Column: Team Bush's Blinders
As detailed in the Times article, the Bush team's assessment was strikingly lucid. For starters, it is incensed that Mugabe captured the last election through what it regards as "fraudulent" practices, exposing the African president's antidemocratic leanings and thus, according to administration officials, rendering his rule "illegitimate." The White House claims that Mugabe's political friends, for instance, rigged voting procedures under the guise of hurriedly executed "restrictive" measures which barred some legitimate voters-those likely to oppose Mugabe-from casting ballots. The Mugabe campaign also professed a supposedly singular love for the nation's "war veterans" and implied its political opponents were less than true-blue, patriotic Zimbabweans. A little demagoguery is naturally symptomatic of any democratic society, but this was demagoguery beyond the pale.
Also, local papers reported "confusion and delay when it came time to vote" and more than a few election observers charged that interested powers-that-be "had drastically reduced the number of polling places in [less friendly] urban areas." In addition, stories abounded about intimidation being employed to sway the election's outcome. Wrote an Africa News editorialist in March, 2002, "Considering the lengths to which the Mugabe government has gone to rig the process to assure victory in the election, one wonders how any dispassionate observer could possibly declare the Zimbabwe election to be 'free and fair.'" The "legitimacy" of the election was in grave doubt, he concluded, and the Bush administration rightly agrees.
Yet that was only the beginning of Bush II's dyspeptic attitude toward Mugabe. Since those dark days of electoral manipulation the Zimbabwe leader has pursued "misguided policies" by nearly anyone's standards, say the White House and State Department. He, and he alone, purports to possess sole insight into what constitutes propriety in the operation of national affairs. While thousands under his rule question in strongest terms Mugabe's lofty, if peculiar, sense of political morality, their president blusters about, asserting he knows his own mind and knows it well enough to dismiss all that double checking with others. In response to such self-righteous hubris, the Bush Team screams Balderdash!--adding it's about time Mugabe's own people rise up to scream "Balderdash!" themselves.
As administration officials correctly point out, Mugabe is giddily pushing domestic policies that are "irrational" and constitute just plain "madness." Most prominent case in point: he is unleashing havoc on Zimbabwe's fundamental economic structure that, whatever its past flaws and inequities, at least offered a few safety nets for society's general welfare. Being the demagogue he is, Mugabe insists his megalomaniacal domestic policies are for the long-term good of commoners. To this the Bush administration says the blustering chief executive talks a great populist line, but his actions are tragically counterproductive and, in fact, dishonorable: in reality Mugabe is stealing from the poor, weak, and defenseless only to reward his already comfortable friends and further fatten his military pals.
What's more, Team Bush is outraged that Zimbabwe's government does not play well with others and appears not even to care less. Mugabe behaves as though his not-subject-to-debate perception of Zimbabwe's national interests--often sloppily articulated yet executed with an air of overweening machismo--is all that counts. If his southern African neighbors and other foreign powers don't like it, they can stuff it. The Bushies justifiably are appalled at this kind of exclusive self-interestedness which so rudely disregards others' warranted concerns. They have had it up to here. Though the White House hasn't yet added Zimbabwe to its judicious list of governments in need of a "regime change"--one way or another--it has at least taken the initial step of training and financing Zimbabwe's internal opposition groups wishing to dump Mugabe, his greedy cronies, their insufferable arrogance and fatuous policies.
Said a wise American official: "There's enough of a system still in place for the Zimbabwe people to deal with this." Let us hope he's right.