Every time I get shaky on my decision re Obama (and I have been this week), I read something that makes me take a deep breath and relax just a bit.<\/p>\n
Via the always excellent normblog<\/a>, here’s Samantha Power<\/a> (in Coventry just now because she was honest about Iraq and mean to Hillary – but a core Obama advisor nonetheless) with a smart suggestion about Zimbabwe:<\/p>\n One by one, those African and Western leaders who claim to be disgusted with Mugabe should announce that they bilaterally recognize the validity of the March 29 first-round election results, which showed the opposition winning 48% to 43%, though the margin was almost surely larger. The countries which do would make up the new “March 29 bloc” within the U.N. and would declare Morgan Tsvangirai the new President of Zimbabwe. They would then announce that Mugabe and the 130 leading cronies who have already been sanctioned by the West will not be permitted entry to their airports.<\/p>\n \nTsvangirai and his senior aides should do as South Africa’s African National Congress did throughout the 1960s and ’70s: set up a government-in-exile and appoint ambassadors abroad – including to the U.N. That ambassador should be given forums for rebutting the ludicrous claims of the Zimbabwean and South African regimes.<\/p>\n \nIf “the U.N.” is disaggregated into its component parts, Mugabe’s friends will be exposed. “June 27” countries will be those who favor electoral theft, while “March 29” countries will be those who believe that the Zimbabweans aren’t the only ones who should stand up and be counted. This can be a recipe for gridlock in international institutions – but the gridlock won’t get broken by lamenting its existence.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Norm (who I believe was born in Rhodesia\/Zimbabwe) continues, contrasting her approach with a far softer one via The Nation – and it’s worth reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Samantha Power says some smart stuff…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}