ON the 3rd of August, US President Barrack Obama was hosting what Washington called “Young African Leaders” and what captured media attention the most for this overly inflated non-event was what Obama had to say about one small Southern African country that is causing the entire West sleepless nights, Zimbabwe.

This is what Obama said: "I'll be honest with you; I am heartbroken when I see what has happened in Zimbabwe.....Mugabe is an example of a leader who came in as a liberation fighter and – I'm just going to be very blunt – I do not see him serving his people well."

Barrack Obama has shown very little more than a celebrated “black man” just too happy and satisfied to be the United States President – all for the historical significance of it, and nothing more. On November 18 2009, Obama publicly admitted that he had failed to close the notorious US torture base, Guantanamo Bay, saying it was “technically difficult” to do so.

This is despite the fact that on 21 January 2009, a day after he assumed the US presidency, Obama’s first signature was appended to a directive for the closure of Guantanamo by January 2010. His directive and signature were both dismissed as child play by those who hold real power in American politics and nothing the matter has since happened to the US torture base.

If Barrack Obama had a heart that could break, it must be broken over his failures to close Guantanamo, to pull out US troops from Iraq, let alone stop the war there, and his dismal failure to defeat the resolute Taliban in Afghanistan, another needless bully war of occupation.

He also has the massive BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill to break his heart over, especially considering that nothing more than watching has happened with this disaster.

What Obama did not tell his listeners, or more precisely his rented crowd of young Africans, was what exactly “has happened in Zimbabwe”. He did not tell the young Africans what has happened in Zimbabwe is defiance of Western hegemony, a defiance of US political benchmarks, and a thwarting of the imperial goals over which he presides as president.

In February 1991, George Bush Senior made a very revealing statement about the US foreign policy and Washington’s idea of world order. It was toward the end of the first Gulf War, when he said proudly that there is a “new world order” that the US is establishing and the main principle of this new world order is “what we say goes.”

The principle of “what we say goes” was rubbished by Zimbabwe’s revolutionary land reclamation program of 2000, and George Bush Junior tried in vain alongside Tony Blair to stop the process.

Recently the United States, Canada and Australia tried to stop Zimbabwe from selling her diamonds from Chiadzwa by trying to abuse the Kimberly Certification Scheme and Zimbabwe simply threatened to flood the market with diamonds outside the Kimberly process and the threat made the United States climb down and accept the Kimberly certification of Zimbabwean diamonds.

Even the 2003 invasion of Iraq did not work out quite as expected, not as effectively as the first invasion. Bush Junior, Colin Powel and others made it very clear to the United Nations that either they could go along with the US plans to invade Iraq or they would be, as it was put, “irrelevant”.
It was put even more brazenly by Washington’s UN ambassador John Bolton who simply said: “There is no United Nations”.

So when the US chooses to have the UN’s acquiescence, then the world body can go along with the world’s leading superpower. Otherwise the United Nations simply does not exist. This is the principle of “what we say goes”.

Of course the invasion of Iraq was undertaken against overwhelming international opposition. There were international polls taken and outside Israel and India, there was practically undetectable support.

The support did not go over 10 percent anywhere in Europe but the principle of “what we say goes” still prevailed. The US marched into Iraq with the UK, Australia and a few others in tow; regardless of massive resistance from the majority of the people in each of the countries that took part in that invasion.

Some people attributed the stance to the personal arrogance of George W. Bush and they said only him could be capable of such crass extremism. While Bush was most certainly a nasty character in a class of his own, the reality is the invasion of Iraq was not an unusual occurrence in the world of Western hegemonic affairs and in the politics of imperialism.

The invasion is understandable on the part of a superpower that has overwhelming military force, incomparable security measures, a huge economic base, and barely any rivals in the world.

So Iraq had no Soviet Union to stop its invasion and the US did as they wished in the absence of the traditional Cold War threat.

But even after the invasion, the US could not exactly do a “what we say goes” as the Iraq insurgents came after the occupiers with the determination of a people that fully understood the gravity of their humiliation and oppression. They managed to kill an estimated 5000 US soldiers and the Americans have been stuck in that war since 2003.

This is the kind of business that breaks the hearts of US presidents and this is exactly what has broken the heart of Obama – the defiance by lesser people to the “what we say goes” doctrine. Zimbabwe stands guilty of failing to do the will of the empire, and US ambassador Charles Ray got the true vibe of Zimbabwean defiance when President Mugabe declared that Obama and his Chicago Boys can as well “go to hell” where there is more hope of achievement than trying to determine the affairs of Zimbabwe.

The major part of the US war in Vietnam was waged against South Vietnam and North Vietnam was more of a sideshow. However, the protests within and outside the US were largely about North Vietnam, even from the majority members of the peace movement.

Declassified Pentagon documents show that the bombing of North Vietnam was planned in meticulous detail, where to bomb, where to spare and when to do what. There is nothing in those documents about the bombing of South Vietnam, as Noam Chomsky noted at a lecture at Lexington, Massachusetts on March 12, 2007.
This is despite the fact that the bombing of South Vietnam was at least three times more the scale of the North by 1965.

Robert McNamara’s memoirs are quite detailed on how the North was bombed but they are silent even on the January 1965 decision by the Pentagon to use jet bombers to escalate the onslaught on South Vietnam.

The silence on the South was because there the principle of “what we say goes” was working well. There was no political cost and no international opposition, so the US could do as they wished. In the North the story was different. There were foreign embassies in Hanoi and Russian ships in Haiphong harbor. When the US bombed a Chinese railway line that passed through Vietnam that was captured on the world stage and there was a political cost to pay.

North Vietnam also had defences; they had Soviet anti-aircraft, something that was described by the US as “interference” in the affairs of Vietnam.

So the US could not bomb North Vietnam as freely s they liked, and that really broke the heart of Richard Nixon.

We hear so much about Zimbabwe’s political violence during the 2008 elections, where the death toll is put at about 200 by the well known sworn enemies of Zimbabwe, a figure that has never been verified or proven by at least providing the names of the deceased. On the contrary January 2008 saw the killing of 1 500 people in Kenya’s post election violence, and so little, if anything is ever heard of this political violence in Western circles.

It is Zimbabwe that breaks the heart of the Emperor because there the principle of “what we say goes” does not work.

When Jendai Frazer visited Kenya in February 2008, she literally told both Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga what was expected of them by Washington and there the principle of “what we say goes” worked quite well. Jendai Frazer’s instructions were obeyed and implemented almost instantly.

Not so in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, as our beloved country is often called by angry Westerners. There the Thabo Mbeki brokered and SADC mandated power sharing deal between ZANU PF and the two MDC factions was declared a no-West affair from the onset. The language was always African solutions to African problems and Mbeki insisted time and again that the solution for Zimbabwe was only going to come from the Zimbabweans themselves, and from nobody else, South Africans included.

This is what broke the heart of Barrack Obama. In Zimbabwe what the US says does not go. The tradition declared by George H. Bush in 1991 simply will not work in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and this is why Obama thinks the man is not “serving his people well”. In the US lexicon there is no way anyone can be providing good service to his people if what they are doing is not in line with Washington’s idea of world order and its principle of “what we say goes”.

Job Sikhala literally reports those who do not obey American rule to Washington and he advocates for American wrath over such offenders, especially those from Zimbabwe, and in this vein wants Marange diamonds banned; he wants more sanctions against Zimbabwe, and he even cherishes an invasion of Zimbabwe, if press reports are anything to go by.

Sikhala hopes to attract funding from the US for his MDC 99 political project, and there is every reason to believe that he will impress the Chicago Boys as a usable gangster that can help promote the principle of “what we say goes” in this little stubborn African country called Zimbabwe.

So you do not hear much about the death of Colombian civilians for example because there “what we say goes” works for Americans. Neither do we hear much about the political violence in countries like Pakistan. It is the death of Zimbabweans to political violence, whether real or imagined; that makes so much relevance for Western media.

Cambodia and Laos were all bombed freely by the US because both were defenceless. So what the US says goes for as long as there is no threat or danger. When Bush Senior made the statement in 1991, the US had just invaded Panama, killed a couple of thousand people, mainly poor slum dwellers, vetoed a couple of UN Security Resolutions, and pretty much no one said anything much about it all, and for the US it was a simple “what we say goes”.

The same was the case in the 1982 massive victory of the United States over Grenada, where the US invaded the tiny island of 100 thousand people, with 12 000 marines and troopers descending on about 200 barely armed Grenadian police officers. Grenada did not even have an army.

There was no heartbreak whatsoever for Ronald Reagan after the invasion of Grenada, and neither was there any heartbreak for Bush Senior after the invasion of Panama. It is only in places like Zimbabwe where people like President Robert Mugabe refuse to acknowledge the US principle of “what we say goes” where heartbreaks for US presidents begin.

No doubt Barrack Obama’s heart must be badly broken over Bolivia and Venezuela too. Not to mention Iran and that most “awful” country called North Korea. It must be terribly broken over Cuba too, with those Castro brothers outliving dozens of US presidents without really allowing America to establish a “what we say goes” government in that stubborn little country.

Zimbabwe must have a “what we say goes” government in the MDC-T and this is why Obama and his Western friends are not too happy that the GPA is doing very little to bring the MDC-T to power. If Tsvangirai were to ever rule Zimbabwe one day the US will not have presidents with heartbreaks over Zimbabwe because then the principle of “what we say goes” would be working perfectly well and Zimbabwe would not feature much in international media. It would be a pliant state.

The principle of “what we say goes” is the modus operandi for Western funded civic groups, groups that fight to impose Western values and beliefs on all others simply because these others are deemed to be lesser people, as clearly defined by their poverty.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death.

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

©  EsinIslam.Com