"First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."
-- Attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller


Washington's a one-topic town. At some undefined moment in the past few months -- anyone know the date? -- the rhetoric of the foreign affairs circuit shifted irrevocably from Iraq to Afghanistan. Buhbye Shiites, hullo Pashto...Which would make sense if it didn't also smack of myopia spiced with short-term amnesia. (And incidentally, why are we there, exactly? The good war, yes? Or was? Is? Will be? Anyone?)

What about Burma? Should the West really care? I mean beyond the pathos of a sadly predictable struggle starring an evil oligarchy and their fat Lamborghini-driving cronies, an iconic opposition leader rotting away into martyrdom and an amorphous mass of faceless folk holding fast to dwindling dreams of freedom.
I'd like to think we should maintain an iota of curiosity not because of the pure exoticized tragedy of a Soviet-style gulag system wrapped in the scent of green papaya. Rather because -- conceding for a moment that we all inhabit a small spherical thing -- untold possibilities for humanity vanish into the ether with each new generation trapped under the military jackboot. And that's aside from the possibility that China gets a gateway to the Andaman Sea and a pipeline full of gas, North Korea gets a sibling with a burgeoning nuclear program, and the semi-democratic rulers in the neighborhood get a powerful foil that makes them look like latter-day Mary Poppins.
We invest in cures for the issues of the past, deal with crises only when they explode into disaster, and leave for tomorrow the seeds of problems to come.
But Burma was once the future. At independence from Britain, it promised to be the leading light of Asia. It's universities were the envy of the East, it's rice paddies fed the world, it's natural riches beckoned years of steady growth.
And now? Now, nearly 50 years into military rule, it squats among the world's charity cases, closer in rankings on development, healthcare and corruption to Sierra Leone and other shambolic post-conflict zones in sub-Saharan Africa. And the bright youth of Burma are instead forced to stagnate, scratching a living from small odd jobs, forced into black market two-timing or Dickensian drudgery when they might have, given the chance, invented a bold new world. I've met so many Burmese twenty-somethings, hungry for ideas or for a taste of forbidden entrepreneurism. Already the older generation dismiss them as bad fruit staring blankly into sluggish monitors at Internet cafes.
A fig leaf of focus on a country ostensibly on the margins, however pivotal to the geopolitics of Asia, isn't in the end so much about us versus them. It is instead about choosing the world in which we live. All of us. Glad I wasn't born there, but I'd be proud as hell if I were. And I'd want you to know that. I might even have a thing or two to teach you. Given the chance.