While the calls for intervention in Zimbabwe grow louder, it’s worth remembering that no less than McCain himself has already essentially ruled out meddling there.  On the main blog, Patrick Ford responds to the interventionist arguments, noting renewed enthusiasm for international institutions in them:

The real novelty is that the go-it-alone liberators are looking to the United Nations for help. NR wants the UN involved, and if not the blue helmets, then the British should stop “posturing” and get in there themselves. The Right–even the neocon Right–used to rightfully criticize the UN for sending peacekeepers everywhere and achieving progress nowhere. Now they want peacekeepers in Zimbabwe, at the behest of the U.S. government.

One of the legacies of the Blair years, as I’m sure Freddy and others could attest, is that the British military, particularly the Navy, has been gutted by spending cuts and was straining to maintain operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan as it was.  Under these circumstances, sabre-rattling against Mugabe from London would be nothing more than an empty threat.  Of course, it is up to the British people and their government to determine whether they have an obligation to their former colony, and whether they wish to imitate the intervention in Sierra Leone and the French intervention in Ivory Coast in recent years, but to my mind the argument for British involvement rings hollow.  If the case cannot be made for British intervention, how much less of a case is there for American?

Oborne invokes the dubious “responsibility to protect” standard that retroactively justified the intervention in Kosovo to stop (non-existent) genocide, but beyond compromising the principle of state sovereignty it asserts a new sort of sovereignty of the protector over those whom he protects.  If other states have a “responsibility to protect” the people of other states, they are to some extent responsible for the government of those other states, and not only in times of crisis.  The de facto two-tier system of protector (i.e., dominating) and protected states that would result exposes dozens of other small, reasonably well-governed nations to interference by more powerful neighbours and regional powers on various pretexts framed in terms of protecting their populations.  That the pretexts will often be transparent will not change the instability that can and will result when major powers begin acting as if the state sovereignty under certain conditions is essentially meaningless.  As Kosovo should have taught us already, the claims made by outside governments about conditions inside another country are often unreliable or patently false, but there is nothing to stop other powers from engaging in the same exaggerations and propaganda to justify their interference in the affairs of other states.    

The invasion of Iraq was framed partly in this way, yet the hundreds of thousands dead, the millions displaced and the tens of millions living in greater insecurity than before all remind us that such protection can be worse than the danger.  The refugee crisis in Kosovo that started only after the NATO bombing campaign began serves as another reminder that those who are supposedly being protected are often among the first to suffer the most from such “help.”  This is not just a question of unintended consequences, but of obviously foreseeable calamities that will result from taking specifically military action to remedy an internal political problem.  Zimbabwe seems to offer a relatively clear case of a despotic maniac and his ruling party brutalising the opposition, but surely Iraq ought to have taught everyone some humility that outsiders do not necessarily understand the internal political struggles of other countries very well. 

We should remember that Westerners in particular tend to valorise one side in an internal struggle and act as if their acquisition of power will resolve conflicts that may be rooted in much more enduring structural divisions based on ethnicity, tribe or religion that are obscure to us and hidden behind simple labels of democrat and dictator.  The international complications that would arise with any intervention in Sudan or Burma are also there in Zimbabwe as well, since everyone knows that Zimbabwe has become one of China’s clients in Africa. 

The MDC and Tsvangirai are unusual in that they are actually reasonably sympathetic representatives of political opposition to Mugabe, as opposed to the rather dubious list of crooks who have been lionised as champions of political reform in the various “colour” revolutions, but it is not clear why their cause is particularly more deserving of armed intervention than that of the Luos in Kenya, Darfuris, Nepalis and Burmese, whose plight briefly caught outside attention and then faded into the background.  Interventionists are always insisting that we must act now, and the urgency of their appeals is one of their political strengths, because it short-circuits serious thought and forces people to pick sides on the issue quickly, but the demand for action fades almost as quickly as it comes.  Had we heeded the call for going into Burma we, or rather our soldiers, would still be knee-deep in the floodwaters, having embarked on another hazardous, open-ended mission with no obvious connection to U.S. interests.    

What we are seeing in Zimbabwe is just one in a series of imploding post-colonial governments ushering in political strife and the early stages of civil war.  Does it then become the new standard that each failing, violent kleptocracy around the world becomes the ward of other states?  It is not at all clear how this actually aids any of the peoples in question over the long term, if their political conflicts must be perpetually adjudicated and resolved by the use of outside force.  Nothing could be more effective in stunting political development in these countries, and the domestic political opposition already suffers enough from the accusation of being the puppet of foreigners without foreign intervention seeming to confirm that the opposition’s cause and that of outside powers is the same. 

It never ceases to amaze me how interventionists on the right can damn the U.N. as irrelevant, useless and corrupt and then turn around and start demanding that it do something to address this or that crisis.  Even so, the appeal to the U.N. and other nations is partly a rhetorical frame to set up the inevitable “reluctant warrior” argument that America must step into the breach because those lily-livered Europeans and globocrats have failed yet again.  This is how those who were eager to “crush Serb skulls” could portray intervention in the Balkans as a grudging act of necessity, rather than the obviously gratuitous and arbitrary act that it was.   

P.S.  It is technically true that ZANU-PF came to power through elections, but they held an overwhelming advantage in the post-independence era as the major anti-colonialist resistance movement.  The lesson to draw from the tragedy of Zimbabwe is not simply that elected governments can also commit terrible crimes against their peoples, but that political movements that once enjoyed international admiration or sympathy can become–or, more likely, always were–dangerous and repressive.  Not only does this tell us that democratic governance is not a panacea for more fundamental political conflicts, but that often enough the main thing that distinguishes an opposition figure and a tyrant is that the former has not yet acquired power.