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. (An elderly figure wandering the world like the Flying Dutchman on my yacht, looking for a woman willing to die for me. Just kidding.) 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 isn’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 defense, however, always does. Think 1776 in a certain British colony in the new world, think of Greece in 1821, and even world war two.

So to recapitulate. 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 I, Bush 0. She also wrote that “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 was one tough lady. The American so called neo-conservatives were allowed to think for Bush – Israel really – and look at the results. Afghanistan will be an even worse disaster. I know we Greeks are having our own problems, but compared to the American dilemma in trying to change the world, we are very well off. If only Bush had listened to Taki and Pat back in 2002, a lot of death, misery and destruction could have been avoided. As a very wise man once wrote, those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat their mistakes. Bush should have been reading Gibbon and Taki, instead of neo-con crap.