In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Indeed, George Orwell’s rather prescient novel 1984 is often read as a warning against Stalinism and its totalitarian consequences, but it is Myanmar–formerly Burma–that is closest to Orwell’s dystopian vision of a state-run tyranny whose control reaches even into the very details of every day life. The military junta that brutally suppresses the Burmese people, and has so for decades, is the very sort of totalitarian state that Orwell predicted would seep into the West should we lower our guard and allow the State too much control over our lives.
Of course, in Burma the military is anything but Stalinist. There is none of the Marxist ideology present in its rulers, not that Soviet Russia held to the ideals of the Communists–the Burmese leaders, however, are unabashedly despotic, and hold to no outside ideology. Nor will they accept outside aide, which has been the subject of much debate recently–at least in the days preceding the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. The death toll there is also rising, though the differences in the Chinese approach and the Burmese approach to their respective national tragedies is telling.
After all, the Chinese government is hardly known for its human rights scruples, or for its respect for human life and dignity. China runs more like a machine than a nation in many ways, and its treatment of the individual would be abhorrent to any Westerner. However, the Chinese government responded to the earthquake by sending troops and rescue workers from all across the nation, and allowed foreign aide and foreign reporters to come to the scenes of destruction. The Bamboo Curtain is not what it used to be….
The Generals
If you want to find a really bad guy, forget Ahmadinejad; General Than Shwe is the real deal in the genocide department.
Well, not in China. In Myanmar the situation is quite different. The Burmese have neither received the same level of aide or media attention as the Chinese have. The junta, under Senior General Than Shwe, has not allowed more than a small trickle of aide to reach its suffering citizenry, and there has been very little media coverage of the horrors the cyclone has left in its wake. Perhaps this explains the total drop-off in coverage following the very newsworthy earthquake in China. Journalists prefer covering a story they’re allowed to actually cover, and so Myanmar slips into the backseat, and China takes the wheel.
The question, however, remains: What can the civilized world do to prevent a human catastrophe on the scale of possibly hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths? Tens of thousands of Burmese were killed by the cyclone, and no one could save them. These were the inevitable deaths. Nothing could have been done to save them short of a new regime in Myanmar that would have had to not only have taken the reigns of government years ago, but would have had to somehow reinvigorate that country so much so that the people would have had some warning of the devastation. This, of course, did not happen, and is not likely to happen any time soon, so long as the junta remains in power.
Still, there has been a clamoring of support for the notion of humanitarian invasion from both the Left and the Right, and while much of this has been from American thinkers and writers, there is a growing worldwide sentiment that at times, invasion can be necessary.
Romesh Ratnesar of Time magazine writes:
The cold truth is that states rarely undertake military action unless their national interests are at stake; and the world has yet to reach a consensus about when, and under what circumstances, coercive interventions in the name of averting humanitarian disasters are permissible.
And indeed, this is a tricky question, especially given the divisiveness present in the current Iraq War, which was started with humanitarian intentions. Would the invasion of Myanmar, regardless of its intentions, be perceived in the same light?
A Neoconservative Perspective
Time Magazine is not known for hawkishness, but Ratnesar’s article takes a very different tone, lamenting at its close that “we still haven’t figured out when to give war a chance.” This, in my mind, is the very heart of practical neoconservatism. It is essential that America and her allies, hopefully someday united in a League of Democracies, will approach interventionist policy in situations that do not benefit us with natural resources. In countries such as the Sudan and Myanmar, America has a chance to show that we are concerned more with humanity and justice than oil and treasure. Iraq has stained the image and ideals of neoconservatism, and successful humanitarian missions in places such as this may restore the true meaning and perceptions of neoconservatives. The spread of freedom and democracy, after all, is equatable to the spread of world peace. Democracies simply do not wage war on other democracies.
Robert Kaplan of the New York Times–another less-than-hawkish-publication–writes:
American armed forces are now gathered in large numbers in Thailand for the annual multinational military exercise known as Cobra Gold. This means that Navy warships could pass from the Gulf of Thailand through the Strait of Malacca and north up the Bay of Bengal to the Irrawaddy Delta.
Because oceans are vast and even warships travel comparatively slowly, one should not underestimate the advantage that fate has once again handed us. For example, a carrier strike group, or even a smaller Marine-dominated expeditionary strike group headed by an amphibious ship, could get close to shore and ferry troops and supplies to the most devastated areas on land.
The magic of this is that an enormous amount of assistance can be provided while maintaining a small footprint on shore, greatly reducing the chances of a clash with the Burmese armed forces while nevertheless dealing a hard political blow to the junta. Concomitantly, drops can be made from directly overhead by the Air Force without the need to militarily occupy any Burmese airports.
And there you have a quick illustration of how our military could act swiftly and effectively to save lives, rather than simply take them. Air drops and sea-based Marine incursions, aided by the Fates themselves could lead not only to the salvation of countless Burmese cyclone victims, but could also lend a damaging blow to Myanmar’s military leadership, shaking the very foundation they stand on.
Kaplan’s piece is provocative and compelling, and his case for invasion is clear and concise and persuasive. He warns, however, that:
It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.
If we do invade, we need to avoid the mistakes we made in Iraq and prepare for the ensuing fall-out in a land already torn apart by chaos and devastation. The main difference between the Iraq war and any action against Myanmar is that in the lead-up to Iraq there was plenty of time for planning. Saddam Hussein had already ruled over that nation for decades, and while he was a brutal, fascist dictator who committed acts of terror against his own people, the country itself was not in chaos. Hundreds of thousands were not in imminent danger.
In Burma, hundreds of thousands of lives do hang on the balance, and every day we spend talking about military intervention and humanitarian aide and not acting is another day that thousands of people who don’t have to, will die. In other words, the moral impetus is harried by time, and our ability to plan for a possible collapse of the junta is hampered by the necessity of swift, effective action.
The notion that the Burmese leadership may cave completely when faced with foreign invasion is not terribly unlikely, either. George Packard of the New Yorker writes:
Forcing the regime to let the rest of the world save its people would have a devastating effect on morale. Burma’s leaders are so isolated and irrational that they actually believe their own propaganda about being the only group that can hold the country together. It’s possible that the junta would collapse out of sheer humiliation.
Can a regime collapse out of sheer humiliation? Perhaps not, but maybe the flood of outside influence, combined with the military chutzpah of the Western powers would lead to the junta’s removal. A CIA backed popular uprising would not be at all unlikely, especially if US forces were on the ground already.
The Huffington Post’s Blake Fleetwood claims that:
CIA commandos have already mapped out invasion scenarios with the support of oppressed ethinic tribes. A quick strike in this misbegotten country would not be difficult.
And Lisa Sheffren, writing for that polar-opposite publication the National Review agrees:
This would be an excellent moment for the CIA to begin co-ordinating the internal dissidents and rebels on the Thai-Burmese border who would like to overthrow the junta. (Oh, no one’s organized that? Pity, because when a million people lie dead for entirely preventable reasons, governments should fall without much help.)
So it seems there are unusual alliances of thought lining up behind the notion of either invading Burma with humanitarian aide, and/or overthrowing the military government of that country. I believe the one would and should lead to the other (whichever way you look at it!) We can’t forget the hundreds of thousands of dying and dead that scatter the Burmese landscape. Can we give war a chance? Well, the idea was first brought up by the French, so there is hope for humanity left, I believe–if only a little.
Andrew Sullivan sums it up best:
In its demonstration of humanity, it is also a great way for the US to enhance its soft power in the developing world. People remember who saved them. And sometimes, a bottle of water can mean a lifetime of gratitude.
~crossposted at The New Centrist Times
There is little doubt that the notion most Americans have in their heads of neoconservatism has been at least temporarily skewed due to the perceived failures in Iraq. Regardless of the fact that things are actually improving on the ground finally, the bad taste left in many proverbial mouths when uttering the term “neocon” is more than apparent.