them to vote in the run-off on June 27).

At a rally on Monday, Mugabe told his supporters: "We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint fight with a gun?" It is clear that Zanu-PF will use any means necessary to secure an election victory. Yet the international community refuses to ensure a free and fair election, even when Mugabe calls the fight for the presidency an "all-out war".

Refuting the argument for intervention, one commentator piously informed me that "Zimbabweans are their own liberators". Wrong. Zimbabweans were their own liberators but they have long since become their own oppressors. And, hamstrung by our colonial past, we have watched them 'progress' from a system of white tyranny to one of black.

Zimbabwean democracy is not served by

pretending Zimbabweans are in a position to sort matters out for themselves. If Gordon Brown seriously believes that "Mugabe must not be allowed to steal the election" then it's time David Miliband and Douglas Alexander stopped sounding off like impotent school prefects, and instead organised support for the only remaining course of action.

The political and diplomatic fall-out (with China, for example, as well as with most African nations) will simply have to be absorbed as the cost of doing the right thing.

"They think they are protected by the British and the Americans," Mugabe claims of the opposition MDC. Well, it's time they were. Without intervention, and soon, it will not be long before there is no opposition.

Who will say we did our best for Zimbabwean democracy then?