Greg Sheridan in today's Australian:
Watching the odious Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe declare on international television this week that no one had a right to tell him he should leave office, one thought automatically of his harassment and murder of opposition leaders and the way he has destroyed the Zimbabwean economy, leading to the death of so many of his countrymen.Read the rest. (Thanks: DM.)Mugabe was particularly insistent that no outside country, neither the US nor Britain or any of his African neighbours, should assist regime change - that is, his removal from office - through any political pressure. Yet Mugabe came to office entirely because of outside pressure on the former white racist regime of Ian Smith in what was then Rhodesia.
Given that Mugabe has become a murderous tyrant notable even by African standards, and that conditions for the average Zimbabwean are worse than they were under Smith, here is the question: Are all those people of liberal conscience around the world who campaigned for the end of Smith's racist regime in Rhodesia morally responsible for the crimes of Robert Mugabe?
This seems to be the bizarre logic of those condemning anyone who supported the overthrow of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the most brutal and murderous dictator in the second half of the 20th century and infinitely worse than Smith ever dreamed of being...