I had some time today so I started the redesign way ahead of schedule.  There’s more to do, but what you see is a start.  New name, same plan, post on Mondays. As always, I value your input whether in person, via email, or a blog comment.

Back to Zimbabwe.  In April, in Norway, I attended a talk by Namibia’s ambassador to Scandinavia (her office is in Stockholm and she travels regularly to Finland and Norway).  There were probably forty of us gathered to listen to the ambassador in the small Namibian non-profit cooperative that sold Namibian goods and raised money for development projects.  The ambassador summarized recent Namibian history, highlighted the progress made since Independence, and then explained Namibia’s ongoing challenges.  Afterwards, she encouraged us to ask anything that was on our minds. 

So after waiting for a few Namibia-specific questions to be posed, I asked, “What, if anything, can your neighboring countries and your government do to pressure Mugabe to respect his citizens’ basic human rights and reverse Zimbabwe’s tragic downward spiral?”  I don’t remember every word of her response, but I vividly recall the analogy she used to explain Southern Africa’s passivity.  She smiled and said, “It’s like my husband and me.  We might not always get along perfectly, but when we argue we want to do so in the privacy of our home.”  Most in the audience viewed that as an imminently reasonable response, but her analogy begs important questions.  Is the right to personal, group, and national privacy unlimited?  Or does one earn the right to privacy by upholding agreed upon international human rights?  The alternative is to say it’s the rule of the jungle within our houses and the survival of the most heavily armed within our political borders and to hell with interventionist neighbors on our streets and just over our borders. 

Just as our first amendment rights to freedom of expression aren’t unlimited, neither are our rights to privacy.  I can’t grow marijuana in my house nor can I excuse physical abuse based upon my “right to privacy.”  Mugabe has been physically abusing his citizens for a decade.  Or maybe, if we extend the ambassador’s analogy, he’s just exercising his right to privacy on a national scale.  Intervention obviously raises a host of challenging questions with probable complications, but we need to urgently raise the questions and confront the probable complications before more people die from starvation and political violence.  How would WWII have turned out if Germany’s neighbors had upheld the German’s right to “national privacy?”  How many more Rwanda’s would there have been and how many more will there be?  

The most important political insight is “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  We make a mistake when we think differences in human nature explain why some nations are dysfunctional and we’re so together.  We’re relatively together for one overarching reason: our constitutional system of checks and balances that limits power and minimizes corruption. Recently, a Wall Street Journal writer made a case for military intervention in Sudan, Burma, Tibet, and Zimbabwe.  If I was grading his commentary, I would have assigned an “Incomplete” because he didn’t address the dilemma of what foreign military powers can do, if anything, to create conditions which will give rise to governmental institutions—specifically substantive checks and balances—that will increase the odds of troubled countries creating positive momentum.  Without checks and balances, a new group of oppressors will begin surfacing as soon as the western militaries return home. Five plus years later, I do not believe Iraq has turned the corner in this regard despite a tremendous loss of American and Iraqi lives and the continuous and unsustainable expenditure of military and financial resources.