American Senator to Meet Myanmar Leader

[Merryweather]

Source: New York Times

An American senator is to meet with the leader of the junta in Myanmar this weekend, just days after the country’s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was convicted and returned to house arrest in a case that has drawn international condemnation.

The senator, Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, would be the highest-ranking American official to meet with the junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, in at least a decade. Senior administration officials, speaking anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the trip, said Mr. Webb was traveling independently and “not carrying a message from the administration,” although he was briefed by the State Department before he left.

Officials described the visit as welcome and called it an opportunity to open lines of communication between the United States and Myanmar. As a military planner, journalist and novelist before joining the Senate, Mr. Webb has traveled extensively in the region. In the Senate, he is the chairman of a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee dealing with East Asian affairs.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/world/asia/14myanmar.html?hpw

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Now to wait for the neocon cries of 'Appeasement! Liberal softy! We don't talk to dictators!'

As Bill Clinton has recently shown, opening talks with oppressive regimes can and does produce good results. At the very least, Webb can't do more damage than that idiot John Yettaw who swam to Suu Kyi's house and gave the junta an excuse to lock her up for the next year's elections there. Yettaw's misguided and deluded mission = real-life metaphor for neocon foreign policy.

[David__77]

1. Myanmar is the weirdest country...

Its leaders have a strange quasi-religious ideology. It's vaguely nationalist but not in the tradition of most nationalist movements. Reading New Light of Myanmar, the state paper, is interesting.

[maxsolomon]

2. good. their paranoia needs to be confronted

but part of me hopes webb punches Shwe in the throat.