The silent, deadly remedy?

The United States is supposed to be the good guy, ready to fight dictators who threaten freedom.\nBut can we bring truth, justice and the American way to Myanmar?\nThe country, also known as Burma, is a brutal military dictatorship. Its ruling junta, the State Peace and Development Council, has embraced extraordinarily cruel policies to keep the former British colony's ethnic minorities under its control.\nOne State Department report says since 1996, the SPDC has destroyed more than 2,500 villages. That's 600,000 people, 350,000 of whom have been placed in SPDC-controlled "relocation centers." The rest are in hiding.\nEarly this summer, the SPDC's soldiers attacked the motorcade of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's best-known spokesperson for democracy, killing many of her aides. Since then, she's been under house arrest.\nAnd last December, the State Department said the United States was "appalled by reports that the Burmese military is using rape as a weapon against civilian populations."\nThe U.S. government and human rights groups have documented hundreds of rapes. More -- many more -- have almost certainly occurred. In perhaps a quarter of the rapes, the officers and soldiers killed the woman afterward.\nThe State Department tells its employees being sent to the U.S. embassy in Myanmar's capital Rangoon that the country "offers a glimpse of a bizarre Orwellian society that has withdrawn from contact with the late 20th century."\nThis summer, Congress passed a bill authorizing tough sanctions against Myanmar. The sanctions, which took effect in August, prohibit anything made in Burma from being imported into the United States. \nWhen he signed the bill, President Bush declared, "The United States will not waver from its commitment to the cause of democracy and human rights in Burma."\nThe bill's sponsor, California Democrat and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos, declared a victory for Myanmar's people.\n"United States imports of Burmese products have been bankrolling Burma's brutal dictatorship," Lantos said in a July press release. "Burma's major exporters are either owned by the ruling thugs or are intricately tied to the government. This bill will hit Burma's dictators where it hurts -- in their checking accounts." \nAt this point, if the world were simple and just, the story would end with Myanmar's military setting up a constitutional democracy with a free market and a free press. Superman always wins.\nThe world is neither simple nor just.\nThe sanctions may have made Myanmar's situation even worse.\nPresident Woodrow Wilson said sanctions were the best alternative to war, calling them "the silent, deadly remedy."\nThey may be silent and deadly. But they're no remedy.\nIn the most recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, journalist Mohammed Almedullah argues that the sanctions are "more likely to drive an estimated half million workers out of their jobs" than cause the regime to fall.\nThe sanctions will cause the closing of Myanmar's sweatshops, which make shoes and clothes for export. The sweatshops employ 400,000 people, mainly women, in terrible working conditions at virtually no pay.\nAnd yet, Almedullah writes, "Bad as they may be, the garment factories have given many Myanmarese women hope for a dignified existence."\nThe alternative, he says, is forced labor for the army. ... The army, you'll remember, doesn't treat women well.\n"(C)ivilian managers … are usually several notches less brutal than the thugs in uniform," Almedullah writes.\nThe United States is supposed to be the good guy. Myanmar's generals are clearly the bad guys.\nBut this isn't a comic book, good doesn't always win.\nHow do we bring democracy and peace to Myanmar?\nI don't know.\nMaybe we can't.