Got home yesterday and this was all over the news:
This is video of Japanese reporter Kenji Nagai being shot at point blank range by a Burmese soldier. The photojournalist was one of nine killed and 11 injured when the military junta ordered troops to fire into a crowd of pro-democracy demonstrators.
Even after being shot, Nagai attempted to continue video taping the attacks on protesters.
Today internet nodes out of Burma were cut.
I always find it interesting that while one of the reasons that the US invaded Iraq was to stop a brutal dictator-equally violent dictatorships continue elsewhere. I personally do not believe that short of an invasion by India and China of Burma, little will change here-it will take more than Buddhists monks to bring the government down. Nonetheless, I continue to find it more a than a little hypocritical to say that we “had” to enter Iraq to change the middle east-while the US (as well as all of Asia) turns a blind eye to what goes on in other places.
Could not be anything to do with the oil? Nope, didn’t think so either.
I am not sure I understand. Are you saying that we should be doing more in Burma and that interfering with Iraq was a good thing, or that staying out of Burma is a good thing and going into Iraq was bad? What should the policy towards Burma be?
I’m saying it is inconsistent to cite elimnation of tyranny as a reason to invade a soverign nation that did not attack the United States. And if that kind of intervention is such a good thing than it should be just as good a thing in nations that do not have oil. Except that we are inconsistent in our rhetoric-some dictators like China, we still like.
Our policy in Burma should be to get the Chinese to be a responsible player on the world stage and quit sheltering the Junta from the effects of what they are doing. Right now China and Russia get to have their cake and eat it too……..to the dettriment of the Burmese people.
Skippy,
A bit of a stretch to Iraq from Burma. We didn’t declare a war on tyranny. If we did that we would have hit Cuba on the way to Afghanistan. We we/are not being attacked by tyranny.
Terrorists are tyrannical – buy tyrants are not always terrorists.
Anyway, if that is the standard, we should go to Zimbabwe first.
My word to the Burmese is the same as the Iranians – if you want your freedom, get to it with your own blood first.
That is how we did it. Then the help from the French, Dutch and Spanish came.
The same word could have been given to the Iraqis though.
And yet we are still there-and because we are our freedom to do other things is limited.
Terrorism is like crime, perhaps controlled but never eliminated. However if we stop thinking of it as a holy crusade and more as a long term policy to change the things that feed it-economics and religion-the better luck the world will have in the long haul.
Burma survives as a dictatorship because Chinese and Indian businessmen like it that way. And the supposedly democratic first world nations of S.E.A are content to let that continue.