Don't Tease Me

Can Hillary Help Liberate Burma?

Let's see how far engagement can go.

Bastards

The bastards running Burma are now seizing food aid shipments. This isn't even suppression that makes sense. Sure beat and shot monks who protest against your rule, that makes sense with evil dictator logic. But to what kind of points is it to starve people after a natural disaster? That's just evil for evils sake.

Women's Work

Why is Laura Bush out in front on diplomatic efforts to help Burma in the wake of the cyclone disaster? Laura Bush doesn't do or say much of anything. No really, name me one thing Laura Bush has done or said in the last eight years? She just kind of stands there with that slightly drugged-out smile. Could none of the real players in this Administration be bothered with a humanitarian project? Is it only war that gets the manly men of the Bush Administration out of bed in the morning. It be one thing if this was a Hillary Clinton or Eleanor Roosevelt-type first lady, an activist with real pull inside the Administration and a high profile with the press. But putting Laura Bush on the case is a pretty clear signal that they don't care.

Women in trouble.

Today in democracy promotion:

Burma opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is preparing for talks with with the junta, but remains under house arrest.

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has just been placed under house arrest.

American opposition leader Hillary Clinton remains free, but is besieged by pettiness. But still, you have to say that she's getting a better deal than her fellows.

Please Don't Help

For the love of GOD (Just for an aside, what do Buddhist say when then want take The Lord's name in vane? How do Buddhist curse, anyway?) Keep Bill Kristol away from Burma. He wants to bomb. Or invade. I'm not sure exactly what, but under no circumstances should the leading intellectual light of our current disaster in Iraq be allowed anywhere near Burma. Even if in my darker liberal hawk moments I've indulged fantasies of having the 101st Airborne giving Aung San Suu Kyi her country back. But with this crew in power, we would be lucky if the nation didn't break off from the rest of Asia and sink into the sea.

Even when we get some competent leadership back in charge in this Country, the damage to American power, prestige, and standing in the world we have suffered over the last seven years means that we are less able to do good on a whole range of issues, not the least would be to get the government of Burma to stop murdering large numbers of its own people. Mahablog has a good example how the massive debt we've run up under Republican governance weakens us vis-a-vie Burma's friend China.

Oh Damn

V for Vendetta:

Dominic: What do you think will happen?
Finch: What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people *with* guns.

Burma

World Still not Right

Crackdown in Burma ongoing. Protesters shot, beaten, arrested. The Internet has been cut off in the Country. All the old crimes in all the newest ways.

My First Cause

Let me tell you how I learned that all might not be right with the world. Back in high school for Academic Decathlon our super-quiz subject was called "Documents of Freedom" a collection of letters, speeches, and well documents that had advanced the cause of freedom in the world. We would study the texts, the history behind them and so on. Declaration of Independence, Letters from a Birmingham Jail, something from Gandhi etc, etc. In the collection was a speech from Aung San Suu Kyi a democratic activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner in Burma. She has fought for years against a military dictatorship in her country, which the junta has renamed Myanmar. What shocked me at time was that unlike Lech Wałęsa, the American Revolution and the rest of the people we were studying, Suu Kyi had not won. When you study history in the mid-1990s, the glow still on the end of the Cold War, you get a sense that freedom really was on the march, that dictatorships were doomed to fail and that the good guys pretty much always won in the end. In fact, despite winning an election overwhelmingly and support for her cause worldwide, Suu Kyi remains under house arrest and the generals remain in charge: a situation that has remained unchanged ever since I learned about it some 13 years ago.

So I note today the growing protests in Burma, led by Buddhist monks, the coming crackdown, international pressure, hope and fear. Hope for change and fear of backlash. And nothing to do but watch.

UPDATE: We do call it Burma. James Fallows explains why.