So Secretary Rice has named Outposts of Tyranny:
"To be sure, in our world there remain outposts of tyranny and America stands with oppressed people on every continent ... in Cuba, and Burma (Myanmar), and North Korea, and Iran, and Belarus, and Zimbabwe."
The article provides quick summaries about the four. Personally, I think Myanmar and Zimbabwe just got on for changing their names to unpronouncable mouthfulls. We really should discourage that.
Seriously, I don't know why Venezuela was left off this list. As long as Axis of El Vil member Cuba was put on it, why not put Mini-Me on too?
Burma is a nice one and puts China on notice that one of their little thug buddies is in our sights. China may want to use Burma as a base to project naval and air power into the Indian Ocean but it isn't going to be a free shot.
Belarus is a shot at Russia. I sympathize with Putin in his own battle with those jihadis who would pull another Beslan, but Putin is short-sightedly courting China by selling Peking advanced military technology and alienating the West that he should be angling to enter--not thwart. Putin's decisions to undermine democracy and rule of law at home and in Ukraine will lose him important friends in the West. And China will one day look longingly at Russia's Pacific provinces taken from Peking in the nineteenth century.
Zimbabwe was a good choice since it tells the world that political correctness won't protect an African thug regime anymore from censure. It has been too long since the minority white regime was booted out to give the government the benefit of the doubt--long past time to apply standards of decency in fact.
Why not Sudan you might ask? Well personally, I hope that the Europeans will take the lead in doing something here. So keeping Sudan off of our list makes it less bad in Brussels to think about intervening over genocide in Darfur. I thought last June that an intervention was in the cards. Send in that vaunted European intervention force with a composite squadron of the US Air Force and a US Army parachute battalion to base out of Chad and establish no-drive/no-fly zones in Darfur so that aid groups can help the people of Darfur. It would be a nice feel-good mission that we and our European allies could conduct side-by-side. Instead we have relied on the UN to wag their finger in dsapproval and the African Union to wag two. Not surprisingly, more people have died. But I'm sure the report on the situation is a lovely read and has a nice index!
And by not adding another Moslem or Arab nation to the list, we probably hope to avoid censure that the third spot on the Axis of Evil is the Arab or Moslem seat. I doubt Syria takes much comfort from not being on the list.
With the administration promoting freedom as a basic goal, we have more chances to score success that is not related to nuclear thugs.
Iran and North Korea we will still deal with. I don't fear that the longer list dilutes the focus on nuclear tyrants and nuclear wannabees.
All in all, not a bad list. It spreads the notion of tyranny around the world and lets tyrants everywhere know that we are not too busy with the rump Axis of Evil to note their depravity.
