We are using diplomacy in Berma, and tens of thousands of people are dying each day. Again, this isn’t my idea, and I am not necessarily advocating it. This “silly” idea comes from Time Magazine. But the fact is as we talk, tens of thousands of people are dying and it is very possible that we are rapidly running out of time to save hundreds of thousands more.
No, those who remain home are supporting the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. If they left thier jobs in the US the troops now in the Middle East would suffer.
I am glad that Time admits that diplomacy doesn’t always work. There seems to be a trend among some in the media to believe that just talking nice to a dictator will make them change their ways.
If your neighbor’s town was destroyed by a cyclone would you wait for the fire departments to come before you helped? What if there was a gang preventing people from aiding them? What if the fire department never came? I think these are the moral issues here.
So, then, “invasion” is becoming more of an option?
I don’t know. Intervention? Just going in and distributing aid with force protection? I don’t know. It is a tough call, but a lot of people are dying as we talk.
We have to make certain that anything that we do actually has the effect of helping the people of Mynamer. Sometimes people have a tendency to want to act without thinking through all the implications of our actions. Will an outright invasion actually help or will it cause more suffering to these people? Food drops sound good to me but someone has pointed out that not enough people would get our food.
Since this Forum is about people’s thougthts/opinions and, as to your indecision" about invasion allow me to be more specific: I am against invasion. It is clear in my mind.
So the solution is?
We already have most of our military fighting in the sand, so we have to train another segment to fight in the jungle.
You see, people like me do not live off of military welfare or taxpayers money, so I suggest this concept some of us call “non-government charity” and “using our own money instead of someone else through taxation theft”. And if the Burmese government won’t allow goods into the country, then the people there will have to rise up and overthrow them themselves. We can also help by getting rid of any sanctions we have on Burma, since the government there uses our sanctions as a propaganda tool to their people by telling them that we are starving them intentionally.
War isn’t always the answer; in fact, is should rarely be the answer. However, many posters in this thread associate the military only with war. We train very hard for humanitarian assistance–it’s one of our mission essential tasks. That’s probably something many people without a military connection don’t realize, and we do it a lot more than the press ever covers. Relatively speaking, very few troops on the ground–just enough to protect ourselves and our supply lines. We rely heavily on non-governmental agencies, host nation, as well as state department agencies, as Gilliam said, to ensure the supplies we bring in are distributed. Our military shouldn’t attempt to rebuild the nation, just provide the tools for the nation to rebuild itself.
There is no point in invading Myanmar.
I can’t even tell what you’re talking about. What is “military welfare”? Are you saying we shouldn’t use our taxpayers’ money to help these people?
First they have to bury their dead. Lucky for us, the French didn’t feel that way toward America in 1776.
Uh, they tried that already.
I agree that we have no compelling national interest that would justify invading Myanmar. And if an invasion were justified, there are plenty of other nations in the world who could do the job.