The desperate situation in Zimbabwe is deteriorating yet further ahead of next week's presidential run-off election between Robert Mugabe and the opposition MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who was arrested and released over the weekend for the fifth time of the "campaign." Tsvangirai's deputy, Tendai Biti, is currently being held in an undisclosed location, with treason charges supposedly being prepared against him.

Meanwhile, the Mugabe re-election drive is in full swing: under the oversight of the army and police, killings, beatings and intimidation are being employed to cow the Flickring The Revolution?: Sokwanele documents horrors no conventional reporter can get nearpopulation into voting for ZANU-PF, with scarce food rations being used as political weapons to secure the support of a starving electorate. Voter registration in MDC areas is being severely curtailed, and officials have taken to simply handing out billions of dollars of Zimbabwe's all-but-worthless currency in return for votes. Mugabe bellows darkly of "going to war" if the country is "taken over by lackeys." Given the vast scale on which these elections are being perverted, he may not need to.

Reporting restrictions make it difficult to know exactly what is happening on the ground, with most Western media banned from the country or operating under intolerable circumstances. But information about the harassment and violence being suffered by opposition activists is filtering out by other methods, some of them remarkably innovative. Chief among these has been the advent of blogging, which we have seen in previous situations such as the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah two years ago and the short-lived Burmese uprising of last autumn.

Where mainstream media are sometimes unable to operate freely, whether due to restrictions imposed by repressive regimes or the exigencies of wartime conditions, lone bloggers have often come to the fore in passing on vital information denied to us through traditional means. In Lebanon in 2006, Beirut residents sat on their balconies describing Israeli aircraft coming overhead; students in Haifa liveblogged from bomb shelters until the all clear was sounded. Some of these firsthand accounts provided valuable context to the reports on the evening news bulletins; others challenged the conventional wisdom we were being fed by our media, whatever you thought that was.

A similar pattern emerged in Burma last year, with the junta's clampdown on reporting from inside the country making traditional reporting all but impossible. Small independent newspapers, resistance groups and bloggers filled the gap, with photos of demonstrations being posted to the web and picked up by news agencies hungry for fresh pictures --- any pictures --- to accompany their stories in the era of 24-hour rolling TV news. But the shortcomings of these outlets quickly became clear; with limited internet penetration into the impoverished country, it was easy enough for the government to block access to blogging platforms for residents of Rangoon and other cities, and the piecemeal supply of information eventually dried up.

The same sort of problem applies in Zimbabwe, whose citizens have long had more pressing problems than a dearth of affordable broadband connections. But information is coming through, thanks in part to the advent of trends such as microblogging, made possible through platforms like Twitter, which (for the benefit of readers as technologically backward as I am) allows users to post information from any internet connection or, crucially, a mobile phone, and makes it easy for others to access the resulting updates. Organisations such as Sokwanele, a civic action group operating out of Zimbabwe and neighbouring countries, are collating information from local activists and observers and disseminating it via RSS feeds and Twitter, and posting photos of demonstrations and police brutality to specially set up Flickr accounts, in ways which the authorities are simply powerless to stop. They even have an interactive Google map charting instances of voter fraud and intimidation by the authorities, and you can follow Morgan Tsvangirai's campaign via Google Earth.

This is not the first time that services like Twitter have been used to outwit security services. A Berkeley student covering an anti-government protest in Egypt used his cellphone to post the one-word update "Arrested" when the police picked him up, and was released within the day. But Zimbabwean activists can count on no such deus ex machina; no embassy or consulate is waiting to spring into action to release those incarcerated in Mugabe's jails. And this is where the limitations of technological advances are most evident. As in Burma, telling the outside world what is happening to you is one thing, and getting them to help you is quite another. Whether through impotence, overstretch or apathy, there is little appetite for Western intervention in the wake of Iraq (as discussed by Daniel last week), and Thabo Mbeki's South Africa, the one regional agent who might realistically exert some diplomatic leverage, has been utterly spineless in the face of Mugabe's brutal campaign against his own people.

And so we watch and wait for the results of next week's elections; and, thanks to the bravery and ingenuity of a few committed activists, we have a front row seat for Zimbabwe's continuing death agony. But we're unlikely to get up from the sofa, no matter what happens. So, yes, the revolution will be televised - but to what end?

You'd think the headline—Robert Mugabe's militia burns opponent's wife alive—would say it all, but it doesn't. Seven of Mugabe's thugs attacked Dadirai Chipiro, the wife of Mhondoro district opposition leader Patson Chipiro. "They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window." They had to have beaten her severely before burning her to death (along with much of her village), since according to the coroner's report, "all hands and legs were broken...the cause of death [w]as haemorrhaging and severe burns."

By mounting a coup against a government to which he no longer has any legitimateRobert Mugabe: Beneficiary of the Iraq War claim, Mugabe has done the world the clarifying favor of removing any objections to an intervention in Zimbabwe on grounds of national sovereignty: Whatever constraints one thinks sovereignty does or does not impose on foreign powers' actions in a state, Zimbabwe's sovereign authority resides with Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change. Since Mugabe has usurped that authority, there is no conflict with national sovereignty, or any other provisions of international law, to prohibit an external intervention to enforce the results of the election.

In practice, of course, an external intervention means a (mostly) American deployment. Without American support, as Shmuel Rosner and Adam LeBor have been discussing, the international community is helpless to do anything about humanitarian crises. Which is why nothing will be done. The case for an international mandate to arrest Mugabe and restore democracy in Zimbabwe is so straightforward that it might still be possible, despite the damage the Bush administration has done the the US's bargaining power, to assemble broad international support for such an operation. But what army would we do it with? And how would we begin to pay for it?

Resources are scarce—that's the foundational premise of economic theory. Every single day in Iraq costs $720 million dollars + approximately 16 man-hours of labor x 150,000 men (and some women); there's a lot you can do with that much capital. You can give it all back to taxpayers. You can invest it in domestic projects. You can use it to pay down the national debt. You can use it to fund and staff a massive global anti-poverty campaign, or anti-hunger campaign, or anti-disease campaign. And you can use it to intervene to save democracy in places like Zimbabwe or shut down killing fields in places like Darfur. Humanitarian crises happen frequently. And as long as the armed forces of the United States remain over-deployed, the prospects of any humanitarian crisis being resolved in any non-disastrous way are minimal.

Never mind the sunk cost fallacies that keep propagandism for the Iraq war going; to argue credibly and honestly for the continuation of the war, one has to be willing to argue not just that it's a worthwhile cause, but that it is a uniquely important cause that justifies losing the opportunity to attend to any of the world's problems which our commitment to Iraq prevents us from doing. How sad that it should fall to monsters like Mugabe and the Janjaweed of Sudan to expose the essential fraudulence of our foreign policy debates.

Christopher Hitchens wants to know why Nelson Mandela hasn't denounced Robert Mugabe, and insists that "[b]y his silence about what is happening in Zimbabwe, Mandela is making himself complicit in the pillage and murder of an entire nation, as well as the strangulation of an important African democracy." The most generous interpretation of this sentence is that Hitchens doesn't know what 'complicit' means.

The thing is, Mandela has denounced Mugabe. He has described Mugabe as aMadiba With Springbok Captain Francois Pienaar: The founding image of the rainbow nation paradigm example of African "'tyrants' who cling to power...'who have made enormous wealth, leaders who once commanded liberation armies.' They had come to 'despise the very people who put them in power' and 'think it is their privilege to be there for eternity.'" For good measure, Mandela added that "'we have to be ruthless in denouncing such leaders.'"

That denunciation of Mugabe came a year into Mandela's retirement from politics, when he was already eighty-two years old, at the height of a political, agricultural, and financial crisis in Zimbabwe. It made no difference in Zimbabwe whatsoever. So Hitchens' notion that "the smallest word" from Mandela would make a "huge difference" is patent nonsense. His complaint amounts to accusing Mandela of being culpable for "the pillage and murder of an entire nation" because he hasn't denounced Mugabe frequently or recently enough to satisfy Christopher Hitchens, regardless of the negligible practical effect of such a denunciation. Which is a distinctly less compelling indictment.

Incidentally, Hitchens' failure to give an answer to his own question isn't for lack of having received one. George Bizos told Hitchens that Mandela is "a very old man" whose "doctors have advised him to avoid anything stressful." Well, that just won't do it for Hitchens, who insinuates that Bizos—the heroic human rights activist and counselor to the defendants in the Rivonia trial as well as (more recently) to Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai—is prevaricating to cover up for Mandela's "squalid compromise."

It can't be that Bizos is stating the simple truth that Mandela is a frail ninety-year-old man whose body has been wrecked by decades of abuse and malnutrition and who lives in constant pain. It can't be that finally after all these years, his mind is beginning to show signs of what happens to a human mind after enduring for so long: Just before the Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and England last year, Mandela mistakenly called his beloved Springboks 'the All Blacks,' the nickname of their arch-nemesis New Zealand. That's not a minor lapse. It would be like a passionate fan of the Red Sox inexplicably calling them 'the Yankees,' at least if his support of the Red Sox were a profound symbol of his nation's post-apartheid reconciliation with which everyone from his country is intimately familiar.

South African blogger Michael Trapido puts things more politely than I can: "Madiba, of all people, has merited his greatness and earned his rest. While we would all love to see him as much as we can, exerting pressure will only shorten his time with us and be of benefit to nobody." Less politely, Hitchens believes Mandela owes it to Hitchens to give himself a coronary episode. Otherwise he's a squalid moral compromiser with Zimbabwean blood on his hands.

Next week in Slate: Christopher Hitchens explains that Martin Luther King's silence on genocide in Darfur proves that the once great man has descended into the squalor of moral relativism.

Could South Africa intervene in Zimbabwe to rescue Robert Mugabe? Both countries train each other's military forces and, as James Kirchik points out in The New Republic,

As members of the SADC, South Africa and Zimbabwe are also signatories to that organization's Mutual Defense Pact. Article 7 of the agreement stipulates that "No action shall be taken to assist any State Party in terms of this Pact, save at the State Party's own request or with its consent." Thus, Mugabe can continue to run a police state and his neighbors can't do anything about it without his permission. Conversely, if Mugabe feels that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), his opposition, poses a threat, he could theoretically ask SADC members to help him stamp it out.