Robert Mugabe owes his presidency to the international Left

The UK Telegraph's Simon Heffer gets it right on Zimbabwe.

A few years ago, when the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this stance, I was assailed by an "Africa expert" who told me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.

White liberals like him are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly unchecked. Sanctions on his country merely starve those who disagree with him. Zimbabwe has all the natural, and had all the human, resources to be an example to the rest of Africa. It is now merely a symbol of what happens when a dictator takes charge, and those who might rein him in simply look away.

So it is infuriating to hear some Leftists and liberals saying, through the teeth of their post-imperial guilt, that perhaps an armed intervention is the only way to rid the world of this brute. Had this been done years ago, when they took the opposite view, how many lives might have been saved? How many productive people, black and white, would have felt able to stay in Zimbabwe, rather than flee with their talents abroad? Would it still be a country with a life expectancy in the low thirties, something not heard of in Europe since the early Middle Ages? How proud does the Left, with its stupidly romantic notions of the inviolate nature of "black freedom fighters", feel about what it has so ably helped Mugabe achieve?

Of course, even now the Leftists who are recanting cannot bear the thought of a military operation being conducted by Britain alone - not that our exploited and resource-starved Armed Forces are in a position to take out Mugabe. It is argued that there should be a UN or multinational force, something that most of us old cynics will believe only when we see it. Frankly, I couldn't care less who liberates Zimbabwe - North Korea, the Taliban or Venezuela are welcome to it: they couldn't be any worse than the incumbent.

Yet the gutlessness of our Foreign Office continues. The disastrous Lord Malloch-Brown, who is to international diplomacy what a lamp post is to a dog, said this week that it would be wrong for "the mangy old British lion" to strip Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. Let us ignore for the moment the question of whether a Foreign Office minister should insult his country so, another sign that this oaf is unfit for office. Four days later the knighthood did indeed go, on a recommendation from David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to the Queen. Mr Miliband had said just two weeks earlier that removing the knighthood was not a good idea. And the Tories are no better. This week they ordered the suspension of a prospective parliamentary candidate who made the blindingly obvious observation that the late Ian Smith was better than Mugabe. It is time these people grew up.

I know what a shock it must be to Leftists of all parties, with their uncritical adoration of African leaders from the saintly, such as Nelson Mandela, to the repulsive, such as Mugabe, to see that sometimes black people can be evil too. But that is the truth. And Zimbabwe may be the prologue to what may happen in South Africa after a decade of failure by Thabo Mbeki is followed by the rule of the dubious Jacob Zuma. It may be very uncomfortable and embarrassing for whites to intervene to stop the butchery of black tyrants. But if they don't, hecatombs of lives will be lost.

If you've never lived in Africa then you can have no sense of the corruption of the place, the power of tribalism and the lethargy of the people.

The left enabled Mugabe to snuff out his country's economic prosperity in just a couple of decades. Surely, the left doesn't think that it's OK for thugs, thieves and murderers to bludgeon their opponents into submission?

Perhaps it's exactly that feature that thrills them so much.

That's why Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che etc are still held in such high regard by the left and why Marxism can be so prevalent in society in the form of cultural relativism and environmental fundamentalism.

(Nothing Follows)