But the Burma crisis highlights a common unnamed factor in the rogue regimes of the world: China.
Our Left can now plaster a new "Save Burma" bumper sticker right between their fading "Save Tibet" bumper sticker and their someone less aged "Save Darfur" sticker. That will feel real good! And look great in the faculty parking lot!
Toss in a "Feed Zimbabwe" sticker, signs that protest actions to stop North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, and at least a couple advocating the impeachment of President Bush to ensure your audience knows who you blame for all these crises, and you are on tenure track for sure!
The bumper is getting rather busy, no? I mean, we're probably talking a small Prius or other subcompact car--not those big SUVs over in the engineering parking lot.
But at no time will these progressive facluly members consider the common factor to these humanitarian crises (and no, it isn't Halliburton):
Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged to him personally? China is always ready to help him out. Are the North Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee. How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists. The identity of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese settlers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China. It was this way when President Bill Clinton wanted the United Nations to take on Slobodan Milosevic and was stymied (by China, among others), and it was this way when President Bush asked the United Nations to live up to its resolutions on Saddam Hussein. And now I hear human rights activists bleating about Burma and our inaction and simultaneously complaining about the only time that any U.S. president had the nerve to break the hold of China (and Russia, and sometimes France) on the possibility of any international rescue.
China. That's what the answer is.
It would save a lot of bumper room to just put on a "Stop China" sticker. It would likely never go out of style regardless of the cause de jure.
But that won't happen. That would interfere with the Left's feel good buzz. We can't have that, now can we?
