IT is a batty business, this international warmongering. Against one despot, we are despatching 29,000 ground troops, 120 Challenger tanks, 150 Warrior armoured personnel carriers, 32 AS 90 self-propelled guns and 18 light guns. Against another, we are sending 11 middle class young men in sweaters armed with cricket bats.

So why does Mr Saddam Hussein warrant preferential military treatment and not Mr Robert Mugabe? Well, Saddam is apparently able and ready to fire weapons of mass destruction against the West. He Must Be Stopped. That is what Tony Blair claims, anyway.

By contrast, Mr Mugabe doesn't have any weapons of mass destruction, so he can do what he likes. There are other key differences, of course. Zimbabwe is ostensibly a Christian country. It has no oil. And America doesn't care about it. But the misery of their respective peoples under the rule of "elected" tyrants is equally horrific.

We all know what Saddam has done to Iraqi people: murdered, tortured, maimed and evicted indiscriminately. Mr Blair has made much of the imperative to free the Iraqis from this terrible man.

You can read all about Saddam's horrendous human rights record in Downing Street's big dossier on the subject. But there is no such link on the 10 Downing Street website to a similar dossier chronicling Mugabe's abuse of his people.

Yet he is responsible for murdering, torturing, maiming and evicting innocent families from their own homes indiscriminately.

There is no political will to deal with Robert Mugabe. In his foreign policy speech to the British diplomatic corps last week, Jack Straw only mentioned Zimbabwe once, in a text running to 3,821 words.

So much for Tony Blair's fabled pledge to heal Africa, "the scar on all our consciences". For all his blustering, the Prime Minister appears content to let our cricket team play a World Cup match in Zimbabwe, which Mr Mugabe will use as huge propaganda coup. I would never suggest that we send over 30,000 troops to try to kick Mugabe out. It is no way to solve any of the world's current problems.

But I would say the humanitarian disaster in Zimbabwe is at least as deserving of the world's attention as Saddam's sabre rattling.

The lead report on BBC1's revamped Ten O'Clock News on Monday night brought home the scale of the nightmare. Millions of Zimbabweans are starving to death because of Mugabe's warped ambitions.

Another eye-witness report, in the Observer last year, revealed how the sound of a truck bringing food provoked a stampede. Villagers only stopped to pull out the bodies of the children crushed to death in the fight for food once the meagre supplies had been handed out.

Mugabe really is a despot who Must Be Stopped. Right away.

NOW for the first in a new series: London Life. This will highlight the obsession with Britain's capital of our so-called "national" media.

Earlier this month, the Times and the Telegraph devoted leader columns to the joy of snow. Why? Because it had snowed in London, of course.

I needn't mention how much prominence is given to London congestion charging and the tube strikes, compared with traffic and train trouble up here. Then on Saturday, Guardian columnist John O'Farrell bemoaned the state of football today. "Every site in the capital is worth more as luxury flats, whether it's a hospital, a school or an old football ground."

The same can be said of York, fella.

Updated: 11:02 Wednesday, January 22, 2003