If ever there was a man who should be drawn and quartered it is Mugabe. There is some excellent blogging about the horrors happening there. I agree that he should not have withdrawn, but I think he chose to in order to prevent hopefully more abuse like this (warning, click on an empty stomach)

www.flickr.com/.../72157600853440301

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.../stealing-an-ele.html

For this, there can be no 'deal', he needs to go, and the AU and UN need to do their duty to make that happen.

I don't know. Some days I'm s bleeding-heart interventionist who wants to throw American force at every sufficiently bad despot in the world. On other days, I ask why the victims of any given tyranny don't take matters into their own hands and free themselves. If about 15 percent of a population are willing to risk death rather than accede to a tyrannical government, that government cannot stand. There is a practical limit to the number of reliable, armed agents of oppression any despot can field at any time. My ancestors participated in successful revolutions against oppression in three different countries; why do the people of Zimbabwe (or Iraq, or China, or ...) not say "no" to their despotic governments? Even the most oppressed people in the world today do not lack for arms they could turn against their oppressors, as Saddam's "victims" demonstrated so ably just weeks after the arrival of our forces in their country. All that's lacking is will.

Which is all incredibly ungenerous, so the next day I'm back to mourning the opportunity costs of the Iraq fiasco, which has denied us for the foreseeable future the ability to use force against even the pettiest of foreign tyrants. To have been or to continue to be for significant U.S. commitment in Iraq is, objectively speaking, to be against American action against the likes of Mugabe.

(But then again, thank God the "international community" wasn't in a position to intervene to overthrow America's slave tyranny in 1850 or our apartheid system in 1950. Flawed as American solutions to our own slavery and racism problems have been, they were superior to any conceivable solution that might have been imposed at the point of a British bayonet. I would think that in the long run, a Zimbabwean, or at any rate an African, solution to Zimbabwe's problems will also be better than any "solution" that results from foreign force. Kenya, Ghana, Botswana, South Africa -- other African countries have found indigenous solutions to similar problems of despotism and racism as Zimbabwe faces.)

What does Mugabe want? That's pretty clear; he wants to hold onto power so that he doesn't end up on the end of a rope or worse - the Hague. His supporters also recognize the perils of losing power, the financial suport that it brings, and the possibility of reprisal killings.

As for American military intervention on southern Africa, give me a break. With or without Iraq, it would never happen.

At this point, the most effective pressure would be exerted on Mbeki in South Africa, Mugabe's chief enabler. Any trade or aid deals with South Africa should be put on indefinite hold, and human-rights groups should bear down on mistreatment of exiles from Zimbabwe in South Africa.

Also: Are U.S. and British tobacco companies still buying from Zimbabwe? Historically, tobacco has been the country's most lucrative export.

And this would be a good time for Obama to speak up about Mugabe and other repressive African leaders. No American politician has higher credibility - family ties, no less - on the continent.

True, mpatrick, but it's not just a matter of military intervention.  It's also to do with the capacity to organize and focus diplomatic and political pressure on a particular target and close down that target's options, with the vision of (a) an escort to the airport and spending the rest of his life as a rich but forgotten refugee in some place like Libya or (b) a visit to the Hague.  You need some assets to do that effectively, and everyone knows that our assets are committed elsewhere, compromised in certain areas, and weak on strategic credibility.

Rhubarbs: My focus would be on arming the opposition. Uprising is tough work, when you're underfed and terrified, destitute, homeless or exiled. (This covers most of the 70 percent of Zim that's unemployed.) Nevertheless, I'd love to see your 15 percent--I'd settle for Tsvangirai--stay and fight. But with what? China's arms boost Mugabe's ruthless policing ops--though I often wonder why the workaday, ground-level enforcers are still killing for him.

mpatrickhendri: I won't give you a break. I agree we're going nowhere near southern Africa. But that's because the most abundant natural resource in modern Zimbabwe is poor black people, and ethnic indifference is well-established foreign policy (cf. Rwanda, Sudan, Kenya). Couple this with my favorite line from John McCain this year:

“If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

and you have the equation that will fulfill your prophesy. As if Iraq weren't, uh, colonized, too.

When was the last time an election boycott accomplished anything positive?

I have nothing substantive to add. Just that writing beautifully, in a blog, about a horrible subject, is hard work. And Dayo did it. So thank you.

I meant to append to my comment above that I don't intend any of it as any kind of policy recommendation, but rather as a confession of my own policy confusion -- and most likely of my own failure of moral imagination on the question of what to do about other people's tyrants.

One question I have is about the complicity of the military establishment, in North Korea as well as Zimbabwe. A trained seal would do a better job of distributing resources and state favors to maintain popular support than Mugabe or Kim; surely every military officer above the rank of captain realizes that he would be a more effective ruler than the fool he salutes. So why does each country's armed forces permit itself to be so badly used for such meager rewards?

Not so, Rhubs.  The military is taken care of in Zim and NKor.  These guys may be murdering loons, but they ain't stupid.