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Reign of terror in Zimbabwe

Arafat and Mugabe: Diplomacy’s Monsters

In Zimbabwe international observers and diplomats sadly shake their heads as the 84-year- old Mugabe unleashes yet another reign of terror in order to stay in power.

Mugabe has presided over a long list of massacres and atrocities, over the murders of hundreds of thousands, over wars and ethnic cleansing. His latest bid for power is almost mild by comparison to the numerous atrocities of the Rhodesian Bush War, the Gukurahundi massacres, the Second Congo War and the land seizures and while the diplomats shake their heads-- the fact of the matter is that Mugabe is their monster.

Mugabe and the long list of crimes perpetrated by him lies not only on the doorstep of his former Soviet allies who backed his campaign of terrorism against the Rhodesian government, but the British and American diplomats who embraced this Marxist thug and insured that he would take power. If the story sounds like a familiar one, that is because it is quite familiar across many of Europe’s former colonies in which the Marxist terrorists created and backed by the Soviet Union were embraced by Western diplomats who insured that they would take power in their respective countries. And when their reign turned into a bloody tyranny interspersed with even bloodier massacres, they shook their heads and wondered what else they could have done.

Mugabe is diplomacy’s monster, just as Arafat, the eternal terrorist, is diplomacy’s monster. The transformation of thugs who led bands of terrorists and killers on sprees of atrocities into Presidents and Prime Ministers is a crime that must be laid at diplomacy’s door.

The rise of these diplomacy’s monsters to power marked not only the surrender of the moral authority of the West, but the surrender of hundreds of millions of people from the third world under the authority of some of the worst dictatorships that could not have come into being without Western backing.

It was Western pressure, most notably from Britain and the United States, that overturned Rhodesia’s last election and brought Mugabe to power, even though everyone concerned was quite familiar with the intimidation and atrocities that had preceded it. It was that same Western pressure that kept the cause of Mugabe’s ZANU and ZANLA thugs burning bright, defending the ZANLA terrorist camps in Mozambique against Rhodesian strikes and forced a premature pullout from Mapai insuring that ZANLA would live to fight another day.

It was that same Western pressure which kept the PLO alive and resurrected it from defeat to defeat, pressuring Israel to negotiate with the PLO, transforming autonomy into an independent state and sending billions and providing arms and training to Fatah’s horde of Marxist turned Islamist terrorists. Today Western pressure is brought to bear on Israel to turn over half its capital and a sizable portion of its territory to Arafat’s successor Abbas even as the diplomats turn a deliberate blind eye to Fatah’s crimes and corruption, not only against Israel, but against their own people.

If the Soviet Union sowed its legacy of dragon’s teeth across the world by creating, equipping, backing and training Marxist terrorist and guerrilla groups across the third world, it is Western diplomacy that has reaped the full harvest, piling them into the silos of government and turning terrorists into national leaders. And each time those same diplomats claim to be surprised when their harvest yields nothing but rot and malignant infestations.

It was Western diplomats who transformed Marxist thugs like Mugabe and Arafat into world leaders while turning a blind eye to their brutal history and yet attempt to disavow credit for their legacy. Yet it is to them that the credit belongs and any War Crimes Tribunal that sees fit to judge the crimes of diplomacy’s monsters, must also put the diplomats themselves in the dock.

While we pay close attention to how our wars are conducted, we pay far too little attention to how our diplomacy is conducted. We hold our generals to account, but all too rarely our diplomats. We demand results on the battlefield but take whatever agreement the diplomats create as a fait accompli. We demand ethical behavior from soldiers but expect none from diplomats. And our inattentiveness has consistently carried a terrible price for it as diplomats have saddled us with policies and agreements that have become millstones around our necks, in their support for tyrants and mass murderers, in the betrayal of our allies and our own national defense.

In matters of foreign policy, we are repeatedly told that more weight should be given to the diplomats over the generals. Diplomacy is portrayed as somehow nobler than war, when in truth it is far fouler. When we consider the full weight of atrocities created by diplomacy, from Hitler’s conquest of Czechoslovakia to Stalin’s conquest of Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century to the Marxist and Islamist tyrannies of the latter half of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st, diplomacy casts a far darker shadow than tyranny and in that shadow, diplomacy’s monsters, the Arafats and Mugabes of the world, thrive.