Someone has finally said it

Time Magazine wonders whether – short of any other option to relieve a relievable disaster - it’s time to invade Burma.

To recap what’s in some of the posts below on this situation:

The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.

It’s unthinkable that the world remains poised and ready to rush in with all sorts of relief, but continues to be blocked by the strongmen who rule the country with a death grip. 

So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. UN food shipments have been seized. US naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.

The junta is more concerned about its power than the masses of people.

“We’re in 2008, not 1908,” says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. “A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.”

That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma.

How else to reach the people?

Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the US to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says.

They’re talking over options at the highest levels of the world community, talking it to death….the death of hundreds, thousands and increasingly more Burmese men, women and children. As the Time piece says, “the world’s capacity for mercy is limitless”, but what’s the quality of mercy so restrained?