Nick's Blog

It sounds like little has changed since I graduated a decade ago.

The state take-over didn't help. It's doubtful a new take-over would work.

So we're pretty screwed.

The Torys are in trouble. They did quite well in the election a month and a half ago -- they won 143 of 308 seats -- so they decided to govern like a majority party. First they tried to cut public financing of political parties. This, combined with a gloomy economic outlook, united the opposition against them.

The coalition would be the NDP and the Liberals. The NDP would have 25% of the Cabinet, but not the Ministry of Finance. They also wouldn't have the Deputy Prime Ministership, but that job isn't very powerful. A Deputy PM is a toy of the PM, so it wouldn't make much sense for a Deputy PM to be from a different party than the PM.

This Coalition will only control 114 seats directly, but the Bloc Quebecois apparently plans to support it. The Bloc can't join a Federal government, because they want to end it, but they do get to vote in Parlaiment.

Right now the biggest problem apparently is that the Liberals don't have a leader. Their current leader (Stéphane Dion) announced he'd resign right after the election, so they're in the middle of a leadership race.

About a month ago a summit to solve the Zimbabwe problem failed miserably. The leader of the opposition couldn't leave the country because his passport was full, the government couldn't give him a new one because they were out of paper. De facto that was a win for Mugabe. He currently controls everything, so a non-summit means he keeps everything.

A more recent summit was also a win for Mugabe. Regional heads-of-state caved in to him. So it's pretty clear the cagey old bastard is beating the hapless Tsvangirai politically. Militarily he's unassailable. Zimbabwe's military is in the tank for Mugabe.

Unfortunately he's got a country to run. And it's not going well. Inflation is insane -- 231,000,000% -- and the employment rate is 20%. Apparently the army's rank-and-file are getting frustrated. Yesterday they were waiting in line at a bank all day, and some started a riot. The riot police weren't too keen to restore order.

This is a very bad sign for Mugabe. African leaders almost never attack one of their own, but if there's a revolution in Harare Mugabe will no longer be one of their own. And if the troops are rioting they ain't likely to stop a People Power-style revolution.

As I predicted government looting was followed a few days later by a rebel advance. Ordinary people are doing their best to flee from the unrest, the UN agreed to send 3,100 more troops to the region. The UN head of peacekeeping hopes those troops are white.

He's got good reasons to prefer white troops. A major one is that western countries spend actual money training their soldiers. Third world countries are notorious for being cheap. Many of their soldiers are crappy shots because they never get to practice. The government just won't pay for bullets. Actual flight time in combat aircraft is equally hard to find -- very few combat pilots in poor countries have more than 100 hours actual flight time. Not to mention the fact western military forces typically have all kinds of cool gadgets. During the first Gulf War American tanks were dominant because our electronic gadgets could see Iraqi tanks before they could see us. We also had better guns and more training, so we killed them before they could see us.

There's also a political value to European troops. If a European country sends troops that means it cares what's going on in Congo. Really cares. That ups the diplomatic ante quite a bit. And signals to Rwanda and Kabila that it would be in their best interest to solve the dispute ASAP, rather than wait it out.

The Congolese Army is back to it's old tricks. Raping and pillaging the people it's supposed to protect. This has been a problem ever since Leopold of Belguim founded it's predecesor the Force Publique..

Sometimes they do it just for kicks. But in the past few wars these reports typically preceded major defeats.