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:

The debate over R2P in Burma, of course, is essentially a political one, as the issue is no longer the death and destruction caused by Nargis, but that caused by the exacerbating and obstructionist tactics of the country's ruling junta. As Gareth Evans, the author of the report establishing R2P, wisely reminds us, intervention in the case of a natural disaster is only even possible under the aegis of R2P if a government's calculated disregard for its citizens amounts to a crime against humanity. The doctrine was not intended as a shortcut for the international community to provide relief in desperate cases of natural disaster.

On PRC, Ban characterized the post-earthquake situation as "humanitarian", and then commended the Chinese government for its performance.

The R2P debate is more about UN "inside baseball" and NGO assertiveness than helping Myanmar or PRC. If any state is so deficient in its relief capabilities, western states, as expert as they consider themselves, should catch them up. But, this is all a horrendous red herring. It's development, stupid! If it were not for the fact, that developing states, like Myanmar and PRC, have burgeoning populations in disaster-prone areas, there would be less need for more relief capabilities. The UN needs to lead on sustainable, environmentally-sustainable development away from marginal areas, not create world government.

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:

There's no excuse for the behavior of Burma's leaders, but history offers an explanation that goes beyond sheer autocratic barbarism. As friendly as the Burmese can be to Western tourists, they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers -- they have been sandwiched between empires in India and China; subjugated and exploited by Great Britain; devastated by Japan (and the Allies) during World War II; and vulnerable in the second half of the 20th century to meddling by Thailand, rogue Chinese nationalists, and other factions and interests. Hand in hand with that xenophobia goes a fierce pride: For much of their history they've been not just survivors, but builders of a Burmese empire that, at its zenith in the mid-11th century, controlled a large chunk of mainland Southeast Asia.

Finally, I don't know what to make of Robert D, Kaplan's NYT op-ed. After plugging intervention, he seems to undermine his case at the end.

It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.

I didn't think we (is that the imperial pronoun?) were trying to fix Myanmar, just help it. Are we so deluded that we believe we can just use force with a smile?

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.

This is the telegenic aid fantasy that has hooked some politicians and appealed to some columnists as a viable option in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. Dropping pallets of aid from the sky seems a straightforward, elegant and technological solution to the difficult political problem of the Burmese government's refusal to allow enough humanitarian workers into the country to deal with the disaster.

Except air drops are not the aid equivalent of smart bombs. Running a humanitarian effort from the skies, like running a purely airborne war, is fraught with problems.

For a start it requires excellent intelligence. Yet no one knows exactly where the worst affected areas are, or how many people are suffering in each place. We don't know if people are on the move, or what diseases are starting to appear, or exactly what state their homes and infrastructure are in.

Has the nonprofit sector conveniently assumed the worst, and avoided the deeper question of how to alleviate the need for intervention? But, there's no national legislature to woo with inflated budgets and dire prophecies. As a donor, please don't tell me I have to give indefinitely. Death and taxes, maybe, but NGOs don't last forever!

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."

I have two problems.

Firstly, interventionism, as manifest in R2P, is the flip side of gunboat diplomacy, which to work requires a substantive military threat lurking over the horizon. Many more states would be willing to call America's bluff here, and so, the risk of appearing weak increases.

Secondly, the emphasis is wrong. It's not, in these two cases, that the CCP or SPDC are despotic, or even completely incompetent. According to Art Lerner-Lam in Foreign Policy, "[t]he Chinese have a very sophisticated system of response, even relative to global standards. They rely heavily on their military, and they have a large civilian component of engineers and scientists who assist. The problem is not with the system, but with the particulars of this event." The problem, then, is, that a disaster occurred. The international community needs to ask, why did a disaster occur? The answer is not primarily military, but is extremely political.

FP: There have been a number of natural disasters in East and Southeast Asia in recent months. Is this region particularly susceptible to disasters compared with others, and will it become increasingly so in the years to come?

(Art Lerner-Lam) ALL: To answer your first question, yes. East, South, and Southeast Asia are all highly susceptible and have what we call a multi-hazard risk profile. They are subjected to typhoons, cyclones, flooding, earthquakes, landslides, and in the case of Indonesia, volcanoes. From a geographic perspective, [these regions] are very susceptible to a whole range of hazards.

Whether the risk is increasing depends on two factors. One, are the hazards themselves increasing in frequency or severity? And two, are people becoming increasingly vulnerable in terms of population density and infrastructure? In the first case, you have to be a bit careful. We are not seeing increases in geological disasters such as earthquakes; you wouldn't expect that. Those are geological processes, so the rate of occurrence should be somewhat consistent over time. But with sea-level rise, which we accrue to global warming, there is some potential for there to be an increase in cyclones.

But the changes in the natural frequency and severity of hazards are dwarfed by the changes in urbanization and construction practices. The key issues in vulnerability are related to social, economic, and political factors more than they are to the geographic factors: building cities near coastlines, improper construction, having institutions that are incapable of understanding the magnitude of a disaster and putting together a response—Myanmar being a case in point. You can attribute most of the increase in disaster losses to changes in the patterns of development.

In other words, the SPDC's human rights record and its development record are two separate issues. ANY government that allows urbanization and hyper-density in high risks areas is in a sense irresponsible, These problems are geological and climatological. The UN, or the US or France, can condemn Yangon for slaughtering Karen. But, until any government devises a way to avoid setting poorer humans atop a veritable time bomb of questionable terrestrial real estate, it needs to stop wagging fingers. There are thornier issues involved here than gunboat diplomacy. There is no way to compare PRC's response to the American response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, because no one has done well addressing the fundamental issue of why so many people would want to live in areas no sane animal would want to squat on.

Again, one can question how Beijing treats Tibetans, or the SPDC treats most of its population. But, it's convenient hypocrisy to pass moral judgment on any government whose territory includes dirt of marginal, or even, dangerous, quality, when no one is brave enough to question why unfortunate people just have to live in hëll, and on top it, have to endure a spectacle of fortunate, so-called educated people yelling over their struggling heads ignoring them.

Liberal hawks vs. neocons vs. realists...old quarrel! The relic of a pampered elite in a golden age. Move on!

I recall The West Wing's fictional Bartlet Doctrine.

When Kundu was first mentioned in season 2, it is led by President Nimbala. In January 2003 of the series' timeline ("Inauguration, Part I"), the Arkutu-run government of President Nzele (described as a "sadistic madman") begins an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Induye in Bitanga, killing 200 people. The violence soon spreads outside Bitanga and into the countryside. In President Josiah Bartlet's second inaugural address ("Inauguration Over There"), he announces the new Bartlet Doctrine for the use of force: America shall intervene whenever there are humanitarian interests at stake. With that new doctrine, Bartlet sends a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division, and a Marine expeditionary unit, a force of 11,000 troops in total, to Kundu ("The California 47th"). As of the episode "Twenty Five," US forces are still operating in Kundu.

So, before you accept Anne Applebaum's plea...

If we fail to persuade the junta to relent soon—despite what I hope are assurances that Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the American military will bring only food, not regime change, much as we all might like to see it—then we have to start considering alternatives. According to some accounts, the U.S. military is already looking at a range of options, including helicopter food deliveries from offshore ships, or convoys from across the Thai border. The U.S. government should be looking at wider diplomatic options, too. The U.N. Security Council has already refused to take greater responsibility for Burma—China won't allow the sovereignty of its protectorate to be threatened, even at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives—but there is no need to act alone. In fact, it would be a grave error to do so, since anything resembling a foreign "invasion" might provoke military resistance.

Unfortunately, the phrase "coalition of the willing" is tainted forever—once again proving that the damage done by the Iraq war goes far beyond the Iraqi borders—but a coalition of the willing is exactly what we need. The French—whose foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, was himself a co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières—are already talking about finding alternative ways of delivering aid. Others in Europe and Asia might join in, along with some aid organizations. The Chinese should be embarrassed into contributing, asked again and again to help. This is their satrapy, after all, not ours.

Think of it as the true test of the Western humanitarian impulse: The international effort that went into coordinating the tsunami relief effort in late 2004 has to be repeated, but in much harsher, trickier, uglier political circumstances. Yes, we should help the Burmese, even against the will of their irrational leaders. Yes, we should think hard about the right way to do it. And, yes, there isn't much time to ruminate about any of this.

...or, Ivo Daalder's and Paul Stares' slightly more diplomatic proposal...

The United States and Britain should join with the French government and introduce a resolution in the UN Security Council demanding that the Burmese government accept the offers of international relief supplies and personnel, let them to enter the country immediately and without interference, and allow the UN to take charge of the humanitarian mission. To make the case, Washington should show detailed imagery of the suffering and the extent of devastation in Burma (as it did so effectively in the cases of Bosnia and Darfur to shock a disbelieving United Nations).

The resolution should hold open the possibility of additional measures - including air drops of relief supplies - if the government did not comply at once. And the Security Council could commit to return to the matter in 24 hours, assess Burma's response, and consider additional actions.

...read what a soldier has to say about helping the Burmese.

I wonder if TIME's editors think while the US military is busy invading Burma whether or not they should just go roll in and invade Tibet as well?  The TIME editor makes it sound like it would all just be so easy if the US military will just show up and the Burmese military will just give up and everyone will be singing kumbayah.  Where have I heard this scenario before?  You have to be really disconnected from reality to think launching a third war, in jungle terrain, with poor infrastructure, against a Chinese ally is really a good idea.

And, also, as China Hand points, the SPDC's clumsy propaganda efforts aside, the Bush administration rightly acquiesced to Yangon's demands to dump the aid and keep the advisors.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa runs down a list of what is wrong with how Myanmar's junta is abusing its authority.

Myanmar has given us one of the most admirable women alive, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and the world's most repugnant regime. Until May 2, the military government led by army chief Than Shwe was competing for that title with Zimbabwe's racist tyrant, North Korea's lunatic autocrat and Cuba's bumbling Castro brothers. But then Cyclone Nargis happened--and the junta seized the opportunity to edge ahead of its rivals.

It is hard to say what was worse: concealing the magnitude of the cyclone that was about to hit the Irrawaddy Delta region from the population and making no preparations, even though the meteorological system had given the government 48 hours advance notice; grossly lying about the number of victims once the tidal rise swept a vast swath of the southern part of the country; denying foreign relief agencies access to the country and shunning help from other governments for days; forbidding civilians to distribute what little aid was available because that responsibility was solely in the hands of the soldiers. Or going ahead with the referendum designed to ratify a constitution that took 14 years to write, all of whose articles can be summed up in four words: We will rule forever.

Many people, including Myanmar's generals, have alluded to the incompetence of the U.S. government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by way of comparison. But there is no real comparison. The Katrina disaster was the unintentional product of bureaucratic government. The Myanmar catastrophe is the result of a political mind-set--that is, of cold-blooded decisions aimed at protecting the military government from the threat of instability. The same thinking drove decisions in 1988 and in 2007 that resulted in the massacre of unarmed civilians, including Buddhist monks, because they wanted free elections.

And, Reason's Kerry Howley lets us see how the junta has bungled its own propaganda (don't fall asleep watching the Burmese news reports!). Relief agencies accuse the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) of hoarding premium rice and distributing rotten and poorer-quality grain. Myanmar-not even as competent as the North Koreans!

Matthew Lee pursues the question of which countries can aid Myanmar, by what the UN calls the "right to protect" (R2P). The Burmese case doesn't fall into the four categories, genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity, that would trigger R2P. That would rule out UN action. Mark Leon Goldberg, however, advocates a less rigorous criterion: "...the international community is permitted to violate the sovereignty of a country when that country is unwilling or unable to prevent mass atrocities from being visited upon its own citizens."

Although western-donated aid is mostly stymied by Burmese authorities, Chinese and Indian-donated aid has reached Myanmar, according to Lee's reporting. Spencer Ackerman confirms this willful obstructionism, and pleads for a solution, even by force. I think Lee is onto a pertinent issue: not R2P, but how states disburse aid.

...developments this week lead Inner City Press to wonder why China does not develop and publicize its own humanitarian machinery, its own Chinese Bernard Kouchner. It could fly aid into Yangon, and film itself doing it. It could say, "we don't need these Western NGOs, we'll do it ourselves." Supposedly China hired a U.S. public relations firm to burnish its image. Where are they? Then again, the Chinese mission has not done an on-camera stakeout interview outside the Council since October 2007.

On the other hand, or foot, at the Security Council stakeout after China's Amb. Liu said that China flew into Yangon "tents and money," one wag muttered, "And guns." Still another said that the French oil industry active in Myanmar ought to be delivering aid. We will continue to explore these issues.

There's a difference between France's hunger for limelight and PRC's quiet approach. Could this be the foundation of a Bolton-PRC alliance against UN empowerment explicit in R2P? I'm not comfortable with the notion of world government, but that doesn't rule out governance. There needs to be accountability somewhere, whether it's Beijing's responsibility or aid NGOs.