I find most regrettable that my basic assumption that an EU sanction would be fundamentally toothless would be ultimately correct. I very much would like to be wrong about Europe some day, but based on their history of talking much and doing little, I don’t expect to be.

It’s time to get our President off his duff and into some real action. I’m afraid that when he does, he’ll bear the brunt of the criticism for his “unilateral” wild ways, but if it puts any pressure at all on the junta, I think he’ll take the slings and arrows.

So Jimmie, I will concede that the Europeans are doing nothing.

“China and India are prominent trading partners with Burma. I’m thinking that with as much business as we send those two nations, there’s some real way we can press them to cut off the cash flow.”

I take this to mean that you believe that cutting off the cash flow from India and China to the Burmese junta would be a good thing. So why is cutting off the larger cash flow from Thailand bad? And what I’m proposing is not really a sanctions regime. It doesn’t require the cooperation of anyone but Chevron- Texaco. Unanimity is guaranteed because there is only a single entity. And such an action would hardly be illegal. The government does have the right to regulate commerce, and laws barring businesses from operating in hostile regimes are common. In fact, there already are laws banning US companies from doing business with Burma. It’s just that Chevron- Texaco is exempt from those laws. Bush can sign an executive order removing their exemption from existing law. Now it would violate Burmese law, but I’m not too concerned about that. After all, the junta itself is illegal. The main problem with the proposal is that China will build a pipeline to China and buy the gas. They are already planning such a pipeline, but it will take 5 years to build. And it will no doubt be built by slaves supplied by the Burmese junta. That’s certainly a bad thing, but China will build its pipeline regardless of whether the Thailand pipeline operates or not. Short of going to war with China, there’s nothing we can do to stop that pipeline. The other problem is that we must compensate Thailand for their losses, but that won’t cost too much. About a week’s worth of Iraq expenses should cover it. It’s not a perfect plan, but it might work. And it will certainly work better than trying to pressure India and China to do what we are unwilling to do ourselves.

The junta will still be killing Burmese.

Put in place all the sanctions you want. They won’t work. They’ve never worked. Sanctions fail because you can never get unanimity. There will always be some nation with deep pockets willing to violate the sanctions and the whole thing just serves to further brutalize the people. Google “Oil for Food” for a recent example.

But, you’re putting the cart before the horse. I firmly believe that we, the people, should insist that our corporations not deal with brutal regimes no matter what favorable deals they strike. That’s our job, though, not that of the government. That’s a problem we can certainly tackle once the junta stops dragging people out of their beds in the middle of the night and executing them. The problem is immediate.

It did make me laugh, though, that you put the words “European actions” together, as if the Europeans had actually done anything. They haven’t. They’ve agreed to think about doing something. That’s not action. That’s just a way that folks who like to talk about human rights make themselves feel better without taking any action at all.

Kind of like a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker on the back of a car of someone who thinks that liberating 24 million Iraqis was an unforgivable sin.

1) They’re sanctions, which never, ever work.
2) They’ve agreed “in principle”, which means that they’ll probably enact sanctions at some point soon, but haven’t actually done it yet.
2) They don’t prevent the most marketable commodity Burma has: oil.

And no European leader has yet stepped out onto the world stage and taken the junta killers to task.

In fact, Javier Solana was patting the EU on the back for “passing serious messages” to India and China.

Yep. Serious messages. That’s going to get monks out of torture prisons.

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Myanmar_junta_warns_of_more_arrests_10032007.html