Word: burma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deploying American power to remove a regime is not the danger it poses to the U.S. but its wickedness, why stop at Iraq? As Mandelbaum wrote seven years ago, "The world is a big place filled with distressed people." Why not ease the suffering of those in, say, Burma or Zimbabwe...
...controlled by authoritarian governments rather than loquacious rabble rousers. Ever since the first crackly radio broadcast, Asia's strongmen have known the power of radio to rally the masses. Radio, after all, reaches even the remotest hinterland, as those listening secretly to the BBC World Service in places like Burma or Tibet know. When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972, one of the first things he did was shut down the radio stations. For Marcos and other autocrats, radio was a tool of subjugation, not incitement. Citizens across Asia were forced to listen to monotonous government...
...some current policies - the willingness to speckle the Islamic world with American garrisons or award contracts for the reconstruction of wrecked nations to favored companies. His loathing of imperialism was visceral, because he knew, firsthand, what it meant. In the 1920s Orwell had served in the imperial police in Burma, then a British colony, and the experience left him with an almost physical hatred for the behavior - in fact, the very language and look - of the imperialist class. Last week I reread Burmese Days, Orwell's 1934 novel based on his time in Asia. It is not a great book...
...would surely have resisted the idea that Americans are bound to behave badly in Iraq simply because all previous imperialists have done so when given a chance. He would certainly have noted that the post-imperial experience has often been a miserable one. Since independence from Britain in 1948, Burma, for example, has been raped by a succession of military regimes. Self-rule does not necessarily mean wise rule...
...that said, I think Orwell would have warned against a long-term military presence in conquered nations. Give young soldiers life-or-death authority, far from home, and you should not be surprised if power goes to their heads. "In Burma," Orwell once wrote, "I was constantly struck by the fact that the common soldiers were the best-hated section of the white community, and, judged simply by their behavior, they certainly deserved to be." Americans should not want their young men and women in uniform to be hated, for to hate someone is the first step to killing them...