Mugabe's Biggest Sin

http://www.321gold.com/editorials/engdahl/engdahl073108.html

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Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, presides over one of the world's richest minerals treasures, the Great Dyke region, which cuts a geological swath across the entire land from northeast to southwest. The real background to the pious concerns of the Bush Administration for human rights in Zimbabwe in the past several years is not Mugabe's possible election fraud or his expropriation of white settler farms. It is the fact that Mr. Mugabe has been quietly doing business, a lot of it, with the one country which has virtually unlimited need of strategic raw materials Zimbabwe can provide - China. Mugabe's Zimbabwe is, along with Sudan, on the central stage of the new war over control of strategic minerals of Africa between Washington and Beijing, with Moscow playing a supporting role in the drama. The stakes are huge.
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much more at link.

or the pentagon.

No one, including the author, makes ANY claim that mugabe is anything but a world-class asshole. In fact, that attitude is stated explicitly.

the point of the article (as i took it anyway) is that you and i and all the rest of the peons that make up 99.99999% of this planet may think he is an asshole because of the reasons you state, but the only reason the western elite think he is an asshole is the natural resources of the country going someplace other than to western interests. Much like you and i and all the rest of the peons that make up 99.99999% of this planet may think the saudi royalty are assholes, but in this case the western elite thinks they are okey dokey. I wonder what the difference is?