If by "compromise," you mean "root out and destroy all opposition," then yes.

Kerry Howley | February 16, 2005

Slate has a piece up about my favorite outpost of tyranny, and it's a fairly accurate roundup of the situation in Burma. It's certainly true that your average Burman-on-the-street is an enthusiastic Bush supporter and that the current policy of unilateral sanctions is ineffective at best. But then there is this line:

Internally, the Burmese are starting to realize that the democrats and tyrants will have to work out a compromise, no matter how painful it is.

Now that's a strange spin on things. Just months ago, General Than Shwe arrested his Prime Minister, the only official who even gave lip service to compromise, and placed him under house arrest on trumped up charges. He also fired his conciliatory foreign minister and replaced him with a hard-line thug who doesn't speak English. The state press started to pump out anti-neocolonialist rhetoric like I'd never seen before. The government threw the co-owner of the Myanmar Times, where I was working and which Jai Singh quotes, in the infamous Insein Prison, and started forcing the newspaper to print its xenophobic screeds. "Compromise" does not appear to be on the agenda.

Comments

KipEsquire|2.16.05 @ 4:16PM|#

The piece also had not one mention of the Burmese tsunami death-toll scandal.

|2.16.05 @ 4:30PM|#

I'm thinking of having that headline made into a plaque and/or t-shirt.

Warren|2.16.05 @ 4:43PM|#

Burma is a fact that conclusively proves Bush is still lying about Iraq.

|2.16.05 @ 5:54PM|#

Having those headaches again, Warren?