The case for forcible humanitarian aid--not

Sunday Times:

One April day in 1991 the world awoke to the news that a devastating cyclone and tidal wave had struck the coast of Bangladesh. As bodies washed ashore by the thousand and the death toll rose to 139,000, with millions homeless, a huge aid effort swung into action.

Seven thousand American troops, diverted on their way home from the Gulf, boosted the relief effort. The American amphibious taskforce lifted 300 tons of relief materials in one day, matching the entire effort in the first two weeks of the Bangladesh government and its allies.

In January 2005 another huge American military relief mission was estimated to have saved tens of thousands of lives in the tsunami-battered countries of southeast Asia.

Marines with water-purifying equipment headed for Sri Lanka, giant cargo planes loaded with relief material landed at a former base for B-52 bombers in Thailand and helicopters ferried supplies to isolated survivors clinging to life in Aceh, Indonesia, where the wave had killed about 100,000 people.

This American humanitarian intervention was particularly noteworthy because Aceh was the scene of a civil war. Also, Washington’s relations with Jakarta were strained over human rights violations. None-the-less Indonesia welcomed American assistance.

The people of Burma have no such luck. “We are in a long line of nations who are ready, willing and able to help, but also, of course, in a long line of nations the Burmese don’t trust,” said Eric John, the American ambassador Burma’s ruling junta suspects that American aid has political motives, and not totally without cause. A day after Laura Bush highlighted Burma’s failure to warn people before the cyclone President George W Bush criticised the generals’ rule and told them to open up to the world.

He simultaneously signed legislation awarding a congressional gold medal to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy leader whom the junta holds under house arrest.

There is no doubt an American humanitarian mission would save a significant number of Burmese lives if allowed. Faced with the junta’s refusal, ought America be prepared to intervene regardless?

One strong advocate of intervention is Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister. Expressing righteous anger over the junta’s callousness last week he proposed forcing the delivery of aid on Burma.

Kouchner invoked the United Nations’s “responsibility to protect” civilians, a concept conceived at a summit in 2005, partly in response to atrocities in Rwanda and Darfur in Sudan.

His call was echoed by Andrew Natsios, the former head of the US Agency for International Development. “Sometimes you have to . . . intervene against the wishes of the local government,” he said.

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This is what is called "liberal aggression." A meals on wheels war where the US has no vital interest to protect or defend. Its the Democrat's kind of war. Hopefully President Bush will not be persuaded in this folly. Think Somalia, and then reconsider this suggestion. We shouldn't do it for the same reason we are not fighting our way into Darfur to feed people.

The Belmont Club looks at the argument for fighting for humanitarianism. Have these liberals considered that the same argument would be much more urgently used to stop the ongoing brutality in Zimbabwe? Has a one of them suggested war against the commie control freak despot in charge of Zimbabwe? The Burma generals are brutal thugs who beat up people who ask for democracy. Mugabe beats up those who exercise it.