I wrote the other day about liberal guilt and their inability to find any reason to use force against tyrants who abuse their own people. It reaches near-comic extremes today in the Post Global section of the Washington Post in an article by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar entitled “No Moral Ground to Oust Mugabe Alone“. His whole argument is based on the naive assessment that Mugabe is bad, but he’s not as bad as other African rulers have been;
Robert Mugabe is indeed an odious ruler with blood on his hands. But since when is that a disqualification to rule? The world has long been full of rulers even more odious and bloodthirsty than he.
Isn’t that an enlightened approach to world politics? Mugabe’s thugs chopped up an opponents wife while she was still alive. He’s been murdering entire families since he was given his power in 1980. Pressure from the civilized world has failed to make him change one iota. Even Nelson Mandela, Mugabe’s fellow traveler, has abandoned him;
Former South African president Nelson Mandela said there is a “tragic failure of leadership” in Zimbabwe. His remarks at a dinner in London Wednesday was the first time he has spoken publicly about Zimbabwe’s political crisis.
The Brits have stripped of his knighthood finally;
“This action has been taken as a mark of revulsion at the abuse of human rights and abject disregard for the democratic process in Zimbabwe over which President Mugabe has presided,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.
Despite all of this, Mugabe still refuses to budge and give Zimbabweans a break;
President Robert Mugabe refused Tuesday to give into pressure from Africa and the West, saying the world can “shout as loud as they like” but he would not cancel this week’s runoff election even though his opponent quit the race.
South Africa’s ruling party issued a toughly worded statement calling on Mugabe’s government to stop “riding roughshod” over the opposition headed by Morgan Tsvangirai, who quit the presidential contest and sought shelter in the Dutch Embassy.
But this Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar doesn’t think that anything Mugabe does rises to the level that reaches a crisis worthy of intervention from the real world. I’m betting there are many Zimbabweans that would disagree with his pompous arrogance to let them suffer because it doesn’t affect his family.
