What do you think about Burmese military junta

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So much is happening in Ukraine that the world has forgotten what is happening in Burma / Myanmar? I wonder if there is a chance for military intervention, probably American, in Burma Maybe a USMC landing party?

Is it that it has been forgotten, or is that focusing on it doesn't suit the agenda of the western world's leadership at the moment?

The third world is full of bad regimes. Not much any of us can do about it.

In fact we are all asked to take sides between rivals nations with equally bad regimes ( like favor Saudi Arabia over Iran).

Although the the Burmese regime is beating up on an ethnic minority, and is causing refugees to flee into neighboring India, it is not invading a neighboring country and trying to conquer that country- like Putin is. The refugees from Burma number about half of a million. Ukraine now has millions of internal and external refugees.

Out of 45 million in Ukraine and 55 million in Myanma (Burma), so their numbers of refugees can be fairly compared.

The problem with many "third world" countries is, the West does not have much of an idea on how to intervene without making things worse - other than grassroots work on things like education and infrastructure, but these require pre-established peace.
Supporting an already locally-established democracy (even if flawed/immature) is much safer about possible end results of success.
Tested here.

Currently, all ASEAN countries are strongly committed to neutrality. Any intervention would disturb that. China would worry that the US was seeking to turn Myanmar into a US ally against China, and would probably fund a resistance.

Ideally the solution would be a UN intervention with Security Council support, but firstly that's pretty unlikely as long as Russia is a pariah, and secondly it's not clear what such an intervention would look like. The Chinese (and the Russians) don't share Western values when it comes to democracy. Probably all that could be done would be peacekeeping troops to stop the military killing civilians. As I understand it, the issue isn't so much that people are being shot on the street, but that they are being taken prisoner and tortured.

The US has the experience of sending military to a certain other, jungle nation in Southeast Asia near Burma.

Does the name "Vietnam" ring a bell?

Actually we sent troops to three neighbors of Burma (South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) and bombed four (those plus North Vietnam). Look how well that fifteen year long venture turned out.

And our POTUS just recently pulled us out of a country in south WEST Asia (ever hear of Afganistan?). So I dont know WHY the OP expects Americans to be eager to get involved in another nation building project in Southeast Asia.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 02 Apr 2022, 6:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

Seriously. I dont get the logic of this thread. Burma was behind Yemen, and Syria, and on a par with the Haitian earthquake in the attention it garnered while competing with the endless laundry list of trouble spots in the world. Dont see why the OP thinks it needs special attention.

A more interesting question IMHO is "what became of the Palestinian issue?".

You dont hear about the Palestinian vs Israeli thing anymore.

And that predated the Ukraine invasion.

Sometime during the Trump years -something happened in the Arab world. Arab fear of Iran suddenly exceeded Arab hatred of Israel about Palestine. And now most Sunni Arabs seemed to suddenly embrace Israel as an ally against Iran., and against Iran's Shiite Arab allies. The Palestinians are now...well...you dont even hear about how they figure in it anymore. Do they feel thrown under the bus? Do they seek help from Iran against Israel (and therefore put themselves at odds with other Arabs), or do they also fear Iran (and now love Israel), or what?

I don't understand Myanmar's political system. But there was a lot of news from China about northern Myanmar in February.

Cross-border gambling and telecommunication network frauds from northern Myanmar have always endangered China. (Considering the familiarity of these telecom scams with China, it is likely that the actual operators of the scams are actually Chinese, and the locals are only playing a logistical and defensive role.)

Another piece of information is that there have been underworld forces in China who have been introducing jobs to people at the bottom for a long time, and actually sending them to northern Myanmar.
But there is another explanation for this: some Chinese try to seek illegal high-paying jobs and go to northern Myanmar, and after failing, claim to the country that they have been kidnapped or deceived in order to seek rescue.

In addition, when searching for Myanmar on the Internet, the first related words that appear are "horror bloody video" and "kidney removal".

China shares a long border with Myanmar. Residents of China generally believe that the Myanmar government is a much worse regime than the Chinese government.

^ Looks like a huge corruption and organized crime issue.
Hard to fight a country's corruption from outside. Latin America is full of examples of what happens when someone (USA in that case) is trying to fight organized crime from outside.
Not good.

I'm not sure that's quite right. A lot of Arab countries who didn't really feel very strongly about the matter (UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, to the extent Sudan can be called "Arab") were prepared to sign fairly meaningless peace deals to curry favour with the US.

The big switch in Palestinian politics came from 2004-06. Before that point, Hamas had close ties to the Saudis plus Jordan, Kuwait, and Qatar. Lobbying by the Bush adminstration saw that funding dry up, and Iran and Hezbollah and to a lesser extent Syria stepped up to fill the void.

I don't think anyone in the Middle East views Israel as a genuine ally.

As for the Israel-Palestine conflict itself, that always comes and goes. Last May it got a lot of news attention following a flare-up but a ceasefire was called.