Invade Burma?
May 9, 2008 by John Rich
Can’t help some folks. Looks like the Burmese charmers have effectively continued their program of paranoia. According to the Wall Street Journal,
Myanmar’s military regime took control of a United Nations aid shipment and said some foreign workers were not welcome as aid officials and diplomats warned the death toll from Cyclone Nargis may exceed 100,000.
Americans in particular are among those “some foreign workers not welcome.” Who woulda thunk it. A brutal military dictatorship hates the world’s most successful free republic. Don’t worry, you thugs in Rangoon. President Obama will just love to sit down to tea and biscuits with you…
It’s been suggested that we might force better behavior in Burma by invading. See, for example, Gordon Chang’s piece at Contentions. But this is a strawman, and Gordon deals with it logically:
Invade? The international community cannot “protect” the Burmese people from a military government without employing military means. The United Nations, of course, is not prepared to use force. So Burmese by the tens of thousands will perish.
Not that it isn’t eminently satisfying to want to see the military dictatorship’s leaders’ heads on pikes. How much of the Burmese tragedy was caused by the dictatorship (late or no notification; blocking aid) is not and will likely never be known with any accuracy. But we must know this by now: it’s not our problem as a nation. It may be our problem as individuals; the Burmese remain our “neighbors” and we must love them.
But let that love not blind us to the reality that it is not right for us to use our already stretched-thin military for un-military purposes.
Regime change in Burma? Why not start in Sudan, to end the Arab genocide of black Africans? Why not assassinate Mugabe and all his co-conspirators in Zimbabwe? Iran looks like a tempting target, as well. The list is long. But our limited success in Iraq should have taught us a little humility before we talk of regime change backed by our military elsewhere.
Let us provide material aid to Burma as best we’re able to; perhaps on the sly through the United Nations (those idiots ought to be good for something). But let’s not pretend we can fix everything that is wrong with the world.
