On Not Pissing Off Than Shwe

Anne Applebaum, David Cameron, and others are calling for the rest of the world to ignore the junta and just start blanketing the country with aid from the air. It's certainly tempting; orphaned kids are getting sick as planeloads of medication wait a short trip away, and it's ludicrous that anyone should have to ask a bunch of barely educated thugs permission to deliver food and water. Still, its probably wishful thinking to envision a happy middle ground between submissively awaiting permission and full scale humanitarian intervention. No one has good enough information to know where, exactly, to dump a bunch of pallets, and Oxfam appears to think an air drop would make matters worse:

Air dropping aid does not guarantee food and other relief supplies reach the people most in need. In many cases it's the strongest and fittest who get to the aid first and not the sick or injured who most need help and assistance. In a natural disaster such as Cyclone Nargis or conflict like Dar-fur it's not only food that's needed but also sophisticated equipment such as clean water and sanitation systems weighing tonnes as well as highly skilled staff to operate them, all which cannot be dropped from the sky.

"If there isn't an aid operation on the ground to distribute the aid the air-drops can exacerbate any tense relations within communities with only the fittest and fastest benefiting," said Brian Scott.

While I doubt that sprinkling the delta with a bunch of high-energy biscuits is going to hurt cyclone victims in the short term, there is reason to worry about the junta's response to what it will call "invasion by Western Imperialists." Burma is isolated, but it is no North Korea; there is ample room for the generals to become more insular by cutting off Internet access and throwing all foreign workers out of the country.

This is a country that's always in crisis, and at any given time, dozens of well-funded foreign NGOs are operating within Burma. The United Nations Children's Fund, WorldVision, and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency have big aid operations, and Doctors Without Borders has a longstanding program that distributes anti-malarial drugs in remote regions. A military that will steal food from hungry people won't hesitate to rid itself of foreign doctors, teachers, and agronomists, and that's going to leave a lot of people much worse off. At the very least, the junta will respond by banning all authorized aid, which means that the teams waiting outside Burma now will never make their way over the border and on the ground.