FORMER British Prime Minister Tony Blair admits he “would have loved” to topple President Robert Mugabe militarily, but found the task “impractical” because he enjoys a “lingering support” from fellow African leaders.
The disclosure is made in Blair’s autobiography, A Journey, which was published this week.
Blair, who stood down as Prime Minister in June 2007 after a decade in power, writes: "People often used to say to me: If you got rid of the gangsters in Sierra Leone, [Slobodan] Milošević, the Taliban and Saddam, why can't you get rid of Mugabe?
“The answer is I would have loved to, but it wasn't practical (since, in his case, and for reasons I never quite understood, the surrounding African nations maintained a lingering support for him and would have opposed any action strenuously)."
Seeking to systematise his theory of foreign interventions in regimes that are "oppressive or dictatorial", he adds: "They may pose no outside or external threat; or it may be easily contained diplomatically. It may – as with Mugabe – be impractical to intervene."
A judgment has to be made, he states. "If change will not come by evolution, should it be done by revolution? Should those who have the military power contemplate doing so?
“The leader has to decide whether the objective is worth the cost. What's more, he or she must do so unsure of what the exact cost might be or the exact price of failing to meet the objective ... In this context, by the way, indecision is also decision ... Omission and commission both have consequences.”
Blair’s latest comments will be seized on by President Robert Mugabe who has previously claimed the existence of an Anglo-American alliance to carry out “regime change” in Zimbabwe. Mugabe says the plot has assumed the form of economic sabotage, namely sanctions imposed on the country following his government’s move since 2000 to seize white commercial farmland for resettling landless blacks.
British and American officials however deny a plot to oust Mugabe, insisting instead that sanctions were imposed in response to his government’s human rights violations; the targeted killing of political opponents and electoral theft.