Burma's Crisis

The regime's impounding of some vital aid and its resistance to allowing foreign nations to save tens and even hundreds of thousands of lives seems to me to alter things. If there were ever a moment when the international community, led as it must be, by the U.S. and the U.N., should use force to prevent what now looks like mass murder, this is it. No dictatorship should prevent thousands of innocents from getting basic food relief, or some medical care in the face of the diseases that now threaten to kill more than the cyclone did. It is also a rare opportunity to open up the beleaguered, isolated repressed population to the outside world, and to show a face for the US and the West that is humane. When aid is being stolen or hoarded in front of our eyes, we have a duty to face down the junta.