Redstate

I don't mean to be crass, but, with Mugabe's record, I think Zimbabwe would be a terrific member of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Okay, I apologize. This is a very serious issue, perhaps I shouldn't reply with sarcasm.

you need to do is start a civil war in a country that is already starving.  Yes, we have ignored Zimbabwe for too long, but arming the opposition is not a way to bring about positive change.

Improvement can only come when Mugabe and his people are out of power.

We're surely not going to send in troops ourselves, so the next best thing is to let those with a personal stake in the matter fix the situation.

A war isn't so great, but giving starving people food and arms is better than nothing.

start of former Mugabe supporters and that turns into a brutal slaughter a la Rwanda, what do we do then, arm the counter-revolutionaries?

Did the American revolution devolve into mass murder?

I don't recall reading that the South Africans slaughtered all the 'whites.'

Has the new Iraqi regime murdered all the Sunnis?

Not all revolutions against oppressive powers turn bad. And besides, no matter what, those people should have the same right to keep and bear arms that we do, right?

Let them defend themselves and reclaim their freedom.  Let the greatest champion of freedom on Earth, the USA, help them do it.

Your typical social-engineering two-step:

1.  Forcibly dispossess productive citizens on some theoretical basis.
   
2. When the forcible dispossession does not in reality create the benefits you expected, broaden the net of demands and coerce more people.

Repeat as inspired by the Demon, to the point where theft and coercion are policies per se.

We have baby-steps of that sequence happening nearby, let us be grateful for the prosperity and Constitution and heritage that have so far kept them smaller than these awful stories from Africa.

is still better than sitting around offering platitudes on how awful things are and empty promises to help.

I honestly think the UN is part of the problem-by giving a country like this a seat in the UN, and a seat on the human rights commission it legitimizes the thug who is running it, as if his government is fine and upstanding.  This is just one more example of how the UN is almost worthless.

has called for Mugabe to be arrested and tried in the ICC, as they have for Bush, Rumsfeld and Gonzalez?

slow death by starvation, I choose war.  The victims of this democide have every right to defend themselves and their lives.

In Rwanda only one side was armed.

That is the recipe for genocide.

In any case if both sides are armed (Mugabe's side is already armed) there won't be a slaughter, there will be a possibility of deterrence or at the worst a fight for freedom.

We should be arming Darfur and southern Sudan just like we eventually allowed the victims in ex-Yugoland to do.

I have to make the same comments on the subject that I've made elsewhere.  Another board that I visit regularly has a member from South Africa, who's a former Rhodesian.

And he's always throwing fits over one or another thing that Mugabe is doing.  And my comments to him are always the same.  "Y'all gave him the country."

I'm sorry, but there it is.  I'm not a racist by any stretch, but when the Rhodesian Government chose to resist until they were forced to capitulate, and didn't start negotiating way sooner, they sank themselves.

If they'd have started 10 years earlier, they could have worked something out and handed the reigns over to a moderate of some stripe.  By refusing to get off square one for as long as they did, they laid themselves open to a takeover by a radical.

And that's what they got.  My sympathy for the people there is endless.  But if they want me to feed them so they can survive under the status quo, I'm like, "What for?"

Now if they want guns, we ought to accomodate them.  I'll bet we could scrape up a good bunch of functional AK's and ammo for them from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Recycling works if you do it right!

But if they are starving, they allowed it to happen themselves.  I don't have a dog in the fight, and whenever I objected to Mugabe for 20 years, I was told I was a racist.  

I'm on the sidelines for this one, and we as a nation should be.  Let somebody else take some responsibility for a change.  How many American troops are we ready to send there, given the way we've been abused by all parties in that quarter for the last fifty years?

Did the American revolution devolve into mass murder?

Actually it did, it just took four score and seven years.  And we did stretch out the genocide of our native population until just about 1900 when we decided there were so few left we could safely assimilate them.

I don't recall reading that the South Africans slaughtered all the 'whites.'

No, and we're lucky it didn't happen in South Africa, and it very nearly did happen in Rhodesia.  Go back to seventies when the there was an insurgency that turned into a full scale civil war that finally ended with Black majority rule in 1980.  It was an ugly, horrible war with atrocities on both sides.

Has the new Iraqi regime murdered all the Sunnis?

Not yet, but preventing Civil War seems to be the primary reason for our continued presence.

Not all revolutions against oppressive powers turn bad. And besides, no matter what, those people should have the same right to keep and bear arms that we do, right?

Don't even get me started on this question.  Besides, I don't think that lack of weapons is the problem, but rather lack of support.  Don't take this as a defense of Mugabe, I think he is one of the most awful leaders in the world today, up there with Karimov of Uzbekistan, but he does have quite a bit of popular support and has managed to crush his opposition.  The white commercial farmers are such a miniscule part of the population they couldn't fight back if they were armed with M-1 tanks.

You just can't solve the world's problems, or even one country's, by dropping a few M-16s, M-60s and MREs out of the back of a C-130 and hoping for the best.  If it were that easy Castro would have been overthrown years ago.

I'm glad I mentioned America first, because once you started your reply with Blame America First-ism, I could stop reading right there.

I don't think we should send a single soldier.  Let's just feed and arm the opposition.

Let them defend themselves.  That's all we have to do.

anything.  Many historians consider the Civil War the culmination of tensions left unresolved by the Articles of Confederation and the passage of the Constitution (i.e., the tension between "States Rights" and the power of the Federal Government).  That war cost half a million lives.  

Now you and I may not like the fact that we, first as British subjects then as Americans, spent almost 300 years exterminating the native population of this country, but we did.  The policy wasn't always explicit, nor was it always well organized but sometimes it was.  There were times in this country's history when we forcibly  resettled the native populations of entire regions of the country without much concern about how many people died in getting to their resettlement areas or how they survived once they got there (e.g., the 1830s and 1870s--90s).  In the 1840s in California, practically the entire native population of the interior was slaughtered to make room for settlers.  

the same question (slow death by starvation or possible death in a civil war) they would choose the civil war, at least in that case, they have a chance to defeat the thugs.

than food anyway at this point.

Arming the oppressed populace will at least give them the chance to not only live on, but to fight for the chance to live better.

Give me a death in battle, before killing me slowly by starvation.

And we did stretch out the genocide of our native population until just about 1900 when we decided there were so few left we could safely assimilate them.

Genocide implies active intent, rotwang.  The US did not have a policy which called for the extermination of American Indians.  Yours is a horrid and wrong mischaracterization.

of international pressure, getting attention paid to the problem and having the MSM spend half as much time on it as they do on one 18 year-old girl from Alabama missing in Aruba or 1/10th the time they spend on a washed-up '80's rock star's child molestation trial.

Civil War was mass murder?

Do you know Howard Dean personally?

Can you honestly equate the expansion of European settlement, often in the face of governmental opposition, that took over 400 years, to planned governmental genocide to be done in one man's rule?  I guess you can.

If you check your history you will find that the 'native' population of California in 1840 had slaughtered and relocated the previous residents and so on for several iterations.  The Commanches of west Texas are athabaskan refugees from a pre-Columbian war who were unable to find a new home for several hundred years and several thousand miles.

Populations grow and contract, and in the past war as a part of that.  Genocide is properly defined as a distinct program with the intent of destroying a people.  Yes, Sheridan was probably genocidal, but the whole history of the USA is not one of prolonged genocide any more than the history of England or of Bangladesh is.

international pressue has worked so well in places like Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan (before the war) and Cuba?

How many people do you think should die, before the UN decides it might want to do something, of course then you get a lame resolution out of the UNSC, after France and Germany get their chance to water it down (as they did with Sudan-have they even made that resolution yet, or is France still worried about its oil contracts?).  

How many dead by starvation is acceptable to you, before we do something to at least give the locals a fighting chance?  Or is it okay that they die, since in your liberal mind, giving them a gun to kill the thugs is somehow horrible compared to their death by starvation?

genocide is a series of acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such.  So you may quibble about whether we intended to destroy the American Indian in whole or in part, but we certainly intended to destroy their culture even if complete extermination of the racial group was never the policy of the U.S. government.

If they'd have started 10 years earlier, they could have worked something out and handed the reigns over to a moderate of some stripe.  By refusing to get off square one for as long as they did, they laid themselves open to a takeover by a radical.

Actually at the time Mugabe's ZANU/PF was seen as a moderating force. And he was very moderate compared to some of the groups with guns at that time. Even in the early years in office the Whites were happy with the transition. The white flight and the huge dropoff in productivity in most sectors didn't start until the late 90's, years after Mugabe came to power in 1980. His Catholic upbringing, education at University of London, and profession of teacher training (before leading a guerilla group) made Mugabe seem like a safe, moderate choice.

The only other leader with enough popularity to take control was Joshua Nkomo. However his close relationship with the ANC in South Africa scared some of the Whites. But by that time it the die was cast. Mugabe's tribal affiliation to the majority Shona group was just too strong to deny him the leadership role.  Nkomo's and his smaller Ndebele tribal affiliation weren't strong enough.

So I'm not sure there was anybody around at the time who could have denied Mugabe the leadership. He wasn't seen as a horrible choice, and having the backing of the Shona peoples and armed by the Chinese the only group that could stand up to him was the White Rhodesians. They did so for about 20 years but didn't see another way out.

was mass murder.  But I was queried about the American Revolution devolving into mass murder and I pointed out that unresolved internal issues from the Revolution led to one of the bloodiest wars the world had seen up until that time.

See below for the definition of genocide.  And just because Native Americans killed eachother doesn't make our killing and relocation of them any less wrong.

If you are saying that England was genocidal too, I agree with you 100%.  Well into the 19th Century there was actually a bounty on Aborigones in Australia and Tasmania.  They actually used to hunt people there and in the Caribbean.  And yes, the relocations of Hindus and Moslems on both sides of the partition line during the partition of India was horrible, although it was the Moslems, not the Hindus who forced the issue (as was the forced ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans from parts of Eastern Europe after World War II).

England

The celts were wiped out.

The danes, the jutes, the saxons, all gone, nobody but normans who were vikings who killed off the local frenchies (or guals or celts or iberians or whoever was there) hundreds of years before that.

That these cultures disappeared is not genocide.  Nobody in the pre-Darwin world was capable of forming the intent to destroy a people, but only of intending to take more room for a farm or hunting or tribute.  This is simple conquest.  The idea of conquest for the purpose of destroying a people is a modern one.  Even Cicero never thought the end of Carthage would mean the end of Carthage-ness in the world, just the loss of a shipping rival.People migrate.  No one is native to where he lives.  Even the zulus migrated south during recorded history, no less than the tutsi migrated from place to place in east africa.  It is absurd (marxist even) to label populations with collective guilt.  Genocide is an individual crime.  No nation can be guilty or innocent.  No single farmer when he shot a buffalo or killed a raiding Comanche believed it was possible to kill all the Comanches much less all the buffalo.  

what future crimes have you been up to lately?

or is it only fair to hold people to the law of their own time?

Re: The danes, the jutes, the saxons, all gone, nobody but normans who were vikings who killed off the local frenchies (or guals or celts or iberians or whoever was there) hundreds of years before that.

None of these people were killed off. You need only consider the fact that English is modern Anglo-Saxon to understand that the Anglo-Saxons survived the Norman conquest quite handily. And likewise the original natives of Normandy also survived the Norman conquest of that land, as witnessed by the fact that Normans spoke a dialect of French.

There is as much Irish spoken in Wales today as Cherokee in Virginia.

I just used mine, in two places.

Intended is the key word.  Veering into Ward Churchill territory is not a place to go.

responsible nor suggesting that we dig up Andrew Jackson and try his bones for authorizing the deportation of the Cherokees.  I am merely stating that in the harsh light of modern standards our treatment of the native peoples of this country was deplorable.  and way off topic.

..or quit too soon.

Rhodesia wasn't even a good analogy for the Confederacy.  They didn't lose the war on the battlefields.  They lost it in the conference rooms.

They chose when they decided to start negotaiting, which was too late.  And who they would negotiate with, which was the wrong one.

And they folded up and quit, far short of anything resembling a militarily necessary surrender.

It may well have been "humanitarian" at the time.  But look where they wound up.  Too soon tough, and too late smart.

Sorry.  They did it to themselves.  "No Pasaran", right up to the month they folded like a house of cards.  Idiots, and I don't feel sorry for them any more.  When reason might have worked, they wouldn't use it.  When it was too late for reason, they demanded it from others and were still too dumb to use it themselves.

Sad, but again, it's not my problem.  I've been told to keep my nose out for most of the last 40 years or better.  So I suggest that we do keep our noses out.

Let the Brits handle it.  Or South Africa.  Or whoever.

assimilation.  One group comes in and conquers the other, killing many of them in the proccess, but at some point assimilation will occur.

The Celts in the England part of the UK are pretty much gone-either they became refugees (Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Brittany)or they assimilated the culture of the conquerer and/or mixed a bit of their own in the proccess.

But there were attempts at genocide when Rome first came to GB, they eventually opted for the containment (Hadrians wall being the big cymbal of that).

substantive, making real sacrifices, actually getting the international community to pay attention to the problem and bring the issue to the forefront your solution is to drop some weapons on the country.

Is there even an organized resistance?

If there is, do they have popular support?

You will have to excuse us brain-dead Republicans. Our puny human minds are simply incapable of getting around this concept of "bringing the issue to the forefront." We can't figure out exactly what you propose to do. Where is this forefront? What happens to an issue when it gets there? Will Mugabe disappear? Tell us how this works.

You also have this thing called "getting the international community to pay attention to the problem." What is this about? Am I supposed to, like, think about how bad Mugabe is for 15 minutes a day? What does "paying attention" mean, in your view? Explain how your new-and-improved form of paying attention causes anything to change. The only kind we know about is sort of like watching a train wreck. On our planet, no one is pulled from the flaming cars by the people standing around watching.

From our limited perspective on this, it sounds like your proposal is that everyone on the globe should simultaneously stare at Mugabe and say, "Tut tut." On our planet, nothing would happen if we did this, so we need to understand why you think this would be helpful.

your solution would end up with a bunch of starving people staring in confusion at a bunch of M-16s, scratching their heads, saying "what the hell are we supposed to do now?"  Then the government troops would show up, gather up all the guns, shoot anyone who resisted, and that would be the end of that.

It takes more than guns to have a resistance.

which is to let them starve while the international community contemplates what a bad man Mugabe is, but continue to give him legitimacy in the UN by putting him on the human rights commission?

Not to mention, I doubt the people are so dumb that they don't know what a gun is or how to use it.

all the people in, say, the inner city have been to extensive firearms and range training? Because clearly if all they did was go out and buy/steal a gun, they wouldn't have the faintest idea what to do with it.

(n.b. From what I understand, I'd actually recommend the AK-47 over the M-16, because it has a very good reputation for continuing to work after being dragged through the dirt and used by guerillas with minimal weapons know-how. But that's a minor detail.)

your solution would end up with

You don't know what my solution is. I didn't tell you. I asked you about your solution. I am seeking to have you describe your solution in ways that do not sound — to my admittedly limited Republican brain — like a bunch of platitudes and empty words. Can you do that?

challenge.

Care to provide a citation for this bit of malarkey?

Go back to seventies when the there was an insurgency that turned into a full scale civil war that finally ended with Black majority rule in 1980.

You don't remember the scandels with the mercenaries in Rhodesia and the Civil War there?  Weren't you in ROTC/college and a young officer in the Army when all this was happening?  Didn't you have any interest in foreign affairs at all back then?  I was in high school and I was following the war in Rhodesia.

But since you have apparently never heard of the Rhodesian civil war here is a paper assessing it.

but the solutions I have seen here has been to "arm" the "opposition" when apparently there is no organized opposition to Mugabe capable of overthrowing him even if they did have arms.

The first thing we should try is international pressure.  I guess you think we have tried this and it has failed.  I must have missed the President's address to the nation condemning Mugabe and urging international sanctions against Zibambawe.  And I'm sure I just wasn't paying attention when he and Tony Blair spent hours railing against Mugabe and calling him worse than Bin Laden at their joint Press Conference earlier this week.  Oh yeah,  CNN spent 20 minutes on the starvation in Zimbabwe before they cut to the search for that cute blonde in Aruba.  And it was the first topic on all the Talking Heads shows this morning, not how Howard Dean is obnoxious.

But now that we have had a extended National Debate on it and still nobody cares, I guess we just need to go with plan B.

And thank you ConservativeMutant for pointing out that you can arm a bunch of poor people to the teeth and still not get a revolution.

Just because the media didn't cover it, that doesn't mean nothing has happened.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2831701.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1871900.stm

http://www.socialismtoday.org/64/zimbabwe.html

The West's chorus of condemnation has been led by US president, George W Bush

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Africa/EM747.cfm

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Africa/BG1525.cfm

Oops look at this there is an opposition in Zimbabwe, but Mugabe is trying to kill them-so does your solution mean we should wait until they are all dead?

Over the past year, Mugabe instituted measures that further destroyed the country's economy and trampled the rule of law,1 even sanctioning attacks on opposition supporters,, in his single-minded determination to remain in office.

http://english.people.com.cn/english/200108/20/eng20010820_77709.html

There are lots of others.  Apparantlythe problem isn't a lack of condemnation from the Bush administration or the US government, but from other African nations which apparantly think it is better to leave Mugabe in power than to see him overthrown.

lack of condemnation because as I sarcastically pointed out both Bush and Blair (and since Zimbabwe is a former British colony they should be taking the lead on this) were together this last week they didn't say a word about it.

And as I said, the opposition is not strong enough to overthrow Mugabe without external assistance, which nobody seems willing to do.  So unless you are willing to advocate U.S. troops, which you are apparently you are not, it looks like people are going to starve.

with some mention of your mercenaries.

I met a Rhodesian FAC, and I was given to understand that Rhodesian mercenaries were soon to be ex-gov't soldiers who hired out as whole regiments after the change to Mugabe-ism in order to fight communist guerillas for other black ruled countries.  

You must burn a lot of calories moving those goalposts around all the time.

Don't they get heavy after a while, though?

The State Department has some unpleasant things to say about

Zimbabwe

And funny you should mention GWBush.  Apparently he doesn't control Newsweek anymore because he just happened to be meeting with Thabo Mbeki.  Apparently they are not happy about North of South Africa. That didn't get too much coverage because it doesn't fit with Rove's big plans.



Expanding Democracy and Freedom

We agreed that our two nations should identify ways to work together even more effectively in the international arena to promote these principles of democracy and human rights.

We stressed that a democratic, stable, and economically prosperous Zimbabwe is in the interests of the African continent and international community. We expressed our deep concern about the food crisis and the suffering of the people of the southern African region - Zimbabwe, in particular.

If only someone had said "I condemn Robert Mugabe" then things would be better?

from Amazon and read all about it.  There were lots of mercenaries fighting in the wars in Africa in the '70s, especially South Africans, but also Americans and Europeans.  The British actually tried a few of their citizens for crimes committed as mercenaries, although I think they might have been fighting in Angola.  Please don't make me provide a cite from that one because I am working off a 20 Year + memory.

When you post a link it ought to at least reference your argument instead of haring off on a wild tangent about stalemate theory.

Although the coverage here is limited, the coverage back in the UK is considerable:

Independent Article

Mugabe's efforts are all about ensuring his legacy will live on. He knows he is old, and will have to give up soon. He is trying to remove all opposition before that time so that his chosen successors have a free run at it, and can't be challenged.

South Africa must take the lead - America and Britain are too easily accused of colonialism - and put pressure of Mugabe to go now, ensure free elections can happen, and start the rebuilding process. If not, there will be nothing left to save.

the Rhodesian Civil War ended 25 years ago.  Most of the links I found on the mercenaries in Rhodesia were really repellant and I didn't want to link to them because they were the rambling of white supremacists and racists who remember the good old days of white rule and how fun it was to kill black people.  So I didn't particularly want to link to those sites.

It was a conflict in a country far, far away a long, long, time ago.  I followed it closely when I was in high school, along with the war in Angola, partially because I was an early Bob Marley fan.  So I remember a lot about it.  Everything isn't on the internet you know.  If you really want to find out about the Rhodesian Civil War you're going to have to hoof it down to your local library and look through the microfiches and microfilms of magazines and newspapers from about '75--79.  Angola was really a proxy war for the Cold War.  The White minority government in Rhodesia made the conflict there much more complex but you still had a minority-White basically pro-Western, but vilified, government, against a black, mostly Marxist insurgency.  Mugabe was actually chosen as the more moderate comprimise.

And as one last aside, Soldier of Fortune magazine began publishing in 1975 and was quite controversial at the time because of it's thinly veiled want-ads advertising for mercenaries to fight in Africa.

1. So why provide a bs link at all.
   
2. Those idiots (in the '70's)were no more mercenaries than you are.  The mercenary garbage you refer to was long over as a significant enterprise during the 1960's-- mostly killed fighting for the Biafrans, or Belgians.  Just travelling to Africa and wandering around with a gun (or saying you did) doesn't make you a mercenary.  It makes you an idiot.
   

When you talk about 'mercenary involvement' you should be refering to 'organized mercenary' or 'private military company' involvement or else you are just blowing smoke.  Lots of idiots go to lots of wars, that isn't mercenary activity worth noting.  

Soldier of Fortune?  Do you think Blackwater and DynCorp recruit out of there?  Soldier of Fortune is for high school kids who don't want discipline but want to shoot free ammo.

about "organized mercenary" or "private military company".  Someone who freelances is just as much a mercenary as someone who works for a private military company.  Please explain the difference.  If anything the rise of the private "security" companies over the last few years have given mercenaries an air of respectability (which frankly I do not think they deserve).

someone to be horrified at their death by gruesome mutilation?

you went from talking about 'mercenary involvement' to 'what is a mercenary'.

Yes. Any foreigner not in military service who fights in combat is a mercenary.

No. No a scattering of untrained individuals with no unit identity don't make a "mercenary involvemnt" just like one car going 75 on the interstate doesn't make a lawless society.

I agree with the extensive use of private security firms in Iraq has absolutely no impact on my capacity to be shocked and disgusted by the mutilation and torture of people, whichever side of the current war they are on.

And be they former U.S. , British, French military members or regular South African Army on loan to the government of Rhodesia, the contribution of foreign fighters (if you don't want to call them mercenaries) to the Rhodesian Civil War was significant. To be fair, the Rebels received significant support, in both men and materiel, from neighboring black African countries and also logistical support from the Soviet Bloc.  But hey, it was the seventies, practically every war in every god-forsaken country turned into a proxy struggle between capitalism and communism.  Besides, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe was/is rich in minerals, especially Chromium.

I confused this thread with another on Markos' "I feel nothing" comment regarding the American "mercenaries" in Iraq.

Apologies.