Oh one last thing.
Mugabe is France's "responsibility". The French like Mr. Mugabe. Why is that, exactly?
It was revealed yesterday that a French aviation company is poised to help rescue Zimbabwe's beleaguered national airline. ATR is in talks to lease three or more aircraft to Air Zimbabwe.
(They're so principled! Such pacifists! So anti-war!)
Y'know, I was not really that interested in foreign relations pre-9/11. Now, I feel like understanding foreign relations is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where you don't know what it will look like until it's done. And by definition, you only have access to half of the pieces, and it's a 3000-piece puzzle.
Each fact, each point of information is another piece of the puzzle. Oh but it's worse than that - some of the pieces are misdirections, or fake pieces, or printed on both sides to annoy and confuse you.
A lot of people get, say, 100 pieces that they like, and maybe they even find some connecting pieces. They look at the pieces they've collected, and they say "Aha! This is a picture of a tiger!"
But 100 pieces is not enough, and one's understanding of the whole big picture is not really helped by picking up, say, just the yellow pieces, or just the pieces that fit into one's little corner.