Grand Strategy Annex

2nd February 2012

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Never say die: a lesson in political immortality

One of the most important lessons that we can learn from politics and from history is that old conflicts never die, they simply continue in a changed form. This can be considered a practical application of the Clausewitzean principle that war is the continuation of politics by other means. For Clausewitz, human purposes and intentions are continuous, sometimes pursued by conventional political means, and sometimes pursued by the means of organized violence, i.e., war.

Clausewitz came at this problem from the perspective of political means transitioning into military means, but when I say that old conflicts never die, I am approaching the problem from the other side, that of military means transitioning into political means. And this is by no means an unusual state of affairs. Very often old soldiers get tired of fighting and they move into political conflict instead. In fact, this is what is now being discussed in Afghanistan: the Taliban are considering laying down their arms, ending decades of civil war, and entering into the political process.

We have had a reminder of the perennial nature, not merely of politics but of political controversy and conflict, in Robert Mugabe’s recent statements upon his return from the African Union meeting in Addis Ababa (Zimbabwe president slams African leaders on Libya), which were highly critical of the role that the African Union played in the downfall of Gaddafi.

One might suppose that with Gaddafi not only out of power, but also dead, with his heirs scattered, and there being little or no chance of the former regime remnants or cronies returning to power, that Gaddafi and his rule of Libya now safely belongs in the past. Not so.

Mugabe was a strong supportor of Gaddafi, and in fact the Africa Union was a particular interest of Gaddafi, who returned time and again to the idea of a United States of Africa, so that the idea of African unity was for Gaddafi something that represented the future hope of the continent. Mugabe has now demonstrated the rhetorical tropes that he will employ to keep the idea of Gaddafi alive by invoking him as a victim of Western powers’ continued meddling in Africa.

Whether or not Mugabe can bully and intimidate fellow African leaders with scare talk about, “Who’s next?” cannot be known, but we can guess that so long as Mugabe has breath he will continue to invoke the shade of Gaddafi, whom he will try to invest with symbolic importance. And even as Mugabe warns the people of Africa about the envious eyes the world has on its resources, Mugabe himself will continue to plunder the people of Zimbabwe for his own enrichment and aggrandizement.

There is also an element here of the famous political axiom that, “All politics is local.” In other words, if it is not only OK but possible to uproot an established dictator in Libya, this is a precedent for the uprooting of established dictators elsewhere. Mugabe wants to nip any such precedent in the bud, since he does not want to encourage any action against himself.

In Zimbabwe where people are dying of typhoid, not least because Mugabe has impoverished and immiserated his people, Zimbabweans live in abject misery while Mugabe and his cronies live in luxury (not coincidentally like Libya under Gaddafi and North Korea under Kim Jong-il). Mugabe enjoys his power and his luxuries, and he is in no mind to give them up. More importantly, his younger cronies and regime supporters have an eye on the same goodies for themselves. 

With this in mind — i.e., that old conflicts do not disappear, but change the form in which they are expressed — we should have known that nothing was settled by the end of the Cold War. A lot of hyperbole was employed at the time, but the conflicts that the Cold War represented have not disappeared, they have only assumed different forms. 

It is almost embarrassing for anyone who has a charitable attitude to human beings to have to speak of “political immortality” in terms of perennial conflicts; we would like to reserve the phrase for admirable  acts of visionary statesmen. Unfortunately, as Shakespeare put in the mouth of Marc Antony, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Tagged: African UnionGaddafiMugabehistorypoliticsClausewitztyrannydictatorship