Daniel Finkelstein in the Times also takes up the charge against John Simpson’s wretched analysis of the latest news from Zimbabwe.

And Lord Ashdown argues the case for intervening by force in Zimbabwe to head off a possible genocide.

But, comes the shriek, that would violate Zimbabwe’s sovereignty!

Recently I was a Harvard-sponsored seminar at which issues of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the Right to Protect were discussed.

I recalled seeing signs as one entered Harvard Square: Cambridge is a Domestic Violence-Free Zone.

I said that if you were walking down the street near Harvard and saw a man beating his wife/child/dog brutally with a stick in his front garden, you were morally and maybe even these days legally obligated to intervene to stop the violence.

Thus we long ago moved on from the idea that the ‘sovereignty’ of one’s home was a shield enabling the uninterrupted commission of seriously illegal acts.

So if it is unacceptable to brutalise one person in one’s own garden, why is it acceptable to brutalise millions of people in one’s country without fear of being stopped?

Lordy. The West appearing yet again as the self-proclaimed world policeman. How to choose where to intervene? Zimbabwe the thin end of the wedge?

Good points. But to accept them without more merely gives a blank cheque to repressive regimes everywhere. 

So let’s agree at least to intervene in the no-brainer immediate brutality cases, where there is no serious cost to intervening and immediate gains to be made in saving large numbers of lives.

Plus ‘intervention’ need not jump immediately to military force. If key Western governments froze all Zimbabwean official accounts, forced the printing of Mugabe’s worthless currency to be stopped and used a bit of electronic sabotage, the regime’s power to suppress its own people would be massively reduced.

Or why not quietly offer the key gangsters propping up the regime a bit of money to Go Quietly?

Or lots of other little ruses designed to End the Misery asap?

Maybe some of this is going on. I hope so. But the dose so far is not working.

Finally, South Africa’s role (to be precise Mkeki’s role) has been outlandishly bad.

Here is a Good Idea from Peter Godwin in the New York Times: lean hard on South Africa by treating Zimbabwe as South Africa’s Tibet:

Maybe Zimbabwe should become to the South Africa-hosted World Cup what Tibet has been to the Beijing Olympics — the pungent albatross that spoils every press conference and mars every presentation with its insistent odor.