I'm not stirring up discord today for the hell of it. I'm doing so because people are dying.
Like Barack Obama, I'm not against all wars. I'm against dumb wars and, beyond that, ones that are unnecessary and unjust.
I think that the time may be approaching when we have to invade Zimbabwe.
If that sounds shocking, it should. I do not say it lightly.
By "we," I do not mean the United States. I do not mean the United States leading a fig-leaf "Coalition of the Willing." I mean we, the rest of the world, acting through the United Nations in cooperation with South Africa and the African Union. The United States, obviously, would be part of that effort; simply put, it would not happen without our leadership.
I know that this sort of talk will not be popular here -- nor should people too-readily accept it -- so I will try to make my case.
Note: see Shane Hensinger's well-informed diary on these issues for more thoughtful analysis; it was coicidentally posted just after this one.
(1) Background
I'll start by letting the New York Times set the stage with this June 5 editorial:
In his cynical and bloody bid to hang on to power, Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has bet on the indifference of his neighbors and the rest of the world. So far, shamefully, he has been right.
On Tuesday, three-and-a-half weeks before a runoff presidential election, Mr. Mugabe’s henchmen detained Morgan Tsvangirai, the popular opposition leader and likely winner of the first round, for nine hours. That is only the latest outrage.
International aid agencies reported this week that they had been ordered to stop distributing food to hundreds of thousands of hungry Zimbabweans, at least until the June 27 vote. Officials working for Mr. Mugabe claimed that the aid groups were backing the opposition, but it is clear that the government wants to further intimidate voters while reducing the number of possible outside witnesses to its campaign of terror.
These few paragraphs leave out a lot: Mugabe's 30 year reign of terror, his monopolistic control over the media, and inflation reaching 100,000% (that's not a mistake: five zeros), and two recent developments that especially bother me.
The first involves a corruption of the electoral system that might make even Republicans blush, as told in this article,Vote or Eat:
The US ambassador to Harare, James McGee, said that President Mugabe was using food as a "political weapon", allowing members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change food aid only if they handed over their voting cards.
The claim came after the regime banned all overseas aid agencies and non-government organisations from working in Zimbabwe, ending the food relief they provide to millions of dependent Zimbabweans.
Mr McGee said the government was trying to become the sole distributor of food to help President Mugabe win the election in three weeks' time.
"If you have an MDC card, you can receive food, but first you have to give your national identity card to government officials. This means they will hold on to it until after the election," Mr McGee said.
"The only way you can access food is to give up your right to vote. It is absolutely illegal. We are dealing with a desperate regime here which will do anything to stay in power," he said.
[Note: because the Telegraph uses such short paragraphs, I feel justified in relaxing the three-paragraph rule.]
Second, there is the issue of Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, and I urge you to click that link for a pair of utterly horrifying photos:
Thousands of black immigrants in Johannesburg have fled their homes amid a growing tide of mob violence that has left at least 23 people dead and many badly injured.
...
The anger was directed mainly at Zimbabweans who have fled the privations of their home country but endure poor housing, unemployment and crime.
The mobs hacked at their victims and set others on fire in scenes reminiscent of the township violence of the apartheid years. Up to 6,000 immigrants were reported to have fled their homes.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for the violence to end. Nelson Mandela, the former president and ANC leader, repeated an appeal made during an outbreak of xenophobic violence in 1995: "We cannot blame other people for our troubles."
(2) Principles
You ought to be preparing a few questions for me, if they're not already at your fingertips: Do we arrogate to ourselves the right to intervene militarily whenever dictators do awful things? How, if we approve of violence here, do we draw the line?
I'm glad you asked.
First, despite all of the horrors I present above, I am willing to let the evil of Mugabe's rule in Zimbabwe continue if we cannot rally the world and, especially, the region to our cause.
Sometimes we can't do that. That is why I do not favor invading Burma, as evil as their junta's rule as been, for example: China would absolutely not be on board with overturning their client government. Intervention would not work.
That is why I hesitate to support military (as opposed to humanitarian) intervention in Darfur. Again, China stands on the wrong side, willing to prevent any action we might want to take. Beyond that, it is not yet clear, to me at least, what actions we could take there that would lead to a more just social order, given the de facto failure of the state.
That is also why I hesitated to support intervention in the Balkans under Clinton: Russia was opposed, it wasn't clear that we could impose a better government, we had difficulty rousing our allies. Clinton went ahead anyway, and while many have complaints about how the war was prosecuted -- the tradeoffs between safety of our soldiers with the amount of "collateral damage" done on the ground -- I am glad that things worked out as they have, and that there is no genocide in southeastern Europe.
This is why I reconciled myself to our inability to intervene in Rwanda. We should have prevented that slaughter, if we could, but we didn't because we would have had to do it alone, and that offered the recipe for something that could have turned out much like Iraq. Instead, it was regional actors that took the lead -- just as with the favorable resolution of the Khmer Rouge autogenocide in Cambodia, when Vietnam marched in, kicked out the miscreants, left a new government in place without trying to control it, and left.
This is why, along with the overwhelming majority of the Black community, I favored Clinton's intervention in Haiti -- which Republicans hated. This was purely a human-rights-based intervention. There was nothing in it for us, except that it was within our backyard and we faced some prospect of refugee flow. We did what we did there because it was right. Since then, things have gotten bad again, although with different leaders. That doesn't change the analysis of what was right at the time.
It is the struggle against tyranny in Haiti that reminds me the most of Zimbabwe today. Both involved corruption of the electoral system. (If you don't know the story of the Tonton Macoute and how they prevented elections from transferring power in Haiti, you should at least click these relevant links before arriving at a considered opinion on this question.) That, to me, is a very important aspect of what makes intervention in a country legitimate. What contested elections -- especially ones where the opposition wins, such as the ones in Haiti in 1990 and this year's contest in Zimbabwe, -- tell you is that someone is ready to take over the reins of government. Labor leader Morgan Tsvangirai is ready to take over the government, especially if the military realizes that Robert Mugabe is no longer going to be in a position to butter its bread. Even the credible threat of intervention may be enough to lead the military to oust Mugabe themselves and allow Tsvangirai to take power, although of course one does not threaten to use force unless one is willing to follow through.
So, limiting the principle of just intervention to cases where an alternative government is available should reduce some of the spookiness of favoring intervention. But even that is not enough.
The other concern, as expressed in the second story from the telegraph, is that the refugee situation has broken down. Zimbabweans in South Africa are getting burned alive. South Africa, for whatever reason, is unable to play its role in housing refugees. (Neither, you may point out, are we -- and touché. But we're notoriously bad about taking refugees, we're not on the border, and complaining about the U.S. in this respect doesn't change anything in Zimbabwe.) South African President Thabo Mbeki has been a great disappointment here, though I recognize that his options may be limited. At any rate, as refugees cannot be resettled, as is happening (and causing its own awful problems) in Iraq, there is no good alternative to intervention.
A county on the brink of stopping a terroristic regime, that needs both a helping hand and a shove, is not going to be able to do it without outside help. If this were the 90s, we would have enough goodwill in thre world to show leadership without question. Under Obama, we will have it again. Now, it must be done despite President Bush. We have leverage over China because of the proximity of the Olympics; I don't think Russia would veto a Security Council resolution; and our economic sanctions against Zimbabwe are hurting the people without dislodging Zimbabwe. This is not like Iraq, where despite horrore there was relative stasis, and no good option for replacing Saddam without bolstering Iran in any event. This is exactly when military intervention should be used to bolster diplomacy.
We shold not seek to profit, or allow others to profit, from such an action. But we ought to make it clear that the world will not stand for this situation where a viable alternative exists.
Some of you may see this as an abrogation of progressive principles; I see our failure to act, where we really could do some good, as such an abrogation. So much for unity, perhaps, but we benefit from healthy debate.