I know people there.

Brilliant country with a lot of potential. Psychotic leadership - it's far worse and more violent than a lot of people realise. (As in - throwing dissenters down mine shafts violent.)

The West is partly to blame. Mugabe and Zanu-PF aren't going anywhere while Zim remains a cheap under-the-counter source of diamonds and minerals.

The book "The scramble for Africa", a history of colonialism in Africa written in 1991, has this upbeat assessment of Mugabe as representative of a new breed of progressive African leaders: "his creed was pragmatic African nationalism .. he told the new nation that the 'wrongs of the past must be forgiven and forgotten'. Mugabe was a statesman in the making." How depressing that this turned out to be so wide of the mark.

A friend reminded me of http://www.petertatchell.net/direct_action/mugabe.htm . How much could've been avoided if we'd been willing to enforce our laws?

How easily we forget that people change, and sometimes not for the better. It's easy to start well; ending well -- that's the trick.

To blame? The US embargoed the state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on every single political and economic issue we could find. We created Zimbabwe.

Rhodesia was run as a segregationist society on ever level. But if you want to change that, you don't just wall off the people, throw a knife in the pit, and declare that the strongest survive. Which is exactly what we did. Both sides were forced to wage all kinds of guerilla warfare in an attempt to survive. It is no surprise that a brutal, corrupt leader like Mugabe emerged. They were the only ones that would survive such a challenge.

Rhodesia was a productive state with a developed economy. After Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, decades of progress was undone. The new regime essentially just looted the country for themselves. Everyone there is worse off now! Worse yet, the segregation of blacks was just replaced with the segregation of whites via 'land redistribution' schemes.