I think it’s a no-brainer that the case for invading Burma to alleviate the consequences of a massive humanitarian crisis is much, much, stronger than the humanitarian cases for invading Iraq and Afghanistan were. (Let’s leave aside reasons involving WMDs and the war on terror.) Simon Jenkins of The Times rants about this inconsistency:

What are we waiting for? Where now is liberal interventionism? More than 100,000 people are dead after a cyclone in the Irrawaddy delta and the United Nations has declared that up to 2m people, deprived of aid for a week, are at risk of death. Barely 10% are reported to have received any help. The world stands ready to save them. The warehouses of Asia are crammed with supplies. Ships and planes are on station. Nothing happens.

[…]

I have opposed many of the macho military interventions conducted by the West over the past decade. Their justifications have been obscure, their motives mixed and their morality situational, especially those aimed at “regime change”. Those in Afghanistan and Iraq had the additional defect of built-in failure.

On the other hand the West did intervene to try to stop humanitarian catastrophes in Bosnia from 1992, Somalia in 1993, Kosovo in 1998 and Sierra Leone in 2000. The failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and more recently in Sudan’s Darfur province was attributed not to timidity but to the logistical difficulty of deploying power in the African interior.

These interventions were not ideological, whether “liberal” or “neocon”. They were to save lives from being lost by the thousand. They were covered by international law (possibly not Kosovo) because the UN charter’s respect for territorial integrity also stipulates it “shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures” to avert a humanitarian crisis.

This was reinforced when the security council in 2005 and 2006 imposed a responsibility on the international community to protect people whose governments failed to do so. It castigated in particular the “intentional denial of humanitarian assistance”. Such an extension of the concept of military intervention was advocated by Tony Blair in his Chicago speech of 1999, when it was dismissed by the Americans (pre9/11) as irresponsible. Today it is widely regarded as legitimate, even by those opposed to the belligerent militancy that ensued under Blair and George Bush.

It is hard to think of a more glaring application of the humanitarian principle than today’s Burma. In none of the above interventions was anything like the same number of lives at risk as the 2m now threatened in the Irrawaddy delta. This is eight times the 230,000 reckoned to have died in the 2004 tsunami.

In Burma, the airlifting of supplies from offshore vessels to stricken areas would indeed be an offence against the sovereignty of Burma. But the intervention would not constitute an attack on a government or occupy its territory. Indeed it would be occasioned strictly because of the lack of government in a particular territory. It would be to save the lives of people abandoned to their deaths by their rulers.

Yet where today are the brave rattlers of sabres against the Iraqis, the Afghans and the Iranians? The American ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, says he is “outraged by the slowness of the response” of the Burmese authorities. His outrage will bring scant comfort to those dying in the delta.

On Friday the British and French foreign ministers, David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, announced that “we look to the regime” to lift restrictions on aid distribution. Nobody “looked to” Slobodan Milosevic to stop slaughtering Kosovans or the rebels to stop the killing in Sierra Leone. We intervened.

The Foreign Office remarked last week that there was “no excuse” for delay and then thought of one. The British chairman of the UN security council, John Sawers, claimed that the 2006 resolution referred only to “acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity . . . rather than government responses to natural disasters”. But in 2001 there was no evidence that the Taliban were committing such acts, yet Britain intervened. And what is happening in Burma if not an “intentional denial of humanitarian assistance”?

[…]

There is no justification under the UN charter for intervening to topple the Burmese military regime. That task would rightly be opposed by other powers in the region and must one day be performed by the Burmese themselves. But aid drops over the Irrawaddy delta are nothing to do with that case. The outside world has waited a week, and protested to no effect.

Either way some enforced intervention must surely be planned. The British aid minister, Douglas Alexander, said last week it would be “incendiary”. He did not explain why a “dump-and-run” of emergency supplies in the delta would be incendiary - compared, for instance, with his antics in Afghanistan.

He cannot hold to the thesis that Burma is not ripe for “liberal intervention” because the loss of life is the result of a natural disaster rather than political or military oppression. What is this fine distinction between a massacre and what the military are now inflicting on the Burmese people? A corpse is a corpse.

This catastrophe is not past but continuing. A western world adept at intervening elsewhere on a humanitarian pretext is suddenly inert. Why? I suspect the reason is that it has too much intervention on its plate already. The Burmese must die because we are too busy pretending to save Afghans and Iraqis. To such cynicism has liberal intervention sunk.

I loved that second last sentence. Though a probably major reason why liberal interventionists won’t intervene in Burma is that Burma isn’t strategically important to them. They aren’t breeding terrorists. They aren’t sitting on huge supplies of oil. It’s just some distant regime with which they have almost no trade with anyway.

Incidentally, the French seem to be saying that they will attempt to distribute aid with their own workers despite the junta’s ban on foreign aid workers:

France is to make its own aid action for the victims of cyclone Nargis, sending the warship Mistral loading with 1,500 tonnes of goods, it was reported Saturday.

“We have decided to act without waiting any further,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was quoted by the French daily Le Figaro.

The aid is to be directly distributed to the effected…, either by the ship’s crew or by French aid organizations,” Kouchner said, adding that “delivering aid directly to (the military) junta doesn’t come into the question.”

At the other end of the spectrum, the Chinese government does not seem to care much to use its leverage with the junta to persuade them to open their doors. At least Thai leaders are trying to meet with their neighbors and the Thai media hasn’t tried to whitewash the junta’s misdeeds like Xinhua News has. Is there any news agency outside Burma and China that would write a headline like “Myanmar welcomes int’l assistance for cyclone victims”?

Obviously, no one is going to invade Burma to provide humanitarian help. The political costs are too great. But I find it an interesting theoretical question to consider if the French government’s suggestion of invoking the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle to forcibly enter Burma with aid should apply here. The principle is a little vague: everyone seems to agree that has something to do with a state’s responsibility to its citizens. I think it’s fair to say that Burma has most definitely failed in that respect. On the other hand, elaborations of the principle tend to mention, as examples of violations of the principle, events along the lines of genocide and civil war. The International Crisis Group has a slightly more inclusive definition:

B. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.

With that definition, one could arguably interpret the current doings of the Burmese junta as an instance of ’state failure’.

Somewhat paradoxically, if we take a ‘violations of human rights’ approach to what kinds of situations violate the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle, then the violent repression of the monks’ demonstrations was a more obvious violation of human rights then the current fiasco. Somehow (to my own intuitions) inflicting unwarranted violence on your own citizens is a more direct violation of human rights than failing to dispense aid. But one could argue that this is not mere incompetence but deliberate prevention of life-saving aid from reaching those who need it. (Contrast with Indonesia’s internal inefficiency but prompt acceptance of foreign aid after the tsunami.) It’s not that they want to help but are too incompetent too; rather, it is clearly now a case of denying help because it would undermine the political goals of the regime. If you think that humanitarian relief for a natural disaster is a human right, then the regime is violating human rights. I suppose that humanitarian relief could fall under the ‘right to life’.

Incidentally, since the Burmese junta claims its right to power on the basis that it’s the entity that has saved Burma from all those evil exploitative foreigners, it’s probably being perfectly sensible, in a strategic sense, in denying foreign aid workers and claiming credit for foreign aid supplies. Perhaps the generals have kept up with enough world news to know what US humanitarian relief for the tsunami did to Indonesian public opinion. Imagine US helicopters dropping off supplies at the currently inaccessible regions of the delta, while none at all arrive from their own government. Without foreign help, there would be no help from the junta anyway. So people are going to be angry at them either way, and they probably figure that it’s better that they just be angry without also having a better perception of foreigners. Obviously, the referendum is another compelling reason not to let foreigners in, but I think the reason I’ve just sketched above is more than enough.

You are considering your options for tertiary education. Education. What do you care more about? Whether a university can provide you with a good education, or whether it is perceived to be ‘good’ (in any number of probably extremely vague respects)?

It seems obvious that reputation and quality of education provided aren’t perfectly correlated. However, a rather annoying fact I’ve noticed in Singapore is that the distinction between the two is almost entirely eroded, to the point that there is hardly an independent notion of quality of education. Part of this may be because Singaporeans have no idea what a good education is in the first place. But the larger part of it (and this may be related to not knowing what a good education is) is that education isn’t seen as an end in itself, hence the weighing of how ‘good’ a university is does not include the quality of education provided. Instead, it primarily includes the consequences of education typically valued in this society, namely monetary reward and reputation. There is practically no independent* notion of what or how one should learn; instead, the preeminent normative consideration is how I should be equipped to earn lots of money.

I was forced to this depressing conclusion after many, too many, conversations with people on this where I found out they actually have fundamental misuses of vocabulary concerning ‘good’ versus ‘perceived as good’. It took some hammering to help them chisel out the difference between the two. And I think a reasonable hypothesis for why their vocabulary could get so mangled is that there wasn’t a difference in the first place, in their minds.

And that is why I think, even if Singapore were to set up a liberal arts-style program, it would quickly be misused by the materially and socially ambitious. Because almost no students will enter with the objective of actually wanting to educate themselves. They’d enter for the purpose of having a good headstart in their career, to look good in front of their family and peers, and so on. They’d be the kind of students who participate in discussions only because it’s included in their final grades. It would be a huge waste of tax revenue to subsidize small intensive classes for such people. (And if it isn’t subsidized, then whoever takes part could have afforded to enroll in an overseas liberal arts college anyway.)

*To see more clearly what could be an independent notion of what one should learn, consider this. Someone with such a notion would think that even if the person getting the education were to die immediately after finishing the particular course concerned, it was still a good thing that he was educated. Whereas someone who ties the value of education completely to its consequences would consider it a waste of effort on the part of those who contributed to his education.