The Feeble Mugabe Gotcha

Step forward the FT’s Jim Pickard:

Some sceptics have often asked why Tony Blair was happy to help rid the world of some dictators and not others. The example most often cited is that of Robert Mugabe, who could have been deposed with even less effort than Saddam Hussein.

Blair tries to justify the contradiction in his book, far from convincingly.

“You need to ask if such action is feasible and practical. People often used to say to me: If you got rid of the gangsters in Sierra Leone, Milosevic, the Taliban and Saddam, why can’t you get rid of Mugabe? The answer is: I would have loved to; but it wasn’t practical (since in his case, and for reasons I never quite understood, the surrounding African nations maintained a lingering support for him and would have opposed any action strenuously).”

What does he mean by this? That a joint US-UK (or Nato, or UN-backed) invasion would have been rebuffed as neighbouring states rose up to defend the aged dictator from the former colonialists? Does he really expect us to believe that he was intimidated by Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa?

The statement implies that – au contraire – the invasion of Iraq was welcomed elsewhere in the Middle East.