KEEP THOSE REGIME CHANGES ROLLIN'

The best part of having force at your disposal is that you don't have to use it. If you can make a credible threat of force, a lot of people are likely to submit to you without you actually exercising it.

This is the secret of the police. Without police, everyone who felt like committing a crime would do it. The job of the police is to imprison or kill those who commit crimes. But if they had to imprison or kill everyone who felt like comitting a crime, there would be so much carnage that the reduction in crime would scarcely be worth it.

Fortunately, they don't have to do this. Once the police are seen to imprison or kill a few people who commit crimes, other people who are tempted to commit crimes will think twice. The application of force is costly, but the credible threat of force, once established, is cheap.

The best part about Iraq was that it put a new form of force in the arsenal of democracy: regime change. I'm convinced at this point that the main goal of the Bush Administration was to end the brutal tyranny of Hussein. It certainly had nothing to do with oil (as I'll prove on this site one of these days). I'm not really sure what role WMDs played in it. But I think the administration deliberately overstated that case because that was what had to be fed to that reactionary, dictator-legitimizing organization, the UN. The real goal was to give back to the Iraqi people the "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" that the vicious dictator was robbing them of.

But the administration's motives don't matter that much: the main thing is, now the world knows that the US has the ability to carry out a regime change. And since we have probably learned a lot of lessons from our first time around, we could do it better the second time: in particular, we could prepare better to win the peace, which would in any case be easier in other, less suicide-bomber-intensive regions.

There are a lot of countries with foul, hated regimes that sorely need regime change. Liberia was one country that recently begged for it. Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe... Zimbabwe is a good example. An article in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly by Samantha Power, entitled simply "How to Kill a Country," describes how Mugabe's insane policies are disintegrating the economy and causing mass famine.

So suppose the US and UK decided to carry out a regime change in Zimbabwe? We could remove Mugabe, then leave troops in place for about a year presiding over a transition to a better, probably democratic, form of government.

Now here's the beauty of it: if it really looked like the US was certain to take Mugabe out if he didn't step down, if we had a credible threat of force, then he'd be likely to step down on his own. Oh yes, I admit that dictators are inclined to be irrational, but still: the Golden Parachute, or a genocide tribunal-- even a dictator might make a deal. Moreover, even if he wanted to stay in power, his henchmen might have another idea, and the credible threat of an attack would be likely to cause his support to collapse.

To make the most of a credible threat of force, there should be a clear definition of when that force will be used. This would involve developing a new definition of legitimate government. Why should a man like Saddam Hussein, whose rule is based on nothing but murder, enjoy sovereign inviolability? And yet if there is no rule about when regime change can take place, that would create too much fear.

So this is a doctrine that should evolve, but it would be too uncaring towards the millions of victims of tyranny if we miss the chance.

But here's a way to start: the US could make an offer to the UN to lead a coalition to carry out regime change in Zimbabwe. There would be an outcry from all over the world: the US is bent on war, it's happening again, "who's next?" and so on and so forth. There would be a vote in the UN and we would be voted down. Then we say, "All right, if the UN says so, we won't do it." That would confuse those who think the US cares nothing for international law. More importantly, it would make the responsibility clear. The responsibility for what's going on in Zimbabwe would lie with the UN.

For now, plenty of people would feel self-righteous for standing against the "evil US empire." But after a while, it would start to gnaw at some consciences that all they had to do was say the word and they could stop the starving children, the torture chambers. A lot of countries did back the US war in Iraq, after all.

So after they had had a few years to mull it over, I think regime change might become a real part of the arsenal of people of goodwill in power. Governments are the biggest obstacle to development for hundreds of millions of people.

The big reason this is politically unrealistic is because a large section of our punditocracy, and as a result of our electorate which would know better if the punditocracy weren't misleading them, is in denial about the fact that the war in Iraq was a good thing. To crush, to humiliate, to shame this punditocracy once and for all into admitting that we were right to oust Saddam: this is the most urgent task for "you writers and critics who prophesy with your pen." Forward to battle!