The Serious People

Happy to see Jim Webb with an achievement, adding him to the rolls of Democrats who can use diplomacy to provide positive outcomes abroad. There is simply no antecedent on the Republican side. Who is the GOP daddy who can walk into Myanmar and get an American rescued? On the Democratic side you have Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton, Jim Webb - heck, even Jesse Jackson has pulled this off.

But Republicans are the adults, remember.

60,000 Dead

My word.

BANGKOK, May 6 -- The number of dead and missing in the Burma cyclone soared past 60,000 Tuesday amid signs the toll will rise even higher, as much of the disaster zone remained flooded by seawater, threatened by disease and out of reach of an international relief operation that is taking shape.

What I heard today is that Burma is 190th among 191 countries in incidents of water-borne disease. So now there's flooding all over the country, with 60,000 dead bodies in the water, maybe more? This is approaching a nightmare, and I have no confidence that the paranoiac military junta will be able to manage this situation, and certainly they won't allow anyone else to do so.

Just horrific.

More Dead In Myanmar

The tragedy in Myanmar is so widespread that the country is asking for outside help. For context, Myanmar was battered during the tsunami and resisted outside help.

"YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar said Monday more than 10,000 people died in the cyclone that battered the impoverished nation, whose secretive military rulers made a rare appeal for international help to cope with the tragedy.

Reeling from the weekend disaster, which also left thousands missing, the Southeast Asian country once known as Burma -- one of the world's poorest -- warned that the staggering death toll could still rise further.

'There could be more casualties,' said Nyan Win, foreign minister of the military junta which has ruled the country with an iron fist for decades, and normally puts tight restrictions on aid agencies from the outside world.

'We will welcome help like this from other countries, because our people are in difficulty,' he said."

It should be noted that NPR is reporting that relief organizations haven't yet been allowed inside the country, although World Vision already had a small group there and they have begun to operate emergency services.

This plays into the food crisis as well, because the area hit the hardest is full of rice paddies. Myanmar exports rice to Sri Lanka. Also, the World Food Program is coordinating relief efforts, which means a further strain to their resources.

The last number I heard was 22,000 dead. (I also don't put it past this government to add those monks murdered in last year's riots on to the top of the piles of bodies.)

I cannot say if relief money will actually get through, but here's a link.

UPDATE: Think Progress is right, any member of the Bush family trying to lecture anyone about the "inept" response to a natural disaster needs to shut their damn mouth.

Never Underestimate The Power Of A Few Committed Citizens

A few monks in Myanmar have led the President of the United States to pay attention to a 19-year old despotic regime:

US President George W Bush is to announce new sanctions against the ruling military junta in Burma, the White House has said. Mr Bush seems poised to impose a US visa ban and financial restrictions on members of the government. The move comes after eight days of increasingly popular protests against the junta led by Buddhist monks. The junta, which violently repressed protests in 1988, said it was ready to "take action" against the monks.

Mr Bush is expected to announce the new restrictions during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. The BBC's Jonathan Beale, in Washington, says the US has already made clear that it is preparing to take unilateral action against Burma's military dictators. Washington is also hoping that its steps will encourage other nations to act and embolden the protesters on Burma's streets, he adds.

More likely, it's that Bush was looking for something broadly popular that fits with his whole "freedom agenda" to tout at the UN. But Myanmar has hardly been in the global spotlight, until the monks started leading protests last month. The ruling junta has stifled dissent for years, with prominent human rights leaders jailed. They actually picked up and moved the capital city, in its entirety, without warning a couple years back, shaking up lives and stranding its increasingly burdened populace. And here's something interesting.

Mr. Steinberg said the demonstrations appeared to involve younger monks rather than the hierarchy of the country’s religious establishment.

Monks have been at the forefront of protests in Myanmar since colonial times, before the country, then known as Burma, won independence from Britain in 1948. They were prominent, along with students, in the nationwide uprising of 1988 that was crushed by the military with the loss of thousands of lives [...]

This time the junta has appeared reluctant to use force. The protests come at a time when Myanmar is attempting to present itself to the world as a democratizing nation, with the adoption early this month of new constitutional guidelines.

The technology of rapid communication is spreading film and photographs of the demonstrations both within and outside the country, and the junta can no longer operate in the shadows as it has in the past. Two weeks ago, however, soldiers reportedly manhandled a group of protesting monks in Pakokku, near central Mandalay, and fired several shots into the air.

In response, some monks briefly kidnapped a group of officials at a monastery and vandalized buildings belonging to members of the government. The confrontation in Pakokku apparently helped fuel the larger demonstrations that have taken place this week. They began after the government failed to offer an apology demanded by the Buddhist clergy.

The fact that younger monks are leading this fight, emboldened by new communication tools and a sense of standing outside the ruling establishment, shows that a parallel movement for change can happen virtually anywhere.