I haven’t learned my Iraq lesson yet. I want the U.S. to pluck Robert Mugabe out of his criminal fastness in Zimbabwe and drop him, parachuteless, from 40,000 feet, during which he’ll have enough seconds to reflect upon the horrors he has inflicted on the country of which he was once a benefactor.
“Do unto others...”
If Ian Smith had allowed the jailed Mugabe to attend the funeral of his three-year-old son, who knows how many people, decades later, might have been spared Mugabe-inflicted viciousness. In jail for ten years, schoolteacher Mugabe earned three degrees from the University of London Extension Division. Soon after he came to power, Zimbabwe’s educational system was Africa’s best. Child mortality dropped, national prosperity seemed possible. Land owned by six thousand white citizens was expropriated and distributed to blacks, too many of them Mugabe stooges. Do unto others... When Cecil Rhodes--who’d given his name to the land that became Zimbabwe--expropriated the land that those settlers eventually owned, was questioned about its propriety, his graceful response was, “I prefer land to niggers.”
When drought hit the country, the long-stored hatred in Mugabe burst into what wrecked his country: life expectancy the worst in Africa, inflation at 1000 per cent, political opponents jailed and tortured, starvation and chaos in the streets.
Corruptio optimi pessimi. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
The bespectacled octogenarian with the gleaming wicked head is trying to squirm out of last month’s electoral defeat. Soldiers and police are bribed to obey him, the seething populace is waiting for African and world leaders to ratify their choice and expel the monster, but they are molasses-slow to act; the United Nations secretariat mutters; the
American administration condemns, but as of today, Mugabe reigns.
Roll out that plane.
--Richard Stern