Intervention

Oh gosh, worthy readers! So many new chapters in our tale of Burma to relate -- in case you, like me, had lost your head in a cardboard box these past few days* and were as taken as I was with the suspense of an 11th hour visit to Burma by the first US Congressman in more than a decade, a trip that began amid hot criticism from exiles that he'd be made a tool of the junta and ended with the stunning promised release of our hapless court fool, John Yettaw by way of a shocker of a 40-minute visit with our heroine, Aung San Suu Kyi and meetings with the arch-villains in Naypyitaw along with a retinue of Suu Kyi's normally sidelined courtiers from her party, the National League for Democracy.

Enough for an entire Act III, in short, complete with (one imagines) a piercing aria from the embattled Nobel Laureate, a chanted chorus (true this) of disapproval from exiles and activists afraid that Webb would, by visiting, confer legitimacy on the junta (or perhaps they'd be more thriller, akin to the ravens coming in for the kill in Hitchcocks Birds), and, from Webb himself, a series of long existential soliloquies on the state of things in SE Asia and whether the US should or should not.
Alack the day. To engage or not to engage.
To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and by opposing, end them?
(Larry Jagan's nicely argued pre-visit oped here.)

Which brings me full circle to two nights ago, while boxing up my old pad (which I say again in passing as excuse for egregious absence from humbled offering your daily dose of Burma), when I stumbled on an old piece by Michael Green and Derek Mitchell in a yellowing edition of Foreign Affairs (Vol. 86, No. 6, p147...). If lex parsimoniae be a thing of beauty, then I commend it to you. It argues for an untested new approach to Burma, so elegant in its simplicity that it obviously took a professor and a senior think tank fellow many many years, several doctorates and we know not how many trips to the conundrum in question to think up a solution brave, vital and utterly unlikely to happen any time soon. It argues, in short, for global coordination. On the one hand is ASEAN -- which accepted Burma as full member in 1997 as part of a regional policy of direct economic and diplomatic engagement (and not a few gifts of gas to fuel an enire SE Asian developing nation with mucho skyscrapers to nourish)-- and on the other the West, which as you know. long ago adopted the reverse tactic, to change by isolating. Throw in Japan, India and China, and they could all sit down en masse and nudge Burma to change, according to Mitchell and Green.

(*one of far too many cardboard boxes of a kind to make you want to find a match and set a light to all your stuff and such is my pointless excuse for abandoning my worthy readers)