Playing Pattycake with Monsters. A story today in Yahoo news about outside softness in dealing with the Zimbabwean fool and tyrant Robert Mugabe reminds me how easy it is to effect change thru military violence, especially if you don't care about what happens afterward. Robert Mugabe is a dictator who won 're-election' thru electoral fraud. He has been in charge of the government of what used to be known as Southern Rhodesia (while a British colony), then Rhodesia (during a 15-year period of unilaterally declared independence under white-minority rule that was not recognized by the international community), since its independence in 1980, and seems intent on being that poor country's "President-for-Life", no matter how many opponents he has to imprison or beat.
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Land reform, on paper, took the form of staged and reasonable transfer of lands from the hands of the 1% white minority to the great majority, but was never successfully implemented, due in part to white opposition and in part to Mugabe's fecklessness as a governor. After decades of incompetent ineffectiveness, the Mugabe government went into radical-socialist mode, declaring that all lands belong to the government and distributing the best areas to Mugabe supporters. However, since black farmers could only lease land and not own it, they could not get adequate financing (for want of sufficient collateral) for machinery, fertilizer, etc. Many also did not have the agricultural expertise to run modern farms. Moreover, Mugabe has deliberately destroyed "the homes or businesses of 700,000 mostly poor supporters of the opposition". The consequence of Mugabe's incompetent and malicious misrule has been that agricultural output has plummeted, inflation has hit 1,700%, unemployment is in the range of 80%(!), and a region once regarded as "the breadbasket of Southern Africa" has suffered catastrophic food shortages, resulting in malnourishment of 45% of the population, and possible widespread death from famine, altho outside media and international observers have not been permitted free rein to investigate, in order to establish how bad the situation really is.
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I have zero sympathy for displaced white farmers, who should not have resisted sensible and fair land reform. By resisting moderate measures, they produced radical measures. They brought their violent expropriation upon themselves and should be hurting. They hurt others for decades. It's their turn now.
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But the people of Zimbabwe deserve better. They should be able to buy land, as is normal elsewhere, or own it in common in the form of tribal lands or community corporations, with the coop being able to raise funds to purchase machinery and hire agricultural experts to make good use of the best modern techniques to provide income for the owners and food and other agricultural products for the population.
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After years of chaos, repression, and malnutrition if not outrite famine, parts of the outside world may finally be willing to press for change. A very badly written Reuters article today, headlined "West seeks Africa support against Mugabe" on Yahoo, is unclear as to who other than Britain's Prime Minister is trying to influence events. Where is Bush? Where is the European Community? Are outsiders really incapable of doing anything but standing outside, not even looking in, and wringing their hands?
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2,500 miles north of sad Zimbabwe is tragic Darfur, where we know with certitude that mass death from starvation and violence both have occurred and continue to occur. There, too, the outside world does nothing. Is it because the outside world can do nothing? or because it doesn't care?
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One is tempted to say that if these were white children dying of starvation by the tens of thousands, the Western world would act. But the sad fact is that it took 2½ years for the world to act to stop mass slaughter in the Balkans during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Europe didn't act in its own backyard until the United States, under the Clinton Administration, forced the issue. Why have we not forced the issue in Darfur?
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Let us speak now to what the United States can do, acting alone and in concert with the African Union as an organization or with individual African countries, absent an agreement by the AU to act.
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On its own, the United States can bomb Harare and Khartoum (the capitals of Zimbabwe and the Sudan, respectively), killing Mugabe and his inner circle, and the genocidal mass murderers on the Nile in a single day, if we're lucky. If we fail on the first try, we could send sortie after sortie in a "Shock and Awe" campaign until we successfully destroy the entire ruling clique in both capitals. We wouldn't need to do more. We could let the people thus liberated take care of the rest themselves, or give the AU some money to empower them to do the cleanup afterward. An American intervention need not last more than a few weeks, at very longest, in the form of air attacks to destroy the offending members of the two governments. A followup ground occupation by neighboring countries acting individually or under African Union auspices could help locals organize a replacement government.
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A President of the United States with integrity and humanity could go on television, in a satellite feed to the entire planet, to tell Mugabe and the killers in Khartoum:

Your time has run out. The world has given you all too much time to change your ways and do the right thing. You refused. Now you have one week to reverse course, or we will kill you.
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Don't sleep, during the day or at nite. Don't sleep in the same place twice. Don't try to hide, because there is no building in your entire country that can save you from our bunker-buster bombs. Don't think your people will hide you. Most won't let you hide among themselves, because they don't want to be killed with you when the bombs fall. And don't think that we are certain to wait until the full week has expired before we act. We'll track you. We've already started. We have or will cultivate intelligence agents and informers in the field to keep us apprised. We could bomb you today. You won't know until the planes arrive. We can fly day or nite, good weather or bad. You have no antiaircraft measures that can stop us, and we don't even have to send planes. We can send cruise missiles and put no pilot at risk to free your people.
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No one will come to your rescue. You have no friends, you have no defense treaties, you have no alliances capable of stopping us. No major power is going to risk war with the United States to protect you. The United Nations won't protect you. For one thing, they don't like you either. For another, we have an ironclad veto on UN action. So no one will save you. No one. Change or die.
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If you are religious and believe in an afterlife, consider how you will be judged on death. Are you really ready to meet your maker?

He would then press a button to start a countdown clock, shown on a very large digital display behind him, then add:

The countdown has started. You have one week to change your ways and act, decisively, persuasively, to end your tyranny. If you want to stay in power rather than simply resign and leave the country, you must use all the force at your command to change course and undo the harm you have done. We will not accept a make-believe resignation that leaves you as power behind the throne. We have one week to put our forces in striking distance and make sure all systems are go. We are thru playing pattycake with monsters.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,223 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:20 PM