Left Flank

The official death toll in Myanmar is, as of Friday, 77,738 (and approximately 56,000 missing). According to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, over 60,000 planeloads of aid have been delivered. Ban called the situation a "human tragedy".

Yet, in an interview on PBS, Secretary-General Ban, discussing the recent international debate over "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), called R2P "important", but related to criminal acts. Ban distinguished between political and humanitarian matters, and refused to consider R2P in the humanitarian context of the Burmese emergency. This contradicts what John Boonstra argues:

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Continue the interview with Part 2.

I want to believe the trends are good, and Reihan Salam is right.

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Robert Farley says it more succinctly, but invading Myanmar to help it "...a terrible idea." Mark Leon Goldberg concurs, calling intervention "...a distraction and counterproductive to first imperative of helping those in danger." The comments section on the first blog is excellent, too, and I won't waste time pasting my comments on both here.

Some color commentary:

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Is it any wonder pundits are sidetracked by this notion of forcing aid on states when aid NGO specialists make arguments like Marines (via Matthew Yglesias, "Aid From Above"):

The plane swoops in low and its cargo bay slowly opens to reveal a landscape devastated by flood, war or drought. Men in jumpsuits pull levers sending massive pallets of emergency food supplies trundling out and down to the desperate masses below. The plane pulls up and away and the job is done. Aid has been delivered to the needy.

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As a registered centrist Democrat, the notion of Barack Obama running with Senator Jim Webb resonates. But, returning to earth, I have to accept Justin K.'s argument, too:

I like Webb, but I've been lukewarm to the Webb-for-VP idea. If we want to pass as much progressive legislation as possible we need as big a margin in the Senate as possible, and his seat would be tough to keep if he stepped down.

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The reason why I'm lately obsessed with disasters, like the earthquake in PRC and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, is rewarded by Ross Douthat's post questioning liberal international hawks...

...offering a long-term agenda as a response to a question - how, when where and why the U.S. and our allies should intervene abroad - that tends to manifest itself as a series of discrete and very immediate challenges. It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."

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Lastest news from WOLONG (Earthquake in PRC), originally uploaded by anitalee.

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