And so it begins...
A new US policy, opening salvos of dialogue with Burma's poker-faced band of generals and a meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and a US assistant secretary of state. Hopeful signs of change to come or mere hot air?

Few would be so sanguine as to predict the forthcoming installation of a hot line between Suu Kyi in her lakeside prison and the junta in a bunker beneath Naypyidaw (not the best occasion, admittedly, for chatting about the absence of decent fiberoptic cable connectivity anywhere in the vicinity of Rangoon). Much less is there a chance of Suu Kyi's release ahead of Burma's greatest unfurling enigma in 20 years -- the looming elections of 2010. This is the first set of multiparty elections, we remind you, since 1990, when Suu Kyi's newly formed party, the National League for Democracy swept to victory, shortly after the mass uprisings of 1988 in surprisingly free and fair conditions. But the junta, caught by surprise, annulled the results shortly thereafter. To be crude, all else follows...(well almost, but for that we'd have to bury deep into modern history with the military coup that took place in 1962.)

Anyway. With no date announced, no electoral law, no clear proof of the junta's thinking beyond the speculative and the educated guessing, no decision on whether Suu Kyi's party will run or boycott, trust no-one to predict for sure the widening of Burma's narrow political space. It is, in short, too soon to break out the champagne. And the junta have a wily ability, history suggests, to offer a sop of appeasement to their most vocal and powerful critics. Rewind to 1994, when Congressman Bill Richardson flew in for the first of two trips to set up dialogue between Suu Kyi and the junta, under the aptly wily intelligence chief Gen. Khin Nyunt (purged in 2004, and down with him came crashing his Soviet-style intelligence apparatus...). Same again in 2000, argues Bertil Lintner.
The underlying assumption here is that Suu Khi is the linchpin of the opposition, however fragmented, diffuse and ragged its organization. Some I know of in Rangoon would beg to differ. Ah, there's the rub. Suu Kyi's role bears further discussion, controversial by any stretch insofar as it would awaken the wrath of tides of outside activists and exiles .

But we digress.
The point here is the old US policy of isolating the regime -- in half-hearted concert with the West while Asia adopted a wholly different approach of commercial engagement -- has proved a conclusive failure. Dialogue is a start. To what? Stay tuned.