AVAAZ.org (“Voice”) is taking donations for civil society groups in Burma. The regime has completely choked off the flow of information.
George Packer has a profound post from the other day about the international response:
Besides coercive diplomacy—which means hard talk and possibly sanctions—the survival and success of democratic movements under stubborn dictatorships require long-term external support, in some cases from governments, in others from private groups. These movements can’t be willed into existence or imposed from outside. (Remember Ahmed Chalabi? He couldn’t even get himself elected to the Iraqi parliament.) They take a long time to grow, and they can seem to wither for years on end. The only help worth giving them has to be based on local knowledge, steady patience, and a sense of our own drastic limits.
The sweeping, self-satisfied language of Bush’s second Inaugural (“It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”) probably does more to damage than to help the cause of Iranian students, Zimbabwean trade unionists, and Burmese monks. There will be no global dawn of freedom, and promising one means that we’ll soon get tired of trying. [My emphasis – DA] The best way for Americans to show meaningful solidarity with embattled people around the world is to remember that, in the end, it’s not about us.
And also from Packer, this, on Bill Kristol’s (hesitant) call for air strikes against Burma:
This is the world created by Iraq: in the face of a manifest wrong, the options are silence and air strikes. Both are expressions of the psychic state of an embattled superpower, and not just any superpower, but our own, born in universal aspirations, congenitally prone to moral hubris and its discontents, supremely impatient with the protean, resistant nature of things as they are. [Packer is a chastened liberal hawk, recall. – DA] Silence and air strikes have an intimate symbiotic relation with each other, like the mood swings of a manic-depressive, and eras in which one is dominant quickly give way to the opposite (as Wilson’s war for democracy collapsed almost overnight into Harding’s “return to normalcy”). We’re on the hinge of such a swing as the Bush Administration and its Iraq war stagger toward their conclusions. The age of moral clarity—”with us or against us,” the Bush doctrine, the second inaugural, “God’s gift to humanity”—is visibly ending. A new age of great-power politics—Russia, China, India rising—is coming.
Comments are closed.