Liberation from Bush

With the end of the loathed Bush era, it is curtains for America’s neocons. But what about Indian neocons who hailed the Bush Doctrine, cheered on the invasion of Iraq, advocated the dispatch of Indian forces there, pushed for aligning Indian policy with the misguided Bush stance on Pakistan, Iran and Burma, and want Indian troops in Afghanistan?

If there is anyone who claims to have got a sense of Bush’s soul, it is Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, now preparing for his last Bush White House visit. Singh looked into Bush’s eyes and ostensibly read three words: love for India. History may spell those words differently: trouble for India.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, November 5, 2008

When the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the Cold War, there was common hope that the world would finally reap the peace dividend. But nearly two decades later, potent new dangers and divisions confront the world. The credit for making the world more unsafe and divided goes largely to President George W. Bush, who will go down in history as an extraordinarily reckless and blundering leader. The greatest damage from his cowboy diplomacy was to America’s own interests and international standing. Little surprise he is leaving office as the most unpopular president in the history of U.S. polling.

The unprecedented mess that has occurred on Bush’s watch crimps his successor’s options. This raises the troubling question whether things could get worse before they start becoming better.

After all, America has not only exported its financial crisis to the rest of the world, but also is still waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to avert war with Iran and North Korea. Iraq is in a mess even if the number of monthly deaths has dropped to its lowest since May 2004. A resurgent Taliban is tearing apart the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. A nuclear-armed, terror-wedded Pakistan is sinking. Osama bin Laden is still at large. And international terrorism is on the rise. All this has happened when U.S. neoconservatives (or “neocons”) were boasting that America has a monopoly on power unrivalled since the Roman Empire.

            The abdication of American values has been epitomized by Bush’s establishment of the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the revealed network of illegal CIA detention camps elsewhere. That has helped undermine America’s real strength — its ability to inspire and lead. The United States, after all, won the Cold War not by military means but by spreading the ideas of freedom, open markets and better life that helped drain the lifeblood from communism’s international appeal.

Had Bush not landed his country in costly, intractable military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, he may have been tempted to unleash America’s untrammelled power elsewhere — by going after the next fire-snorting dragon on the neocons’ target list, be it Syria, Iran or North Korea. Thus, a silver lining of his blunders was that some countries were saved and that the initial neocon triumphalism gave way to a hard-to-conceal erosion of U.S. soft and hard power, with much of the world seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the Patriot Act and Guantanamo as symbols of such decline.

The epoch-shaping U.S. presidential election marks the end of the misbegotten Bush era. Not unsurprisingly, the liberation from Bush is bringing a collective sigh of relief in the world.

Bush’s flub diplomacy was fashioned by the neocons, for whom 9/11 came as a blessing in disguise to gain ascendancy in policymaking. Given Bush’s provincial background, his knowledge of foreign affairs was minimal when he came to the White House. Indeed, after becoming president, he once confessed that “this foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating”.

The neocons were the architects of the Bush Doctrine, founded on the belief that aggression pays and that naked aggression pays handsomely. The core tenets of the Bush Doctrine were fourfold: the United States should pursue pre-emptive strikes where necessary; it should be willing to act unilaterally — alone or with a “coalition of the willing” — if it cannot win the United Nations’ sanction; the primary focus should be on politically transforming the Middle East; and Iraq ought to be the cornerstone in bringing about region-wide democratic change.

Enunciating the doctrine’s most-controversial tenet — pre-emptive action — Bush, in his June 2002 address at West Point, had said deterrence and containment were no longer enough to defend U.S. interests and America thus “must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act”.

The neocons, in views expressed through the Project for the New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, the journals Weekly Standard and First Things, and their own website, had for long vented their messianic ambition to remake the Middle East and then the rest of the world. Their rise in policymaking accentuated their estrangement in the Republican Party from conservative realists, whose mouthpiece, the National Review, once ran a mocking headline: “You can’t spell ‘messianic’ without mess”.

The ascendance of the neocons, many of them Jewish, was facilitated by their intellectual partnership with the Christian Right — a constituency dear to Bush, a born-again Christian, and his wife, Laura. A foreign-policy focus on the Biblical lands meshed well with the neocon and Christian Right worldview.

Yet, such were the simplistic calculations that an occupied Iraq was visualized as a profit hub for U.S. energy, infrastructure, construction and other firms and as an everlasting American military outpost. Occupation, however, turned out not only to be a huge financial burden on the United States, but also has transformed a stable, secular Iraq into a failed state whose ruins fan Islamist trends. No thought was given to how, in an era of globalization, imperialism moulded on conquest could be practiced, even if under the garb of democracy promotion. Democracy, in any event, centres on the exercise of free choice, which presupposes that the state enjoys sovereignty.

The neocons advocated — and Bush blithely accepted — an expansion of U.S. military bases across Eastern Europe, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest and Central Asia. Using the war on terror as justification, Bush exerted pressure on several states to win permission for US forces to set up bases for the long haul. The new bases have helped establish the largest-ever U.S. military presence overseas since World War II.

But all that assertiveness and interventionism only made the United States unpopular. The Bush Doctrine, in its zeal to identify and target “rogue” states, helped turn — as American commentator Nicholas Kristof has put it — “a superpower into a rogue country”.

From Bush’s refusal to back family planning through the UN Population Fund to his wife’s missionary diplomacy against the Burmese military regime, Christian fundamentalist beliefs have played havoc with U.S. foreign policy.

The extent to which Bush was influenced by his religious beliefs can be seen from the manner his relationship with Vladimir Putin bloomed the moment the now Russian prime minister told Bush in 2001 that he had been given a cross by his mother. According to Bob Woodward’s Bush At War, Bush instantly said to Putin: “That speaks volumes to me, Mr. President. May I call you Vladimir?” Bush then said publicly: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward… I was able to get a sense of his soul”. The curmudgeonly John McCain also claims to have looked into Putin’s eyes and seen not soul, but three letters: K-G-B.

By contrast, if there is anyone who claims to have got a sense of Bush’s soul it is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, now preparing for his last Bush White House darshan. Singh looked into Bush’s eyes and ostensibly read three words: love for India. History may spell those words differently: trouble for India.

With the end of the loathed Bush era, it is curtains for America’s neocons. But what about Indian neocons who hailed the Bush Doctrine, cheered on the invasion of Iraq, advocated the dispatch of Indian forces to aid the US occupation of Iraq, pushed for aligning Indian policy with the misguided Bush stance on Pakistan, Iran and Burma, and until recently wanted New Delhi to consider sending troops to Afghanistan? Will they disown their past, or change colours, or simply wait to latch on the next U.S. presidential doctrine?  

(c) Asian Age, 2008.

Rising geopolitical risks have been underscored by today’s multiple global crises — from a severe global credit crunch and financial tumult to serious energy and food challenges.

Add to that the international failure to stem the spreading scourge of terrorism and the specter of a renewed Cold War arising from the deterioration in relations between the West and Russia since Moscow’s August retaliatory military intervention in Georgia and subsequent recognition of the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some portray as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

The world clearly is at a turning point, underscored by the ongoing tectonic shifts in political and economic power. Tinkering won’t help because the global crises cry out for fundamental changes in international rules and institutions.

That was the broad conclusion at the Oct. 6-8 World Policy Conference in Evian, France, attended by a number of heads of state or government, policymakers and intellectuals, including this writer. The common theme in many of the presentations was that the grave challenges the world faces today demand major fixes, including the revamping of the institutional structure.

If existing institutions are not adapted to the new power realities in the world, greater instability is likely to ensue. As French President Nicolas Sarkozy pointed out, a 21st-century world is saddled with 20th-century institutions. Consequently, there is great uncertainty over how to address the pressing challenges.

In addition to the imperative to enlarge the U.N. Security Council and the Group of Eight, the failing Bretton Woods system for governing monetary relations needs to be overhauled. The various crises have shown, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev highlighted, that no single power or institution can claim exclusive rights to set the rules.

Changing the international institutional structure, however, is no easy task. The existing institutions were born of crises and now represent entrenched interests of some players. It will be difficult to reform or replace them until a serious, sustained crisis makes change inescapable. The financial meltdown could be one such crisis that facilitates an overhaul of the Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund at a time when Asia and the Middle East have emerged as the world’s main creditors.

As the futile efforts to reform the Security Council for more than two decades illustrate, revamping any institution is a Herculean task. Even reforming the International Energy Agency is proving daunting. Meantime, great powers continue to impose their will on weaker nations or limit their freedom of action.

For long, but especially since the end of the Cold War, democracy and markets have been touted as the twin answer to all ills, nationally and regionally. Today, both have come under serious strain.

Democracy is in retreat globally after the successes of the 1990s in spreading political freedoms to Eastern Europe and overturning dictatorships in Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. In fact, China’s dramatic rise as a world power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The financial crisis, for its part, has helped turn free-market principles on their head.

After having dispensed one prescription to all — liberalize, privatize and emulate the Anglo-American practices of financial and corporate governance — the U.S. has taken the lead to precipitously embrace principles of financial socialism in the current crisis. The U.S. has swung from implicit faith in the power of markets to bailing out its troubled financial colossuses in a manner that seeks to keep the profits in private hands but nationalize the losses.

By palming off losses to the masses, the U.S. has not only backed away from its own model of capitalism, but also set in motion new practices that some European economies have been to quick to emulate. Nothing better illustrates the troubling turn of events than London’s use of an anti-terrorism law to freeze the British assets of an Icelandic bank.

The U.S.-government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bailout of AIG and moves to partially nationalize some banks mark the end of America’s trust-the-markets capitalism. Henceforth, the U.S. will have no face to preach laissez-faire capitalism.

In fact, the global financial mayhem has resulted from the excesses of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, symbolized by unbridled risk-taking, which created a liquidity problem before manifesting itself as a solvency problem.

The lesson: High living on borrowed Asian money is just not sustainable.

The gap between principle and practice, unfortunately, has also extended to the political-diplomatic realm. The West, for example, has supported the inviolability of international borders while contradictorily backing the right of self-determination.

Having sponsored Kosovo’s self-proclamation of independence from Serbia in February 2008, the U.S. and some of its allies now find themselves in the awkward position of opposing the right of self-determination of the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — today self-declared independent entities under Russian protection. It is as if the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depends on which great power sponsors the action.

The present global fault lines and crises carry significant security risks. The most pressing challenges today are global in nature and thus demand international responses and solutions. Yet the representational deficit of the existing institutions and their inadequacy to play an effective and forward-looking approach has become glaring.

The events of September 2008 that set in motion the financial meltdown and now threaten global recession have proven no less significant than 9/11.

While 9/11 involved terrorist attacks on symbols of U.S. power, the events since last month are an insidious assault on U.S. financial might, which helps underpin America’s global strategic heft. Along with the other crises, they signal an end to the leadership role the U.S. has played economically and politically since World War II ended. The multiple crises are proof that America, with its own internal mess, is no longer able to play global guardian.

Until a new world order emerges, we will continue to live, to quote Sarkozy, in "a dysfunctional world with outdated set of rules." Only revamped institutions and new rules can deal with the root causes of the present crises, not just the symptoms.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.

El celo de la primera dama

LA VANGUARDIA, May 31, 2008

Por Brahma Chellaney, profesor de estudios estratégicos del Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi:

Un desastre natural suele ser ocasión propicia para apartar a un lado las diferencias políticas y mostrar compasión. No obstante, la Birmania devastada por el ciclón, gobernada por elites militares ultranacionalistas y rapaces, temerosas de sanciones de parte de Occidente, se ha visto presionada para franquear sus áreas devastadas a la ayuda humanitaria o bien enfrentarse a una intervención armada de signo asimismo humanitario.

La politización de la ayuda ha oscurecido el papel de una protagonista cuyos esfuerzos han contribuido a ejercer mayores presiones sobre los generales birmanos. En cuanto el ciclón Nargis,con vientos de hasta 190 kilómetros por hora, devastó el delta del Irawadi, la esposa del presidente Bush, Laura, lanzó públicamente improperios contra los aislados gobernantes birmanos. En una comparecencia sin precedentes en la sala de prensa de la Casa Blanca – dominio tradicional del presidente y del secretario de Estado- Laura Bush peroró sobre política exterior y acusó a la junta birmana del elevado número de víctimas del ciclón. Y en diciembre, Laura Bush dijo en Nueva Delhi que “India, uno de los principales socios comerciales de Birmania, ya no vende armas a la junta”, para sorpresa de la audiencia.

A decir verdad, siendo China un suministrador de armas de confianza desde hace 20 años y pudiendo abastecerse de armas a través de Singapur y Rusia, la junta apenas precisa de armamento indio. India, en cualquier caso, tampoco llevará la contraria a la primera dama estadounidense, imbuida de furor moral y religioso.

Por otra parte, no es difícil optar por la prédica ética contra Birmania, uno de los países del mundo más endebles y en situación más crítica. Sancionar a Birmania de vez en cuando se había convertido en un pasatiempo tan dilecto al presidente Bush que sólo 24 horas antes del ciclón anunció otra tanda de sanciones. Ninguna instancia mundial, sin embargo, ha llegado a sugerir medidas penales (moderadas) contra China por su permanente represión brutal en Tíbet, pues las sanciones acarrearían pérdida de empleos y otros inconvenientes económicos a Occidente.

De hecho, incitado por su esposa, Bush ha firmado más medidas para sancionar a Birmania en los últimos cinco años que contra cualquier otro país. La cruzada de Laura Bush contra la junta militar que se considera a sí misma defensora de la unidad e identidad cultural birmana, predominantemente budista, obedece a la inspiración encarnada en algunas iglesias cristianas que cuentan con notables minorías étnicas, aparte de una reunión mantenida al parecer en aquel país con una víctima cristiana de una violación. En cambio, tanto Laura Bush como su marido encontraron la senda despejada en relación con una intervención militar en la política de países vecinos de Birmania, como Bangladesh y Tailandia.

Aunque la junta militar birmana accedió al poder en 1962, las primeras sanciones estadounidenses de importancia no llegaron hasta 1997. No obstante, el punto de mira sobre Birmania se fijó con mayor precisión y fuerza bajo el mandato de Bush.

Actualmente, Birmania se halla atrapada entre las sanciones lideradas por Estados Unidos y la creciente influencia de China. Azuzado por el diablo que le pisa los talones, el país se inclina hacia el profundo mar azul de la benevolencia china.

Al tratar a Birmania como un títere en el marco de un juego geopolítico más amplio e intentar llevar al país ante el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas, la Casa Blanca no hace más que aumentar la necesidad de protección política de la junta procedente de una China dotada de poder de veto, con la consiguiente obligación de agradecer tal protección a Pekín. Muestra de ello ha sido la firma de un contrato gasista de 30 años de vigencia.

Las iniciativas estadounidenses no sólo han obligado a Birmania a desplazarse del no alineamiento al alineamiento, sino que han motivado una dependencia mayor de la política estadounidense respecto de Pekín en lo concerniente a Birmania.

Como en el caso de Corea del Norte, Bush externaliza alegremente en China una parte de su política con relación a Birmania. Sin embargo, la política estadounidense acusa también el peso del celo misionero de Laura Bush sobre Birmania. Lejos de mejorar la situación de los derechos humanos en el país, este miope activismo ha contribuido a reforzar a la junta. La amenaza de una invasión por causas humanitarias de Birmania hiede a recurso desesperado y apunta a un deseo de valerse de la herramienta humanitaria para provocar un cambio político.

Ahora resulta que una mujer no electa ni titular de responsabilidad alguna secuestra la política de Estados Unidos para promover paradójicamente elecciones libres y responsabilidad pública en Birmania. Y el doblemente electo y renacido cristiano Bush da fe de hallarse bajo la influencia de su esposa, como se constata mediante la expresión “Laura y yo” en su último anuncio de sanciones contra Birmania.

Pero, como dice la Biblia, “no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver”.

(c) LA VANGUARDIA

Missionary Diplomacy

Laura Bush’s Burma crusade, driven by a moral and religious calling, has increasingly pushed that strategically located country into China’s strategic lap while undercutting Indian interests.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 24, 2008

A natural calamity is usually an occasion to set aside political differences and show compassion. But after a powerful cyclone tore into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on the night of May 2-3, that isolated country — ruled by ultra-nationalistic but rapacious military elites deeply distrustful of the sanctions-enforcing West — came under mounting international pressure to open up its devastated areas to foreign aid workers and supplies or face an armed humanitarian intervention.

            Such threats have helped lay a tentative framework for an ASEAN-led aid operation, a middle option that is supposed to end an impasse over the Burmese regime’s refusal to allow the entry of foreign relief teams other than from the Asian states it considers friendly, including India, China, ASEAN members and Japan. But even as the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has toured the cyclone-wracked areas, the World Food Programme has brought in helicopters, and aid teams from India and other neighbouring nations continue their work, the junta still faces intense pressure from the sanctions-applying states to throw open Burma’s borders to Western relief workers.

The murky politics of international assistance has helped obscure the role of a key actor whose growing activism in recent years has helped turn up the heat on the Burmese generals. The increasingly outspoken Laura Bush, the first lady of the US, has emerged as the main driver of America’s Burma policy.

No sooner had Cyclone Nargis, packing winds up to 190 kilometres per hour, battered the Irrawaddy Delta than President George W. Bush’s wife stepped out in public to toss insults at Burma’s military rulers. In an unprecedented spectacle, the first lady showed up at the White House briefing room — normally the preserve of the president and secretary of state — and held forth on foreign policy, blaming the junta for the high death toll. The next day, as announced by Laura Bush, President Bush presided at a ceremony awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the detained leader of Burma’s democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi.

In the twilight of her husband’s presidency, the 61-year-old Laura Bush — a former librarian — has left no one in doubt on who directs Burma policy in Washington. In a prepared statement that she read out at the White House briefing room on May 5 before taking questions from reporters, she thanked “the European Union, Canada and Australia for joining the United States in imposing” sanctions, and went on to “appeal to China, India and Burma’s fellow ASEAN members to use their influence to encourage a democratic transition.”

Last December, Laura Bush caught New Delhi by surprise by announcing that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta.” To date, New Delhi has made no such announcement.

With China serving as a reliable weapon supplier for the past two decades and access to arms also available via Singapore and Russia, the junta has little need for India’s low-grade, mostly second-hand, arms. But New Delhi has dared not say a word in contradiction to Mrs. Bush’s statement during a December 10, 2007, video teleconference on International Human Rights Day. Who can refute a first lady whose fury on Burma flows from a moral and religious calling?

It is easy to play the morality game against Burma, ranked as one of the world’s critically weak states.

Slapping Burma with new sanctions every so often has become such a favourite Bush pastime that just one day before the cyclone struck, the president announced yet another round of punitive actions. But no one in the world has suggested any penal measure, however mild, against China for its continuing brutal repression in Tibet because sanctions would bring job losses and other economic pain to the West.

In fact, egged on by his wife, Bush has signed more executive orders in the past five years to penalize Burma than any other country.

Mrs. Bush’s crusade against the Burmese military, which sees itself as the upholder of a predominantly Buddhist Burma’s unity and cultural identity, has been inspired by three separate elements: (i) information from some of the Christian churches that have sizable ethnic-minority adherents in that country; (ii) a meeting she reputedly had with a Christian Karen rape victim; and (iii) the briefings she received from Elsie Walker Kilborne, a cousin of President Bush. By contrast, she and her husband have had little problem with the military’s intervention in politics in Burma-neighbouring Bangladesh and Thailand.

Such is Laura Bush’s activism that last September it was she, not the president, who telephoned Ban ki-moon and called for the UN to be more active on Burma. Earlier, in 2006, she moderated a roundtable discussion at the UN that sought to draw attention to the junta’s political repression. She has condemned the regime not just in official statements and congressional testimony, but also in two opinion articles published last year in the Wall Street Journal.

In an October 2007 article, titled “Stop the Terror in Burma,” she put forth her demand clearly: “Gen. Than Shwe and his deputies are a friendless regime. They should step aside to make way for a unified Burma governed by legitimate leaders. The rest of the armed forces should not fear this transition — there is room for a professional military in a democratic Burma. In fact, one of Burma’s military heroes was also a beloved champion of Burmese freedom: General Aung San, the late father of Aung San Suu Kyi.” She added: “The regime’s position grows weaker by the day. The generals’ choice is clear: The time for a free Burma is now.” In an earlier June 19, 2007, op-ed, she said: “The Burmese regime poses an increasing threat to the security of all nations.”

In May 2007, Mrs. Bush enlisted 16 women Senators to join her in sending a signed letter to Ban Ki-Moon calling for the U.N. to pressure the Burmese regime to release Suu Kyi. And since last year, she has repeatedly met with the UN’s special envoy for Burma, Ibrahim Gambari.

After her phone call to the UN secretary-general created a public stir, she said: “I think that this is sort of one of those myths that I was baking cookies and then they fell off the cookie sheet and I called Ban Ki-moon.” That comment harked back to Hillary Clinton’s famous remark during her husband’s presidency that she was not one to stay home and bake cookies.

This week, as the junta still refuses to accept aid from four US naval ships that have been waiting in the Bay of Bengal with 1,000 Marines, 14 helicopters, and 15,000 water containers and purifying kits on board, Laura Bush went on the Voice of America — a US Congress-funded broadcaster with a Burmese language service — to tell the regime that it has nothing to fear and that “there would be absolutely no strings attached with this aid.”

The unpalatable fact is that her angry denunciations right after Cyclone Nargis had struck only contributed to the junta’s resistance to allowing Western relief workers to enter, deepening the aid crisis. As the Los Angeles Times reported on May 10, 2008, quoting several critics, “the administration’s harsh comments were poorly timed and risked reinforcing the government’s suspicions of the outside world and undermining the humanitarian effort.”

Although the Burmese military seized power in 1962, the first substantive U.S. sanctions, tellingly, did not come until 1997, when a ban on further American investments to “develop Burma’s resources” was reluctantly clamped by President Bill Clinton. But it was only under Bush that Burma emerged as a major target of U.S. sanctions.

Escalating sanctions have compelled a country whose nationalism has traditionally bordered on xenophobia to increasingly rely on China, even as its rulers still suspect Chinese intentions. Today, Burma finds itself trapped between U.S.-led sanctions and growing Chinese leverage over its affairs.

But with the devil close on its heels, Burma — which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has labelled an “outpost of tyranny” — has moved toward the deep blue sea of Chinese “benevolence.”

For a resource-hungry China, Burma has proven such a treasure trove that some northern Burmese provinces today stand stripped of their high-quality tropical hardwoods and precious gemstones. Beijing also has used Burma as a dumping ground for cheap Chinese products, besides running large trade surpluses with that impoverished country.

Aided by Western disengagement from Burma, Chinese entrepreneurs, traders, money lenders, craftsmen and others have flocked to that country, now home to between one to two million Chinese economic migrants. With their higher living standards setting them apart from the natives, these migrants constitute Burma’s new economic class.

While unintentionally aiding Chinese interests, the US-led penal campaign has cost New Delhi dear, reflected in China’s setting up of listening posts and other moves in Burma that open a security flank against India. In the Bush years, India has been losing out even on commercial contracts.

By treating Burma as a pawn in a larger geopolitical game and seeking to drag it before the United Nations Security Council, the White House only increases the junta’s need for political protection from a veto-armed China, with the consequent Burmese imperative to reward Beijing for such defence.

One reward to China for stepping in twice last year to shield Burma in the Security Council has been a 30-year contract to take gas by pipeline from two offshore fields owned by an Indo-Korean consortium. The junta first withdrew the status of India’s GAIL company as the “preferential buyer” of gas from the A-1 and A-3 blocks in the Bay of Bengal and then signed a production-sharing contract with China’s state-run CNPC firm.

The U.S. penal measures and moves have not only forced Burma to shift from its traditional policy of nonalignment to alignment, but also driven U.S. policy to become dependent on Beijing for any movement on Burma.

This is apparent both from the way the US has pleaded with China this month to use all its influence to press the junta to open up the cyclone-battered areas to outside relief efforts, and from the secret mid-2007 US meeting with Burmese ministers that was held at America’s initiative in Beijing.

The Beijing meeting, held without prior US consultations with India, Japan and ASEAN states, came six months after China had torpedoed a Security Council draft resolution tabled by the US and Britain that called on the Burmese regime to halt military attacks on ethnic minorities, release iconic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, and begin a democratic transition. By taking China’s help to set up a meeting between its deputy assistant secretary of state and senior Burmese government representatives, the US only helped validate Beijing’s rationale for maintaining close contact with the junta.

Like on North Korea, Bush is blithely outsourcing to China parts of the US policy on Burma. But on Burma, US policy is also weighed down by Laura Bush’s missionary zeal.

Far from improving human rights in Burma, the blinkered activism has helped strengthen the military’s political grip. Recent threats of a humanitarian invasion of Burma indeed reeked of desperation, suggesting a callous willingness to employ food aid in a disaster situation to try and effect political change.

Today, an unelected, unaccountable woman holds US policy hostage to paradoxically promote free elections and public accountability in Burma. And her twice-elected, twice-born Christian husband — whom she persuaded to quit drinking at age 40 — attests to being under his wife’s sway through the “Laura and I” reference in his latest Burma-sanctions announcement. But as the Bible says, “There is none so blind as he who will not see.”

© Asian Age, 2008.

(Photograph at top shows Laura Bush meeting Karen and other minority-ethnic representatives from Burma at the White House, along with a U.S. congressman and an American adviser to the Karen National Union. Photograph released by the White House.)