“We’ve done enough damage. All we can do is send food,” writes Simon Jenkins in The Guardian, regarding the crisis in Zimbabwe. The “we” is not Robert Mugabe or his ZANU-PF thugocracy, as you might suspect, but the British. Jenkins, one of Britain’s fiercest anti-war polemicists, represents an ascendant wing of leftish politics: left-wing isolationism. “Robert Mugabe is making a mockery of liberal interventionism,” Jenkins writes, describing it as “a will-o’-the-wisp, a vapid, feel-good refashioning of foreign policy in response to a headline event, motivated by self-interest or passing mood.” He all but thanks Mugabe for doing it.

According to Jenkins, because Britain — the former colonial power that once ruled Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe — made a series of mistakes regarding its policy towards that country, “there is no alternative for Britain to sitting out the Zimbabwean tragedy, impotent on the sidelines.” There are two problems with his argument, the first one conceptual and the second one historical. That Britain can’t effect meaningful change in Zimbabwe simply because it overlooked Mugabe’s brutality in the 1980’s is the same leftist argument that was trotted out, endlessly, by anti-war activists in the run up to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Because the United States supported Hussein with weapons in his war against Iran fifteen years ago, this argument went, it was somehow logically inconsistent to declare him an enemy and seek his removal from power in 2003. Many war opponents, it seemed, favored keeping Hussein in power for the sake of some perverted form of intellectual “consistency.”

The mistakes in British policy which Jenkins believe annul intervention all occurred in the 1980’s, when Mugabe solidified his dictatorship and murdered thousands of his political opponents. Oddly, Jenkins doesn’t talk about the period before 1980, probably because he — like nearly every Leftist at the time — cheered Mugabe on as a liberation hero. Talking about Britain’s policy towards Rhodesia pre-1980 would force Jenkins to admit that the history of his country isn’t entirely that of a rapacious, ex-colonial power loathed by its former native subjects, a narrative to which he and his employer are so obviously wedded. Jenkins is old enough to remember Rhodesia’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, in which the colony rebelled against Great Britain’s insistence that it move towards majority rule. For the next 15 years, the British enforced an arms embargo on its former colony and led the United Nations to impose worldwide sanctions on the regime. Ultimately, it was British diplomacy — under successive Labor and Conservative governments — that brought Ian Smith to his knees and ended white rule. For Jenkins to argue that British colonialism is to blame for Zimbabwe’s current plight utterly ignores its policies regarding white minority rule in Africa.

Jenkins mocks liberal interventionism further. “Sated on having ‘done something,’ presumably glorious, about Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, public opinion is hard-wired to such a question. So what is to be done?” His use of scare quotes is perplexing. Great Britain undertook military interventions in all of the examples he cites–its doing something was hardly hypothetical. Most people would judge Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo successes. (Although it appears that Jenkins also thinks that Britain created a “mess” in the Balkans.) Most people would also consider Afghanistan at least partially successful. Iraq, of course, is still a developing case. But given Jenkins’s own metrics, I can confidently say that interventionists are still 3.5 or 4 for 5.