Samantha Power: Saving Zimbabwe

Wow...my goodness. I'm not really sure I know which way this should go. After reading both articles, the quote "God will know his own" comes to mind, though.

This is a mess. I do NOT believe that it is the United States job to step in and intervene forcefully. If there was a concerted opposition that was organized, and was to declare independence, perhaps we could support them.

"Commerce with all, Alliance with none".

Oh, brother...don't think I don't want to. If I could step in and twinkle my nose to make everything right with the world, I would in a heartbeat. It don't work that way, though. The American Revolution was BLOODY, but it was required for us to establish sovereignty, and show that we were serious. It requires people to have that yearning within their breast for a change to be made, and the conviction to fight and die for it.

You let me hear that hungry, newborn baby cry for freedom, and scream for justice...you'll see me.

I've always liked Samantha Power. Her book "Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" is excellent and she provides a critical perspective on crimes against humanity, partiuclarly those occuring in the former Yugoslavia as it disintegrated in the 1990's.

But this is by far and away NOT her best work.

Many of her initial observations are correct: the death, torture, and displacement wrought upon Zimbabwe by Mugabe represents brutality, certainly not at its worst, but on a scale unfamiliar to many living in the West. Neither the multilateralists nor the moralists (as she calls them) have a working plan for Mugabe or Zimbabwe despite their protestations and condemnations. And she's right about the Iraq war--regardless of how badly political elements in the United States want to pretend that it was about humanitarian issues, it was framed in terms of weapons of mass destruction and September 11th and thus does not serve as a precedent for the kind of military intervention many would suggest for Zimbabwe.

But her conclusions are problematic at best and ludicrous at worst.

She suggests that the world publicly side either with Mugabe or with president elect Tsvangirai, creating a political and normative split between the two groups and allowing Tsvangirai to set up a government in exile with ambassadors abroad.

And that's all well and good, but what's the point? As Dreyfuss explains, the world isn't likely to split into the pretty picture Power paints. On the one hand you have the apathy of an international community and its constituent parts to the situation in Zimbabwe given the socio-political-economic realities of world politics today. On the other, you have the potential for Zimbabwe to become a pawn in broader and completely unrelated political struggles. And through it all, what good is a government in exile going to do for the people of Zimbabwe who need more than and international debate on the legitimacy of their government.

Dreyfuss calls this democracy promotion run wild and he's not all together wrong. While I'm not sure that his solution (to wait for Mugabe to die before taking action to resolve the situation) is best, I think he is wise to remind readers that the situation in Zimbabwe "hardly rises to the level of genocide." Indeed, those who would call Mugabe the "Hitler of Africa" would be well served to remember the horrors that have plagued the continent during the post-colonial era, horrors of which the African people remain painfully aware. We're not talking about violence that reaches the scope of Rwanda in 1994 (and if we were, I'd be shouting to put as many troops between those with the machetes and those being hacked to pieces as possible, consequences be damned as long as we stopped the bloodshed). While I'm all for intervening in episodes of genocide, we need to consider the precedent we would set if we intervened in a situation that does not as of yet meet justify a violation of state sovereignty by international forces.

I'd love to be able to end with a counter proposal to that which Power suggests but I am for now lacking in policy suggestions. Though it falls along the lines of "multilateral hand wringing," I do find her proposal to send Kofi Annan as the UN envoy to Zimbabwe to see if he can try his hand at brokering a solution. In the mean time, I think Dreyfuss is wise: we should really try not to make things worse regardless if our intent is to make them better.