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"The trouble with that argument is that at the end of the road we will have a situation in which Smith and the internal nationalists are on one side, supported by the South Africans and ourselves, and on the other side are the rest of the African countries, and most of the ex-colonial world, supported by the Russians and Cubans. It would be a dreadful conflict." The key to avoiding such a conflict, Moose maintains, lies in an evenhanded approach to the transition. "Whether the transfer of power is resolved politically or militarily," he says, "will have an enormous impact on the whole region; it will determine whether we'll have a southern Africa in turmoil."
Moose denies that the U.S. is leaning toward the Patriotic Front. "That's a fundamental misinterpretation of our policy. We have no special brief for the Patriotic Front. Our concern for an 'all-inclusive' process should not be misinterpreted as partisanship. Our objective is to secure the earliest genuine transfer of power in a manner that allows a free expression of political will and an outcome that, insofar as possible, will assure the rights of all the Zimbabwe people." Washington thus shares the view of the front-line leaders and the Patriotic Front that Smith's internal settlement is a clever form of tokenism that, in effect, ensures continuing white control of the military, the judiciary and the bureaucracy, even if a black Prime Minister is installed after elections.
The Administration is probably correct in assuming that any Rhodesian settlement that does not guarantee true majority rule is doomed in African eyes. Civil war, moreover, is all but inevitable unless the popular Nkomo is brought into a new Zimbabwe government. If it backed the internal settlement, the U.S. could face the Hobson's choice of impotent neutrality in the event of a civil war or lonely support for a regime denounced by almost all of Africa and already stigmatized in American documents as "illegitimate." The big question—for which Cy Vance will seek the answer on his forthcoming African mission—is whether it is too late to sell all of Rhodesia's nationalist factions on a reasonable alternative.