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Originally posted by Sidd Finch
Ty, that's just not true. Huge portions of the black populace were starving, or were severely malnourished because Zimbabwe's farmland was devoted to tobacco or to corn (and people cannot survive on cornmeal). Why do you think people were demanding land reform if food was plentiful.
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Cite, please. Then compare it to, e.g.,
this article from The Economist in 2002 titled "From breadbasket to basket case" or
this report from the State Department titled "Zimbabwe's Manmade Crisis" ("Zimbabwe exported food and imported some of Africa’s brightest young minds. Today, Zimbabwe cannot grow enough food to feed itself and a bankrupt treasury cannot finance critical imports of food and fuel."). Export crops like tobacco bring in money that can be used to pay for food. Many more blacks have lost their jobs than whites have lost their farms in the last few years.
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No dispute there. Nor do I dispute that Mugabe denied food to the Ndebele (I've never heard that claim before, even from Ndebele partisans, but I don't particularly doubt it). Nor do I dispute that this is genocide.
But, again -- what would you do? It seems that your answer is "there wasn't any problem to address," yet I cannot believe that you are so ignorant.
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I didn't say that there isn't any problem to address. For the first several years he was in power, Mugabe had found a way to accommodate whites and blacks, to a remarkable degree. This changed when his hold on power started to slip. A more gifted leader would have tried to find a more pragmatic way to address the legitimate push for land reform, but we all know this is not what Mugabe was after.
I don't know what we can do. I'm the one who is skeptical, on practical grounds, of U.S. intervention to depose foreign despots. Bilmore, OTOH, presumably thinks we should be invading Zimbabwe to stop Mugabe from killing his own people, and yet he would rather recycle his old talking points about Josh Marshall.
