Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

Op Eds About Invading Burma

Here's Robert Kaplan in the NY Times and here's Jacob Sullum discussing that piece.

Some of Kaplan's reasoning in the case against really ought to have been applied to Iraq planning, especially the part about accepting responsibility for the ensuing civil war. On the other hand, the gall of the current regime to stand in the way and just let hundreds of thousands die rather than dare let people in... my knee-jerk impulse had been to strongly support regime change there (even before the cyclone).

Thought experiment: If, instead of a natural disaster, we had simply learned after the fact that the junta itself was killing people on that scale, how strong would the case for invasion be?

(I also think we should apply the Sudan rule as necessary (though it's unclear to me to what extent the junta has rejected UN, rather than U.S., help) : Any regime that publicly conflates UN peacekeeping troops with an invasion force, deserves to be invaded and toppled.)

If nothing else, I thoroughly agree with this Kaplan passage (change the "might" to "would" to get my exact opinion):
"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.)"