifey used to beat up and torture Filipino servants and intimidate the Swiss government by kidnapping Swiss citizens working in Libya and holding them on charges unknown. He slipped over to Algeria where his ill-gotten moolah is welcome. My friend Saif Gaddafi wasn’t as lucky. He was ‘detained’ while fleeing the country and is held by some nice guys south of Tripoli. I call him my friend because we were introduced in New York four years ago and I mistook him for a coke dealer and politely asked if he had anything good. Yes, folks, war is in the air all over the Middle East and no use saying that war has always been with us and always will be. War in the Middle East has been endemic since the 7th century, and if you don’t know why, ask George W. Bush, who went to war without knowing the difference between Shiite and Sunni. (He thought the former were terrible shits and the latter nice and sunny. It’s the other way round.) W will go down in history as a modern Alexander the Great. Like the Greek, he stirred things up down south two years into his presidency. Iraq is now the most violent place on earth, competing with Syria for numbers killed and exiled. Libya — a Cameron-Sarkozy-Obama triumph (with Taki’s blessings, I hate to add, because Saif’s coke was so lousy) — has become a safe haven for militants seeking rest and recreation far from American government officials, while Jordan and Lebanon hang in the balance and are being swept under by refugees. What are the moral responsibilities of liberal democracies in a situation such as the Middle East at present? That’s an easy one. Stay the hell away and let the Saudis and Qataris do the fighting, which is like asking them to be nice to guest workers from Pakistan. My question is, why is it that I knew what was happening in Syria two and a half years ago, and such brains as Obama and Cameron and Hague and la Clinton were out in left field? Why is it that I knew that extremists who want to erase Syria’s borders and establish a transnational Islamic state were the enemy, while the media and the EU were screaming bloody murder against Assad? Only three weeks ago, in our chairman’s programme This Week

, the arselicker Christiane Amanpour was shouting about democracy and human rights and how we have to intervene in Syria. Andrew Neil was polite, as was Simon Schama, who dared suggest that the mercenaries doing the fighting were not all they pretend to be. Let’s face it, folks. The jihadist agenda is a priority in Syria. Anything else is propaganda from Saudi, which knows very well whom in the media to approach. The al-Qa’eda branch is establishing its own agenda in Syria while arselickers like Amanpour are whistling Dixie. For God’s sake, jihadist extremists — and they are all extremists, make no mistake about that — are seizing towns, replacing crosses on churches with black flags and holding classes to teach Syrian children about the importance of battling ‘infidels’, meaning anyone who is not a Sunni Muslim. Public executions of Alawites and Christians by men walking around in masks are common, but back here at home all we hear about is Assad’s chemical weapons and how we should not repeat the mistakes of Neville Chamberlain. As they say in the Home of the Depraved, is this for real or what? Paid fighters from Chechnya and other parts of Europe are committing terrible atrocities in northern and eastern Syria, and we’re talking about a gentleman with a nice moustache who waved a piece of useless paper in an airport long ago. The best, however, is one Dexter Filkins, who writes for a New York magazine that takes itself more seriously than God. This guy Filkins puts the whole blame for the mess in Syria and even Iraq on an Iranian, some poor slob called Suleimani. I don’t know what Filkins is smoking or sniffing, but for his own sanity he must change dealers. ‘To save his Iranian empire in Syria and Lebanon, he [Suleimani] has helped fuel a Sunni–Shiite conflict that threatens to engulf the region for years to come…’ Like George W, who was given a history lesson by the Israelis and the neocons in Washington and decided that Saddam’s fall would turn the Middle East into Palm Beach and Monte Carlo combined, our man Filkins has decided that Qassem Suleimani is the bad guy, and if Mossad, say, can get rid of him we shall be going to Damascus and Latakia and Beirut and Hama for the holidays instead of crappy places like Gstaad and Zermatt. The funny thing is, it’s the other way round. The Iranians were helping Bush attack the Taleban after 9/11, then some neocon told Bush that Iran is in the ‘axis of evil’, and you know the rest.