In a more perfect world Burma would be a prime candidate for regime change. National security strategist Tom Barnett has set out a process (here briefly and more extensively in his books) for dealing with politically bankrupt states: the UN indicts, the G-20 authorizes and commits funds, the US military takes out the local military, an international reconstruction team begins nation building, an international reconstruction fund kicks in development funding and former leaders are prosecuted before the international criminal court. Unfortunately we do not now have these international institutions and relationships in place to make this work in Burma’s case.

What happens in Burma will depend upon China and India. There is no use talking about regime change until both those countries want it. If they both wanted it, then we could talk about shared implementation. This would not be a time or place for US unilateral action even with the UN blessings.

Personally, I had no problem with the regime change in Afghanistan. That, at least, was logically related to the events of 9/11.

Iraq was, of course, a farce and continues to be one. Worse, by wagging the dog we've allowed Afghanistan to edge back towards chaos or at least towards a protracted struggle where many more will die before security is restored.

I would tentatively support regime change in Myanmar only if it's led by the UN or by Myanmar's neighbors. And by "led by the UN" I don't mean they rubberstamp something and we go charging in. I mean, they lead, they charge in, we lend support.

ok, no one has the ability or will to actually go into Myanmar and force the needed aid down the tyranny's throat.

what then? how do we demonstrate our dedication to the free will of other nations when half-a-dozen people possess that will? how do we prevent hundreds of thousands of people from dying when their leaders don't give a damn?

if we weren't wasting our good will in the global community in Iraq, could we use it to lead the world to force the military thugs in Myanmar to do the "right" thing?

this is how badly we've lost our way since the end of WWII: we see clearly what needs to be done in Myanmar and Darfur — protect and help those who are powerless at the ends of many guns — yet we are impotent to act or even see a path to action.

Cody, to start with I reject the common blog-spin idea of "the xyz crowd" -- it never describes anything accurately.

Secondly, "regime change" is a euphemism for aggression and imperialism. Although it has died back after the wheels came off of Bush's Iraq invasion bus, during the ginning up of that aggression and for 6 months to a year after, quite a number of pundits were floating ideological balloons to the effect that the U.S. should openly acknowledge having an empire and assert its "right" to act accordingly.

Thirdly, as far as I am concerned the United States utterly lacks any standing other than its (our) brute force power to attack Myanmar militarily. What the Myanmar military junta has been doing in obstructing aid is nasty and reprehensible, but has only lasted a few days and the excess deaths above what the cyclone would have caused even in the best case are likely small by comparison say to those in North Korea, where the government has during a number of recent famines refused outside aid for protracted periods.

It also is fairly comparable to actions by the U.S. ally Indonesian government for a few days after the great tsunami several years ago in Aceh province, before an accommodation was reached by them with a separatist movement there, or problems in Sri Lanka around political interference in tsunami response there around the continuing civil war/Tamil separatist movements there.

More to the point on some idea of a U.S. invasion, the scale of excess deaths also is small by comparison to the hundreds of thousands into the millions caused by U.S.-led and preserved sanctions against Iraq, combined with infrastructure destruction during the "First" Gulf War, the continued infrastructure destruction under Clinton in "retaliation" for violations of no-fly zones, the renewed infrastructure devastation of the 2003 invasion, and the incompetent and corrupt failure of reconstruction during direct U.S. administration of the country and since the installation of our client government led by al-Maliki.

What the Myanmar government is doing and failing to do is not active genocide such as was carried out by the Rwandan government in 1994, which could have been and ultimately was stopped by military action. It is not even like the quasi-genocidal actions of the Sudanese government in its civil wars in the south of the country and more recently in Darfur.

It is a gross and grotesque failure of governmental duty to protect its own population, but as such is no worse and probably not as bad as the U.S. collusion with the Husseing government in Iraq in killing hundreds of thousands or millions with sanctions in the 1990s ("we think it's worth it -- Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the last Democratic administration in the U.S.), and our almost complete failures of responsibility as an occupying power after our aggression in 2003.

Bill R.'s point about the inconstency of an invasion with humanitarian relief as a practical matter is absolutely right. If the government were actively committing mass murder as was the case in Rwanda in 1994, that would be a different matter, and action under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter might be in order. But the destruction caused by an invasion and likely guerrilla war following would only create more displaced civilians, more destruction, more obstruction of people's ability to grow food. Exactly this tension is part of the problem in Darfur now, though only part of it. An even closer example might be the huge number of deaths caused by failure of government, civil war, and active and proxy wars by neighboring (post-genocide) Rwanda and Uganda in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Burmese government has been terrible and repressive for a long time. But the imprisoned opposition leader who won the last elections held there, Aung San Suu Kyi, has never called for external intervention to impose "regime change."

Change to what?

That's the part that keeps getting left out of these ideas. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan didn't have any follow-up to them. It's one thing to topple a government. It's something else entirely to replace it with something that actually works.

Myanmar's government is dysfunctional, but unless you've got a replacement in the wings -- or some way to hold things together at a level of cohesion better at least as strong as the existing government, foul as it might be -- then you're only exacerbating the situation.

It's not enough to make room for a Karzai or a Chalabi in the seat of government. They need to have governmental infrastructure, some way to maintain security, and the apparatus to execute government functions.

How many times do people need to make that mistake?

Let me urge us to call the country Burma, as James Fallows does here and here, saying “that people should call the country Burma -- as the Bush Administration, Senators Clinton, McCain*, and Obama, and the Washington Post do -- rather than Myanmar, the term chosen by its junta and now accepted by CNN, NPR, and the New York Times.”

Úberplanning Urbanlord,

The uninterest of the Bush administration in working with the U.N. is a direct reflection of the fact that the U.S. is not a "democratic and responsible nation."

Politically we are an electoral oligarchy. Our electoral system functions to restrict the choice of candidates and policy ideas just as much as the Supreme Council of the Revolution does in Iran, though by different mechanisms.

And the U.S. has been grossly irresponsible for decades -- pursuing narrow interests of only parts of the national population in an arrogant, hubristic, hypocritical and short-sightedly opportunistic manner. The extent to which Bush has transparently made "responsible" a synonym for "agrees with my policies" and made "reform" at the U.N. mean "change to produce greater agreement with my policies" is only a difference of degree, not in kind.