The New Republic

for the world if the UK and US invaded every disfunctional nation on this bedeviled planet? Sounds like a nightmare vision to me - what about this is appealing to you Alex? Or would you draw some line, somewhere? Neil

- purcellneil

July 4, 2007 at 12:04pm

we don't have to invade, just drop a bomb on his Palace and level it, hopefully with him inside. Eventually we should be able to track him down, it is not Pakistan after all, and Mugabe loves his luxury. Killing him would be in defense of millions.

- blackton

July 4, 2007 at 12:32pm

Gee, maybe Kirchick was right. If the west had not rallied around Mugabe three decades ago, we wouldn't be at this pass.

- teplukhin2you

July 4, 2007 at 7:08pm

Kirchick (a) minimised the nastiness of the Smith regime, (b) dismissed the undemocratic nature of the Internal Settlement that made Abel Muzorewa Prime Minister* and (c) ignored the violence that Muzorewa's auxiliaries were involved in (as were Mugabe's forces) during the 1980 elections. So... hindsight is 20-20. I don't think that 30 more years of Ian Smith's rule would have been much better (despite the dreams of some colonial wannabes here at TNR), and Muzorewa had the distinct benefit of losing power before any more violence developed out of his partnership with Ian Smith. *A pretty much-entirely whites-only election and a very large number of seats and Cabinet positions reserved for whites. Kirchick also made a mistake when he claimed that these arrangements were normal in newly-independent African states: in the cases he mentioned - Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia - such arrangements were the last gasps of colonial rule, and were repudiated after independence.

- SMacEachern2

July 4, 2007 at 11:05pm

I did not "minimize the nastiness of the Smith regime." I directly blame him (and the majority of whites who continued to vote him into power) for creating the sort of backlash that allowed men like Mugabe and Nkomo to gain popularity. Yes, the internal settlement was not perfectly democratic. But neither was the Lancaster House agreement, which both Mugabe, Nkomo and all the Frontline States agreed to. Both agreements reserved a highly disproportionate number of parliamentary seats for whites, 28 in the case of the internal settlement and 20 in the case of Lancaster House. Are you really going to make a fuss over 8 seats? Essentially, what you are arguing, is that it was illegitimate and racist for the world to accept a plan in which 28 seats were reserved for whites and that banned the openly dictatorial Mugabe, but heroic to accept a plan that reserved 20 seats for whites and that paved the way for Mugabe to take office. Bishop Muzorewa's men did commit violence. But hardly on the scale of Mugabe or Nkomo. But Muzorewa was a committed democrat, to the extent that they existed in Africa at the time. Mugabe openly declared, time and time again, that he supported a one-party, Marxist state in Zimbabwe and he set about setting it up, murdering tens of thousands of people, within years of taking power. None of this ought to have come as a surprise to anyone who knew the slightest thing about him. As for Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia--you're right, such arrangements reserving seats for whites "were repudiated after independence" ... along with democracy itself. All of those countries became one-party dictatorships. --James Kirchick

- JamieK

July 5, 2007 at 7:45am

Give me a break. You praise Smith's regime with faint damns throughout that article. Look at the title: 'How tyranny came to Zimbabwe'. Ever think that perhaps white-only rule through the previous 15 years - and through the colonial period before that - constituted tyranny as well? Look at the text: "Smith, whose Rhodesian Front party was consistently reelected, would have none of it....Somehow, this tenacious little former colony held out against the world's once-great British Empire, busting sanctions, increasing white immigration, and keeping domestic black political opposition at bay with a succession of authoritarian laws that effectively banned political dissent." Great language that - Rhodesia as international underdog. Smith was 'consistently elected' by 250,000 whites, and those 'authoritarian laws' included imprisonment without trial... but not, latterly, the disappearing of black opponents of the regime, which was done off the books. And all you manage to blame him for is bringing Mugabe to power? As for the difference between the internal settlement and the Lancaster House agreements, you'll note that there was rather more involved than the number of seats in Parliament. The internal agreement provisions virtually ensured white control of the military and civil service, while those extra eight seats allowed the white population to effectively block constitutional change for the length of the agreement. And quite right that Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia became one-party states - not states nearly as repressive and violent as Rhodesia under Ian Smith, but, hey, tyranny and dictatorship are only worth mentioning when they're undertaken by _black_ Africans, eh? 'Bishop Muzorewa's men' committed violence, which effectively distances him from such violence... whereas apparently Mugabe and Nkomo were directly responsible for all of the violence committed by the PF. In fact, the estimates are that about athird of the violence was associated with Muzorewa's auxiliaries and the Rhodesian military and ex-military - you forgot to mention the two assassination attempts by ex-Selous Scouts against Mugabe during the campaign, as well. Omissions abound... Carter and Young are demonized (well, Peretz hates 'em both, eh?) and you mention the involvement of Callaghan's Labour government - but you never get around to mentioning that the Lancaster House agreement, which took place in late 1979, was signed under the watch of that darling of the right wing, Margaret Thatcher. If this was all a big leftie screw-up, how did she get involved? In some ways, you're perhaps not to blame. In an article for the Weekly Standard, you could hardly take an even-handed stance on the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. That's a magazine for the most Blimpish of American conservatives, the ones who supported Rhodesia and, in the 1980s, terrorist outfits like Renamo in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola. If you hadn't let Smith off easy and concentrated your fire on Jimmy Carter, it probably wouldn't have gotten published.

- SMacEachern2

July 5, 2007 at 11:34am