The U.S. Should Not Invade Burma
The Left Favors Military Action where there is no U.S. Interest
The calls to invade Burma are beginning. But should the military be used as a relief organization? And why didn't the left make that argument for the people of Iraq?
Calls for the United Sates to invade Burma (Myanmar) to save its desperate people from starvation, disease, and death in the wake of Cyclone Nargis are beginning to be heard rumbling on the American political left. But while the pictures and stories of the devastation visited on Burma by the storm are truly heart-rending, liberals would do well to remember recent U.S. experience in dealing with humanitarian relief operations in areas where there is no vested U.S. national interest. They should also recall that their concern for the human suffering of Iraq's people has been largely absent from their demands to bring an end to the Iraq War.
That Burma is ruled by a callous military dictatorship more concerned with maintaining its grip on the country than the welfare of its people is not much in doubt. Somalia was in a similar situation in the early 1990s, when a band of lawless warlords were preventing food shipments from reaching the people for whom they were intended. President George H.W. Bush, urged on by liberals and Democrats, ordered troops in to protect the shipments. President Bill Clinton later withdrew them after the loss of 19 soldiers in the famous "Black Hawk Down" incident in Mogadishu. Critics of the Somalia action said at the time that the United States had no national interest in Somalia, and stressed that the military was not an international relief organization. Those concerns were ignored in large part due to the emotions evoked by the sheer desperation of the Somali people. The U.S. withdrawal from Somalia, from a place that U.S. soldiers should never have been sent, is often cited by al-Qaeda leaders as the opening victory in their worldwide campaign against the United States.
The arguments made in favor of intervention in Somalia then, and in Burma today, were rejected by the American left when it came to Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who abused his people and stole the country's wealth for himself and his ruling Ba'ath Party elite. Iraq was a threat to U.S. national security, and President George W. Bush based his Administration's case for invading Iraq in part on the suffering of the Iraqi people. While not the primary reason for the invasion, concern for the people of Iraq was a part of every Bush speech in the run up to the war. But liberals and Democrats refused to heed those calls, accusing the Bush Administration of embarking on a war for oil, or to finish the job from the Gulf War, or to benefit Israel. It seems that the left is only comfortable using the military when there is no tangible benefit to the United States.
The relief effort undertaken by America after the 2004 Indonesian tsunami is widely viewed as a success and serves as a model for when the military should be called upon to assist in humanitarian tragedies. Unlike Somalia and Burma, the government of Indonesia welcomed international relief efforts. Additionally, as a moderate Muslim nation, the world's most populous one, Indonesia serves as a key ally for the United States in its battle against fundamentalist Islamic extremists. Assisting the people of that country after a natural disaster was not only the right thing to do from a moral imperative, but it was in the United States' best interest. Invading Burma, while it would make liberals feel better, serves no like purpose.
