Zimbabwe after Iraq

Zimbabwe didn't go away, and neither has Robert Mugabe. But the attention to Zimbabwe, such as that was, has declined because of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. At the end of last week Martin Fletcher put a case for 'the one guaranteed means of removing Zimbabwe's President: military intervention by a multinational force'. Sketching how bad things now are in that country, and saying why he doesn't expect either a popular uprising or a palace coup there, Fletcher offers three arguments in favour of intervention - feasibility, the existence of a legitimate government-in-waiting, and the immorality of the world community merely standing passively by - and then says:

The arguments against military intervention are easy to predict. It would set a precedent. South Africa would object. If Zimbabwe, why not Sudan or North Korea? Intervention would smack of Western imperialism. To which the answers are, in turn: I hope so; tough; because Zimbabwe is doable; and that any intervention force would have to include African troops.

Also alluding to Zimbabwe in a piece (focused mainly on Afghanistan) a few days earlier, Joan Smith wrote the following:

The central proposition is that democratic nations should not simply stand by as oppressive regimes wreck whole countries and cause the deaths of thousands of civilians. It can't always be done but I would be delighted if, for instance, President Mugabe's neighbours decided to send a joint military force into Zimbabwe to put an end to his corrupt, violent rule.

Smith, at the same time, speaks of the actions of the Bush administration having 'discredit[ed] the doctrine of humanitarian intervention' - though she says it shouldn't have been allowed to. However, that it discredited the idea, in the eyes of those for whom it did, has never made sense to me. Assuming one doesn't either oppose humanitarian intervention in all circumstances or support it in all circumstances - an assumption I shall make without more ado in order to save time (for otherwise one would have to allow that genocides must be left to go ahead unhindered, or that probable military calamities should never be avoided) - then whether or not intervention is justified in a given case comes down to setting out what you believe the criteria for a defensible intervention should be, measuring the given case (Iraq, Zimbabwe, wherever) against those criteria, assessing the likely human costs of intervention and the comparative costs of non-intervention, and estimating the chances of the enterprise being a success. Whatever one's views about the Iraq war, it could not, in the nature of things, have settled the question of the viability and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention for all future cases.