Wednesday Morning Round-Up

1. Iraq is moving ahead with a referendum on the Iraq-US security agreement. Such is the perils of democracy. Though Iraqi leaders would almost certainly prefer American troops stay in the country, they can't afford to oppose the referendum in an election year.

2. The Obama administration signals that they may move away from a policy of isolation with the regime in Burma. Since that hasn't worked to date, I think it's worth trying something new.

3. The Senate is moving ahead with a bill that would give the FDA the power to regulate tobacco products.

4. A profile of the guard killed in yesterday's shooting at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. It would be interesting to ask the murderer what he thought he might accomplish with his act, though fanatics always seem to have a grander view of their place in the world than most of the rest of us do. I visited the museum when I was at law school in D.C., and was surprised at the heavy security required to enter the museum. Now I understand.

5. Some local news: Dallas County meals on wheels needs help. They don't need your money, so much as they need volunteers to deliver meals so they won't have to pay drivers to do so. If you'd like to help, more information is here. Also, local residents know about the odd series of minor earthquakes the area has experienced in recent months. Scientists at SMU hope to get to the bottom of the mystery.

6. Two mentally disabled men in Texas have (separately) been given ridiculously long sentences for molesting young children. Even the jury in Hart's case was shocked by the 100-year sentence the man, reported to have an IQ of roughly 47, received. The question I would like to ask the prosecutors in this case is, if both men are reported to have IQs themselves that are roughly equivalent to those of young children, why are they sentenced as if they were fully functioning adults? And, the Hart story points out, repeat sex offenders routinely receive shorter sentences than these men did, which raises the question of whether there is some discrimination against the mentally disabled going on here, at least in my mind.

7. Perhaps you heard about the collapse of the Cowboy's practice facility in Valley Ranch, Irving, last month that paralyzed a Cowboys scouting assistant? It appears the Cowboys knew of a similar incident involving a canopy built by the contractor they hired. While this isn't exactly proof of negligence on the Cowboys part, it sure does make it easier to add the Cowboys to the lawsuit that I'm sure is being contemplated against the contractor.

Shift in U.S. Policy Towards Burma?

So hints Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that economic sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western governments have failed to pressure the repressive Burmese government, signaling a potentially major shift in U.S. policy.

Clinton, at a news conference here, did not deny that easing sanctions was one of the ideas under consideration by the Obama administration as part of a major review, saying that "we are looking at possible ideas that can be presented." She said she had discussed the issue with Indonesian officials.

"Clearly, the path we have taken in imposing sanctions hasn't influenced the Burmese junta," she said, adding that the route taken by Burma's neighbors of "reaching out and trying to engage them has not influenced them, either."

[...]

In an influential report issued last October, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group argued that humanitarian aid should begin to flow into the country and that bans on Burmese garments, agriculture and fishery products and restrictions on tourism should be lifted.

"It is a mistake in the Myanmar context to use aid as a bargaining chip, to be given only in return for political change," the report said. "Twenty years of aid restrictions -- which see Myanmar receiving twenty times less assistance per capita than other least-developed countries -- have weakened, not strengthened, the forces for change."

While Clinton has been careful not to tip her hand on the direction of the policy review, she has used strikingly mild language about the Burmese government, describing "the unfortunate path" taken by Burma, leaving it "impervious to influence from anyone."

During her stop in Indonesia, Clinton also visited the Jakarta-based headquarters of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a regional bloc of 10 nations that includes Burma but is often criticized as ineffectual.

As scores of ASEAN employees lined the balconies to applaud her, Clinton announced that the Obama administration would consider signing the group's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, a nonaggression pact signed by 15 nations outside the region. The Bush administration had declined to sign it, in part because of concerns it might hamper policy toward Burma.

Clinton also said she would attend a regional security meeting in July, a diplomatic session that former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice skipped twice during her four-year tenure. "It really shows the seriousness of the United States to end its diplomatic absenteeism in the region," a beaming ASEAN Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan said.

Sanctions are generally regarded as an appropriate measure to punish a government that refuses to abide by international law; in fact in the diplomatic realm, this belief is something of a truism. Hence the willingness of some to cling to the idea of sanctions towards Burma, even though the military regime is mostly impervious and completely unresponsive to sanctions, which mostly punish a civilian population that the regime has unrelenting control over. While I do not think violent and oppressive regimes should be rewarded for their bad behavior, I certainly have no problem with rewarding them for good behavior, especially when they shrug whatever punishments we are capable of. It will be interesting to see what carrots the Obama administration has in mind for the Burmese regime.

Legislative Week in Review XI

Congress voted for an omnibus spending bill that capitulated on both President Bush's spending caps (and in a separate bill for SCHIP) and his demand for more war funding (to a tune of $70 billion).

After courageous opposition from Sens. Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold and others, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put on hold, for now, a FISA update bill that would include telecom immunity.

The Senate also passed additional Myanmar sanctions and a a long-stalled bill inspired by the Virginia Tech shootings that would more easily flag prospective gun buyers who have documented mental health problems and help states with the cost. The House already passed the bill, but it is unclear yet if Bush will veto it or not.

In one major victory this week, the House of Representatives approved an energy bill to boost fuel efficiency that was then signed by President Bush. The House also backed a 7-year terror insurance bill (conceding to the Senate), the Veterans Guaranteed Bonus Act, mortgage tax relief, and a House commission made new ethic recommendations.

Additionally, Congress passed a bill strengthening citizen access provided by the Freedom of Information Act and an AMT fix, but one that does not pay for itself.

UPDATE: Bush pocket vetoes the defense appropriations bill. He signed the CHIP extension, an open government bill, and a Sudan divestment bill, however.

Fleeing the Crackdown

From the Washington Post, a really good article about Burmese monks who fled the crackdown.

Burmese Government Continues Crack Down

While our attention wavers, the Burmese military junta goes about rounding up and wiping out dissidents.

Most of the detained monks, the low-level clergy, were eventually freed without charge as were the children among them. But suspected ringleaders of the protests can expect much harsher treatment, secret trials and long prison sentences. One detained opposition leader has been tortured to death, activist groups said yesterday. Win Shwe, 42, a member of the National League for Democracy, the party of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has died under interrogation, the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said, adding that the information came from authorities in Kyaukpandawn township. "However, his body was not sent to his family and the interrogators indicated that they had cremated it instead." Win Shwe was arrested on the first day of the crackdown.

A young woman, a domestic worker in Rangoon, described how one woman bystander who applauded the monks was rounded up. "My friend was taken away for clapping during the demonstrations. She had not marched. She came out of her house as the marchers went by and, for perhaps 30 seconds, smiled and clapped as the monks chanted. Her face was recorded on a military intelligence camera. She was taken and beaten. Now she is so scared she won't even leave her room to come and talk to me, to anyone."

Another Rangoon resident told the aid worker: "We all hear screams at night as they [the police] arrive to drag off a neighbour. We are torn between going to help them and hiding behind our doors. We hide behind our doors. We are ashamed. We are frightened."

In Rangoon, people say they are more frightened now than when soldiers were shooting on the streets.

"When there were demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, the world was watching," said a professional woman who watched the marchers from her office.

"But now the soldiers only come at night. They take anyone they can identify from their videos. People who clapped, who offered water to the monks, who knelt and prayed as they passed. People who happened to turn and watch as they passed by and their faces were caught on film. It is now we are most fearful. It is now we need the world to help us."

UPDATE: George Packer, and the difficulty of knowing what to do about all of this.

UPDATE II: More from Time magazine about the crackdown on Burma's monks. And this from CNN, on how the regime is ordering residents to march through the streets in support of the government.

The Limits of Outrage

No one who has followed the situation in Burma can react with anything less than disgust and anger with which the military junta has brutally repressed the popular demonstrations that erupted this month and last. But there are limits to what even the fiercest outrage and anger can do, as George Packer acknowledges in a post at his blog (accompanied by a graphic picture of a dead monk):

Aye Chan Naing, D.V.B.’s executive director, told me by phone from Oslo that as many as six thousand Burmese, the majority of them monks, have been detained in four locations around Rangoon, and their fate is uncertain. After nightly raids, the monasteries are “totally empty,” and he fears the worst for the detainees. But, staving off despair, he’s been mildly encouraged by the reaction of Malaysia, Thailand, and even, in its tepid way, China—quite different from their response after the brutal crackdown of a similar uprising two decades ago. At that time, Aye Chan Naing was two months away from completing his degree in dentistry in Rangoon; he became involved in the revolt and ended up an exile in Thailand and then Norway. “The change must come from inside Burma,” he said, “but I don’t know how much the Burmese people can resist this kind of violence. They need some help from outside.”

Andrew Sullivan quotes a reader who says much the same thing:

f freedom is to be gained in the near-term, the Burmese junta need to be dealt a death blow that can only be administered through military defeat. Satyagraha merely provides the reason for an SPDC soldier to pull a gun out and blow someone's head off for defying an order to provide labor, food, possessions, sex slaves, or whatever is demanded by the junta. Perhaps over the longer term the strategy of non-violent resistance could work, but this presumes that the Burmese junta and its allies such as China will come to value and honor the will of the people, which seems unlikely.

There is no negotiating with SPDC thugs, only submission is tolerated. They are cunning, vicious, and too comfortable in their luxury and power to ever give it up willingly. The democracy movement within Burma cannot count on other nations to overtly come to their aid, and China's appetite for resources is too sated by the junta for any alteration of diplomatic course.

Put simply, the tyranny of the military junta in Burma is so great that they care little about the opinion of anything but their closest trading partners, and even then only to the extent that it does not in any way threaten their power.

Democratic movements everywhere should be supported. Mostly this entails a sort of moral support, accompanied by letter writing campaigns and the threat of boycotts and sanctions. But in dealing with particularly vicious tyrants, such threats are almost meaningless. At best the tyrant will accommodate the outrage to the extent necessary to make an issue go away (for example, no more shootings in the street...while nonetheless dissidents are rounded up and quietly "disappeared.") Truly vicious tyrants can be unseated by only one means, and that's force.

But it's no easy to step from moral support to aiding an active and violent revolution. It's one thing to write emails to the representatives or aiders of a dictatorship, and quite another to secretly ship arms into their country to insurgents. International law and common sense require that nations tread lightly when it comes to interfering with the sovereignty of other nations, for the reason that support of convenient rebellions out of naked national security interests has so often been masked as support for democracy and freedom.

And yet there comes a time when it's simply not enough to accept that we must sit back and watch as people are murdered by a violent regime, out of fear of overstepping ourselves. No one in their right mind can argue that direct military intervention in a place like Burma is a tenable alternative. But there are steps that can be taken short of that. Providing rebels with food, medicine, safe haven-and yes, weapons-is intervention, make no mistake about it, but a kind that can be supported under a reasonable moral calculus.

So far there's little talk of doing more to aid the Burmese people. Unfortunately, support of rebellions and insurgencies is often taken only when it also supports national security interests (and never when it's against national security interests) and no one right now has an interest in angering or provoking China by encouraging the downfall of one of it's "allies." This isn't likely to change soon.

But it's clear that the Burmese people lack only the ability, and not the willingness, to undo their rulers. How to go about helping them do that is something that all free nations should be willing to talk about, even after things quiet down.

Burma Update

The situation in Burma appears to have quieted down, but according to at least one report that may be because the Burma regime has cracked down by killing thousands. A special UN envoy is pushing for a meeting with the leaders of the military regime, to no avail thus far.

UPDATE: As Adam notes in comments, it appears that the whereabouts of the UN envoy aren't exactly known at this time.

Burma Update

Despite violent government crackdowns, demonstrators are still taking to the streets in an effort to subvert the ruling military junta as a United Nations special envoy arrived in Burma to engage in talks with government representatives over the demonstrations. Bush administration officials, recognizing limitations on efforts to pressure the military government, are reportedly pressing China to help manage a transition to a new government. So far there is no indication that military leadership intends to relent, as they have only moved to suppress dissent and cut off Burmese demonstrators and activists from the outside world.

Dissent in Burma

You may or may not be aware of the street demonstrations that have taken place in Myanmar (formerly Burma) over the last week and a half, demonstrations that began when the ruling military junta announced drastic increases in fuel prices. The military government of Burma is one of the most brutal and repressive in the world, and is notrious for their intolerance of dissent, killing 3,000 of their own citizens in the last serious street demonstrations in 1988. Buddhist monks have led the demonstrations this time, steadily increasing their numbers and culminating in a march by 100,000 people through the city of Yangon on Sept. 24th. The insular and remote military leaders remainded eerily silent for days as the demonstrations built in size and intensity, only ordering troops into streets in large numbers after the massive demonstration in Yangon. Rebuffing the threat of tightened sanctions, soldiers conducted pre-dawn raids of monastaries in an effort to deprive the demonstrators of leadership, and broke up attempts at demonstration with tear gas and bullets. Burmese media outlets report that nine have died so far, though it's likely the toll is far higher. To date, the violent response has only antagonised protesters, who are gathering again today to challenge the military junta. The U.N. Security Council is holding an emergency meeting to discuss what to do about the uprisings, but it's unlikely they'll be able to take concerted action as Russia and China-both of whom have economic interests in the country-are unlikely to support harsh calls for regime change. Unfortunately no amount of international pressure is likely to prompt the military junta to acquiesce to the demands of demonstrators; they clearly are willing to use all force at their disposal to remain power, and will not face significant economic distress as a result of actions of their allies and close neighbors. The extent to which any major powers are willing to intervene on the behalf of the Burmese people is unknown, but it's likely that the junta will simply violently suppress the demonstrations and cut off access to the outside world before any meaningful response can be attempted anyway.

Regardless, the Burmese people deserve our support. To keep abreast of the situation or to send an email or letter of your own, visit the Amnesty International campaign page here.