British moonbat wrings hands over Mugabe

In politics as in our personal lives, just six words comprise one of the commonest falsehoods around. Those six words are: “It can't go on like this.” But it can. I've come to the melancholy conclusion that in Zimbabwe it must.

This weekend there will be voices in our Prime Minister's ear suggesting how in one bound he might cast off his dithering reputation. To help to broker the toppling of Robert Mugabe (they will whisper) might be just the sort of history-making that rescued Margaret Thatcher from doldrums at home, before Galtieri invaded the Falklands. In The Times this week Lord (Paddy) Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon suggested that intervention may become necessary. Mr Brown will think hard about this; list the pros; list the cons; dither; and finally decide it's all too difficult.

Well let's hear it for dithering. Beware the widely held opinion that all we need is Robert Mugabe's head on a stick. In Iraq we called this the decapitation strategy, and duly secured the required head - Saddam's - on the right stick. Then it all went wrong. The ingredients necessary for a liberal democracy were not, it turned out, there. Why should things be different in Africa?

Zimbabwe Rhodesia is not Iraq and Mugabe is not Saddam Hussein, however the Rhodesian people would be extremely lucky if they were. Because contrary to what this limy nitwit thinks the war in Iraq has been all but won. The Iraqi government is making great strides and the streets of Baghdad are well on their way to becoming safer than those of Washington DC.

Sadly the current state of Rhodesia is the inevitable and predictable result of putting left-wing Marxists in charge of the country. The people (black and white) of both Rhodesia and South Africa would have been far better off it the Western nations hadn't come down with a collective case of the vapors at the thought of white governments ruling over black people and had just minded their own business.

Oh, what's the limy nitwit's answer to it all?

"I have none. To rescue Zimbabwe is beyond not our capacity, but our will. We can only wail and wring our hands."

You wail and wring your hands sugarplum. I'll occupy my time by trying to warn people that this is what happens when you listen to the left about, well anything.

The left can't be bothered

From Front Page Magazine:

Last week Morgan Tsvangarai, the head of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was beaten to near-death after taking part in a demonstration against the tyranny of Robert Mugabe. In what was falsely described as a police detention, Tsvangarai and his colleagues, including two prominent female officials, were brutalized and left for dead.

There are other tragic cases. Mourners at the funeral of another anti-Mugabe activist, shot dead by the regime, came under fire from government police. One corpse was taken miles away and buried by the authorities to avoid a further demonstration. Last weekend Tsvangarai’s spokesman, Nelson Chamisa, was stopped at Harare airport and brutally beaten as he was preparing to leave for a conference in Belgium; it is feared he has a cracked skull. Arthur Mutambara, leader of one of the factions of the MDC, was re-arrested last Saturday, and is now being held at Harare's central police station. MDC members Frail Grace Kwinje and 64-year-old Sekai Holland, who also suffered beatings in the police roundup, were recently detained just before boarding flight because officials claimed the women needed a supplemental “clearance letter from the ministry of health” in order to leave the country.

For many on the political Left, the fate of these opposition activists does not bear thinking about. One reason, it appears, is that the United States has taken up the cause of Zimbabwe’s opposition. Indeed, it was the U.S. envoy to Zimbabwe who protested and was reported to have been instrumental in getting the wounded activists to a hospital. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also intervened. President Mugabe reacted by threatening to expel any Western envoys who interfered in the running of the country.

In stark contrast to America’s response is the reaction that has come from the anti-war, anti-Bush campaigners and hangers-on. I recently called a colleague who is active in the anti-war movement and she very nearly deafened me with a screaming rebuke that went something like this: “There are plenty of people dying in the Congo and Rwanda and nobody is making headlines about that.” I tried to explain that Zimbabwe, once the agricultural orchard of Africa, was now suffering 80 percent unemployment and 1700 percent inflation. Both white farmers and black opposition leaders have suffered under Mugabe’s savage rule. Yet this activist informed me that she “did not care” about the plight of Morgan Tsvangarai and others who risked their lives to challenge Mugabe‘s dictatorship.

[. . .]

This is a sorry state of affairs. The same Left that rails against Israel and the United States and organizes marches for the “liberation” of Palestine will not acknowledge the political crisis in Zimbabwe because it would mean siding with America.

Someone finds this a surprise? Radical left-wing feminists in the US side with the Taliban against the US. They prefer those who treat women as slaves to the man who liberated the woman of two nations. Giving the women of both the first chance they had ever had to vote and the women of one (Afghanistan) the first chance they had ever had to walk outside without a husband or male relative to escort them.

Another reason that the left is silent on the suffering of Zimbabwe is that to admit that they were wrong all those years ago when they were working to remove Rhodesia's white government. It their world view the ultimate evil was a minority white government ruling over people of color.

To protest Mugabe's criminally insane policies would be to admit that those who warned that the black population of Rhodesia were better off with the white government than they would be under "one man one vote" were right.

So in Zimbabwe things will never get so bad that the left will raise its voice, let alone its hand, in protest.

Cleaning up the mess in Africa

From The Washington Post:

LAST WEEK President Bush hosted a White House summit on malaria. "We know exactly what it takes to treat and prevent the disease," Mr. Bush said, referring to insecticide-treated bed nets and other simple measures. "The only question is whether we have the will to act." The day before the malaria summit, the question of will was raised again by the announcement of an AIDS breakthrough. According to clinical trials conducted in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, male circumcision can cut the chances of HIV infection by perhaps 60 percent; on one estimate, making circumcision widely available could avert 3 million deaths over 20 years in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is whether health systems in poor countries will be boosted so that circumcision is an option for those who want it.

I'll add a couple of things. Tens of thousands of children die from dysentery because the disease dehydrates them. The body loses its electrolytes causing the heart to become unable to function properly and the child dies. Oral re-hydration salts could save them, or at least the overwhelming majority of them. What are oral re-hydration salts you ask. They are small packets of the minerals which the body needs. Add them to water, stir and what you have is in essence Gatorade. Give this to the child with dysentery and his electrolyte balance is maintained until the disease passes through his body and he lives.

The packet of oral re-hydration salts costs pennies.

You might ask why, since the things are so cheap, are the packets of oral re-hydration salts not ubiquitous in Africa. This is, after all, the kind of thing that the US and the EU and the UN can (or should) agree on. This is even one of the few things that the Islamic world doesn't call blasphemous and fly into a murderous rage over.

Basically the problem is a failure of the local governments to rise above tribalism. The borders of most African nations were drawn by European colonial powers without regard to the tribal makeup of the territories they were creating. To make things worse the Europeans would often draw their native government administrators, soldiers and police from the minority tribe. This was done on the theory that the minority tribe would be more loyal due to the fact that their place of privilege in the nation was due only to the colonizing power and without them they could face retribution from the majority.

Another way in which this tribalism comes into play is the distribution of food aid. If you take the food grown in Africa and add the food sent into Africa by the various world charities (government and private) there is enough food to feed everyone an adequate diet. However the food is often either siphoned off into the black market with the money from its sale finds its way into some "leader's" Swiss bank account or is held back from the starving because the government considers them to be disloyal.

Another area where millions of lives could be saved is in the reintroduction of the insecticide DDT to control mosquito populations. DDT is one of the safest insecticides to humans and other mammals ever developed. The only thing standing in the way of bringing back DDT is the failure of will in the Western governments to stand up to their domestic environmentalists.

Another area where the lunatic fanaticism of the Greens is costing Third World lives is in their success at banning CFC refrigerants. Many medicines, you see, have to be kept cold or they go bad. Making refrigeration more expensive means that there will be a shortage of that which was already in short supply in the places where it is needed most.

If the European colonial powers had taken a more enlightened approach to the dismantling of their colonial empires a great deal of this could have been avoided. They should have adopted a slow process of withdrawal lasting 100 - 150 years. During the long transition period they could have established a nationwide educational system, a transportation infrastructure and a national electrical grid all of which would have weakened the grip of tribalism and left the African nations ready (or at least more ready) to take on the burdens, responsibilities and rewards of full independence sometime in the first quarter of the 22nd Century.

Also, before the Europeans left they could have also done incalculable good for the people of Africa by eradicating every last trace of Islam from the continent, but that's a another story.