How We Could Save Zimbabwe

Is this a very dry witticism?  Daniel, this is precisely the kind of well-meaning intervention that neoconservatives have always advocated, and that you've spent pages demonizing them for.  I understand that events in the mid-nineties occured beyond the scope of your memory, but similar charges were levelled, justly, at the Bosnian Serb leadership, as well as Haitian coup leaders, and, frankly, Saddam Hussein, whose savagery easily matched Mugabe's, if it didn't in fact exceed it.  And The Weekly Standard was always there to propose intervention on humanitarian grounds and to sow the seeds of democracy, agree with them or not.  There is just not a scintilla of daylight between your view and theirs, excepting the fact that the Iraq war is deeply unpopular now that it's become evident that our experiment in democracy promotion may be an ill-fated venture.

In the immediate term, I am trying to make the point that simply by supplying basic axioms of economic and decision theory to the background premises of Iraq war boosters (on the assumption they're being honest), they would seem to be committed to withdrawing from Iraq in favor of other engagements.

Now, if the diplomatic and military contexts were entirely different from what they are now, what would my position be? I honestly don't know for sure. Since the hawks have destroyed the army and bankrupted and isolated the country, these are somewhat moot questions. In the abstract, I would not, I am fairly certain, object to a US intervention to stop an ongoing genocide.

Also this: Zimbabwe and Iraq are very, very different countries. The question of whether a successful military operation initiated under international law with a very strictly and narrowly defined mandate to topple Mugabe, restore the elected government to power (Zimbabwe does have a political infrastructure), and withdraw within a modest set period of time (6 months? one year?) is possible is presumably an empirical question. If the answer is no, as it was in Iraq, I would oppose any intervention.

What if South Africa and a few other neighboring states decided they'd had enough with Mugabe and moved in and toppled him? Would you be opposed to that? (I'm not asking flippantly, I'd like to know.) Provided they didn't try to annex Zimbabwe or start committing atrocities themselves, that would seem to be a pretty good outcome, something akin to Vietnam shutting down the Khmer Rouge (I'm aware Pol Pot invaded Vietnam first).

I'm not sure that toppling any dictator and restoring an elected government to power ever constitutes a limited mandate, even if it's a justified one.  Revulsion against state-sponsored brutality is a worthy sentiment but, awkwardly, there are really only two alternatives: do something or do nothing.  If you're inclined to do something, even with an international consensus in your favor, it's apt to be harder than advertised.  And if your criterion is feasibility, than the difference between your view and neoconservative doctrine really just comes down to pragmatism, which isn't much.

The so-called paleocons you've alluded to like to caricature their neoconservative counterparts as bloodthirsty, but remember that they're opposed to intervention on any grounds whatsoever; they really just don't care about humanitarian crises in remote parts of the planet.  Does that reluctance to spend blood and treasure under any circumstance ennoble them somehow?

Whether or not to project American power abroad is a stark but difficult choice, and no one has been especially clairvoyant in the past about the prospects for success in any particular instance.  Credit neoconservatives with this: despite the overwhelming unpopularity of the Iraq War, they cleave unwaveringly to their views, i.e., we have a responsibility to use military force to protect democratic ideals anywhere in the world they are threatened.  There is nothing to be gained poltically anymore by advocating that policy.

It's not just a difference of feasibility. I would chart out the entire universe of options (including doing nothing) and attempt any of them before going to war. Neoconservatives always go to war first. 

I'm not under illusions about paleocons, by the way. There are reasons I'm not one of them. I would however vastly prefer it if they controlled the Republican party versus the current lot.

Agreed that this administration has made dreadful mistakes, and I think that you're right that an unfortunate consequence of this has been to discredit, or at least render moot, the possibility of using force for humanitarian reasons, for the time being.

But the "paleocons" and the utterly fanciful intellectual genealogies they're so fond of spinning deserve closer scrutiny than they've received in some quarters.  Evidently, Pat Buchanan, newly-christened peace activist, was working within the system in order to undermine it, when he was flacking for Nixon and trashing pusillanimous pussyfooter opponents of the war in Vietnam.

"It's not just a difference of feasibility. I would chart out the entire
universe of options (including doing nothing) and attempt any of them
before going to war."

If that's the case, I hope you don't mind months, and probably years, of reports of atrocities like the one your post describes before your list is expired.  It's not just a matter or trial and error, simply checking off an entry on a shopping list.  The problem with diplomacy, and one of the reasons dictators love talking, is that it is slow, it takes time, and more often than not it is rather inconclusive (in the sense that you're not likely to talk Mugabe into stepping down through diplomacy).

The problem with judging feasibility is that you can't be sure how feasible an action is until it's done.  Toppling Mugabe may seem easy, just like people thought toppling Saddam would be easy (which it actually was), but it may not be.  Who's to say an insurgency won't erupt in Zimbabwe?   You say Zimbabwe has a political infrastructure but who knows whether it could function if Mugabe's militia goes guerilla, or if al-Qaeda decides to take its anti-American caravan of terrorism down to southern Africa?

" Neoconservatives always go to war first."

This is hyperbole (I hope).  If that was true we would've invaded Iraq in September 2001 when we went into Afghanistan.  The truth is that the Bush administration spent over a year trying to get a UN mandate for Iraq, allowing inspectors to look around at least for a while, went through the whole domestic process in which the vast majority of non-neocons decided to go along with,  and then trying to build as large an international coalition as possible (however lame and pathetic it turned out is beside the point). 

While the situation in Rhodesia (oops Zimbabwe) might be a tad bad, it is nothing compared to the genocide that the Palestinians are undergoing, which is unprecedented in all of history. In my role of Special rapporteur for the final solution to the Jewish problem as part of my employment by the United Nationas Against Israel, I can make a suggestion. The Zimbabweans should call themselves Palestinains, so then the UNAI can investigate. Otherwise, what happens in Zimbabwe stays in Zimbabwe