Fish soup and democracy

This weekend, I was invited to a Burmese cultural event at the Leo Dowling International Center. Actually, it was more a political event than a cultural event. Although the festivities included the sampling of mon' hin gar (a fish and noodle soup) and a briefing on the wearing and uses of the longyi (the cotton skirt worn by both men and women throughout the country), much of the attention focused on photos and videos detailing the brutal repression of Burma's democracy movement. This caught me a little off guard -- I knew that Burma (officially Myanmar) had an autocratic government, but I wasn't expecting the political conditions to receive such emphasis, not that I ever mind talking politics. \nIt made more sense, however, when I learned that my hosts, the members of the Burmese Students Association, are refugees from the military junta that, since 1988, has ruled Burma with an iron fist. In taking power, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) killed thousands of protesters and has since handled its critics by packing them into some of the world's least pleasant prisons. Indeed, the SLORC is such a nasty piece of work, it has been publicly condemned by both Susan Sarandon and President Bush, making it perhaps the only thing upon which the two agree (www.freeburmacoalition.org).\nWhile I waited for my bowl of mon' hin gar, an article from the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs kept rattling around in the back of my mind. The uninitiated Foreign Affairs is a highly influential journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations and generally relies on historical anecdote, random statistics and author's prestige rather than empirical research. In this article, Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a foreign policy think-tank, argued "Destiny and choice have made the United States the dominant power in the world today, yet many U.S. policy makers -- both Republican and Democrat -- have failed to learn from past mistakes. The pursuit of their universal democratic utopia, as attractive as it may seem, is damaging vital U.S. interests …" (Foreign Affairs, Nov./Dec. 2003). This is because "democratic nations are not always prepared to support the United States (but) authoritarian ones sometimes are, including on the crucial issues of our time, such as nonproliferation and terrorism." \nIndeed, Simes complained that U.S. foreign policy had been Shanghaied by "powerful but too often reckless single-issue groups and non-governmental organizations -- which aspired to shape policy without having responsibility for its consequences" using "emotional but poorly explained television images."\n To be fair to Simes, I should make clear that his article is primarily concerned with the use of force -- that the U.S. military should not be sent in to overthrow one autocratic regime after another. Fair enough, this argument could be made on feasibility alone. But as I sat there, surrounded by folks approximately 8,000 miles away from home, trying to get the word out about the awful things happening back in their country, I couldn't help but think that he had it all wrong. In this country, democracy isn't something we advocate just because it's in our interest. We advocate it because it's what we are, even if it does result in a damned nuisance or two sometimes.\nSo when you finish this column, I want you to think about all the other folks who are out there reading papers that carry only the news the government wants them to hear. And I want you to think about what you can do to help them.