The Inside Zimbabwe blog has some horrific stories about the atrocities being committed in that hellish country. Despite my support for the war in Iraq, one of my regrets is that it has left our military stretched too thin to decapitate the regimes that torment places like Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Burma. Forget "nation building" for a while... we could do a lot of good just by killing the right sets of people all around the world.
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I'm not particularly sad that we're not in Zimbabwe. One of the things that made success in Iraq possible is that the strategic importance of the region ensured that the pro-victory coalition was just (barely) big enough even in the face of error and setback. If you want to have a Zimbabwe intervention there would have to be some sort of roadmap that lets enough politicians support the mission even in the face of an Abu Ghraib or the ritual desecration of US corpses (Mogadishu II). I don't think you can.
If we intervene and don't stick it out, that's dangerous for the locals who support us and horrible for our national interest. Such an action truly would breed new jihadis.
No thanks.
It isn't just Zimbabwe. South Africa, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, and many more are in the throws of lawlessness and extremely inept and corrupt leadership. I feel for the people there. They have been under oppression and genocide for a long time and nobody is going to help them.
I don't advocate us going in anywhere over there but suprisingly (not), the UN isn't doing a thing to help either. Such is life in a non-strategic poor part of the world I guess.
TML: No no, you miss my point, I don't want to go in there and rebuild anything. I just want to go in and kill all the thugs at the top of the heap, then leave.
The problem with "kill them and leave" is that the generals may be more brutal than the thuggish civilians and the colonels more brutal still. We are likely to have a limited stomach for this sort of thing so going back in and decapitating further just makes another Haiti. Do we *want* another Haiti? You can intervene and make things worse.
TML: True, true. I'm not saying that decapitation is a panacea for what ails the world. Eh, the brutality of the world just disgusts me, and killing beneficiaries seems like the right thing to do, and in at least some places and some circumstances it would help everyone else, too.
In Zimbabwe, for instance, there's a nascent political opposition that could potentially prevent a descent into anarchy. Of course, anarchy might better that the status quo in Zimbabwe.