I commend this to you: a clear thinking piece in Foreign Policy by David Rothkopf that analyzes the potential downsides of Sen. Jim Webb's star turn in a country that otherwise doesn't have a US Ambassador. Thoughtless, Rothkopf argues. Barely a quid pro quo, a release of a US prisoner, and Suu Kyi still thrown to the dogs for her new 18 month sentence of house arrest. Unwittingly, Rothkopf's is the argument of Burmese watcher-critics who saw in Webb's visit a possible legitimizing device for a regime of imposters, who annulled the victory of Suu Kyi's party in 1990 and more or less left her to rot ever since beside the mildewed stench of Rangoon's Inye Lake. They didn't even have the class to let her share a cell with her fellow beloved Burmese in one of their 70-odd prisons and labor camps.

Regardless, Webb would have been hard put to secure her release from a junta impossibly terrified of her street cred months before the 2010 elections. "The generals' wives are jealous of her," a friend in Rangoon told me. This apparently matters more than fears from brawny men in starched khaki. As he told me this, I had visions of Livia Drusilla, arch villainness (at least according to Robert Graves, to whom I will happily endow my trust of all things ancient Roman), wife of Augustus, fertile fount of a long line of unhinged emperors including Caligula (great-grandson) and Nero (great-great grandson).

Should there have been more coordination from Washington? (Could there have been more coordination?) Was Webb consciously a maverick, the Vietnam vet parachuting in for the rescue to play to his own constituents? He was no emissary of Obama's, but one doubts they would notice the difference in Naypyidaw. A US Congressman is a US politician and a US man is a thing of US soil and therefore officially party to US policy which may or may not one day involve taking steps to invade Burma in multiple massive gunships from the sea. Ye gods! -- but that's not me saying that, rather the nightmare that long ago licked and flickered like giant shadow puppets against the walls of a golden pagoda while a hypnotized Burmese general watched, listened to the Livian poison of a royal astrologer and promptly decided to uproot his capital and install a fresh new one in the middle of malarial jungle...