Democracy Shrew Aung San Suu Kyi Went to Bed with Military Dogs…

Now she’s waking up not only with fleas, but in jail … presumably tamed for the rest of her life.

Frankly, the military is only doing over in Myanmar what former President Trump tried to get the military to do here in the United States. Myanmar’s generals even parroted Trump’s canard about election fraud.

Of course, when his generals refused to obey his unconstitutional order to stage a coup, Trump took to a MAGA-rally stage and incited his supporters to stage an insurrection. And the rest is this kind of history now playing out in Myanmar.

In other words, Trump has set a precedent for sore losers of democratic elections to follow in perpetuity. Even worse, he has so undermined America’s moral authority on the world stage that Myanmar’s generals could fairly argue that their coup is no worse than what America’s commander in chief just tried to do.

Not to mention the irony of allies fearing and enemies hoping that America could relapse in four years by electing a wannabe Trump as president, if not reelecting Trump himself.

To appreciate how the world now sees America, however, Americans would do well to reflect on the two primary reasons Trump is now the only twice-impeached president in US history:

He was caught on tape sounding like a tin-pot dictator as he tried in vain to extort the president of Ukraine for dirt on his political opponent, Joe Biden.
He incited a MAGA mob to storm the US Capitol in a vain attempt to prevent Congress from formally counting the votes of the Electoral College, which certified Biden as the duly elected 46^th president of the United States. (It’s notably that Myanmar’s military generals aped Trump even in this respect – waiting, as they did, until the country’s Parliament was convening to ratify Aung San Suu Kyi’s landslide victory to strike.)

Meanwhile, Western governments are registering protests. Actually, they are giving the impression that Biden’s inauguration awakened the whole world from a Trump presidency that turned out to be nothing more than a four-year nightmare. But Myanmar’s military generals are hardly quaking in their boots; not least because they have a history of withstanding such protests that must impress even the leaders of North Korea and Cuba.

Apropos of which, I wish President Biden had the presence of mind to condemn their actions without threatening dire consequences. Because everyone knows that his sanctions will have no greater influence on these generals than the sanctions 11 consecutive US presidents imposed on Comandante Fidel Castro for the coup he mounted in 1959.

Mind you, Myanmar’s military generals could also scoff at the hypocrisy of America blessing a military coup in Pakistan in 1999, but cursing this very similar coup in Myanmar today. Indeed, I even began mocking the general who headed the former in commentaries like “Day of Reckoning for America’s Most-Favored Dictator – General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan,” August 24, 2007.

Of course, China and Russia are typically mum, knowing full well that silence means approval in this context. But, no matter their flirtations with Suu Kyi’s democratic government, she had no reason to harbor any illusions about the leader of either country defending her against a military coup.

After all, China and Russia have shown time and again that they have far greater affinity for and common cause with military dictatorships than democratic governments. And it hardly matters that those democratic governments behave, at times, like military dictatorships.

That said, this coup became inevitable after Suu Kyi showed the military generals that she could be used. She has simply outlived her usefulness.

As it happens, I was in the vanguard of those who warned it would be thus. But nothing animated my disillusionment and dismay quite like watching former President Barack Obama’s pilgrimage to meet Suu Kyi.

His advisers spun it as a meeting of two Nobel Peace laureates. This, notwithstanding Obama already admitting he had done nothing to deserve his prize, and Suu Kyi already compromising her democratic principles in ways that made a mockery of hers. Simply put, he was never the peacemaker and she was never the democracy icon they were hyped to be, respectively.

This is why I was not surprised two years ago when Ben Rhodes, the most high-profile of those advisers, finally ate his words. I duly commented in “Obama Adviser Finally Sees What Was Always True About Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi,” August 14, 2019. It is so comprehensive that I can do no better at this point than to reprise it in its entirety.

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In November 2012, Barack Obama became the first US president to visit Myanmar. More to the point, he became the first world leader to make a pilgrimage to the home of its celebrated democracy activist, Aung San Suu Kyi.

That home, of course, is where she spent 15 years under house arrest. This is why Obama visited with the same reverence with which he visited the prison on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent 27 years.

Yet nobody seemed prouder than Obama’s then deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes. He could barely contain his pride as he provided behind-the-scenes commentary in real time. Most notably, he justified this extraordinary pilgrimage by hailing Suu Kyi as Myanmar’s best hope “to move out of the path of authoritarianism and onto the path of democracy.”

But that was then; because my, how Rhodes has changed! The headline to a book-length telling of his awakening in the current issue of The Atlantic says it all: “What Happened to Aung San Suu Kyi? A human-rights icon’s fall from grace,” August 9, 2019.

He is “shocked, shocked” that Suu Kyi turned out to be more interested in gaining power than in championing democracy. This, despite the prevailing clue she gave by abruptly forsaking her husband and young children to do so.

Here is how he summed up his seven-year journey to disillusionment:

When the human-rights icon Aung San Suu Kyi met former President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November 2012, she embodied hope — after surviving years of house arrest, Suu Kyi was expected to lead her country through the trauma of military dictatorship and into a future of democracy. But in the years since, Suu Kyi has become part of a government that has curtailed civil liberties, stifled political freedom, and carried out what some UN officials have called ethnic cleansing. … What went wrong?

But to Rhodes I say: ask not what went wrong with Suu Kyi, ask what was wrong with you that you could not see. An allusive challenge, incidentally, that pertains doubly so to Obama. But I suspect he was just too blinded by the light of their Nobel fame to see.

After all, even I could see. The headlines to just a few of my commentaries (in real time) say it all:

“Myanmar: One Small Step for Democracy, One Giant Leap for Aung San Suu Kyi,” April 2, 2012
“Aung San Suu Kyi Becoming Democratic Mascot of Myanmar’s Military Dictatorship,” March 28, 2013
“Nobel Laureate Suu Kyi Courting Totalitarian Power at the Expense of Democratic Principles,” September 14, 2015
“Suu Kyi, ‘Myanmar’s Mandela’, Is a Religious Bigot Who Condones Ethnic Cleansing?” March 30, 2016
“Aung San Suu Kyi Lording Over Myanmar’s Crimes Against Humanity,” March 10, 2017
“Even Fellow Nobel Laureates Now Condemning Myanmar’s Suu Kyi, the Godmother of Ethnic Cleansing,” September 14, 2017
“Rock Stars Geldof and Bono Damn Myanmar’s Suu Kyi as ‘Handmaiden to Genocide,’” November 15, 2017
“UN Report: Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Laureate, Is Complicit in Genocide,” August 28, 2018

I could go on but shall suffice to end by returning where I began with “Obama’s Historic Trip to Myanmar: Too Soon?” November 20, 2012. Because, in an ode to Rhodes, it includes this evidently prescient excerpt:

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International human rights groups criticized [Obama] for conferring legitimacy on this country’s oppressive regime. Not least because it is perpetrating the kind of ethnic cleansing of minorities (most notably, the Rohingya Muslims) that provoked the United States to bomb Bosnia in 1995 to stop Serbs from ethnically cleansing Muslims. …

The only meaningful step President Thein Sein has taken towards democracy was to release Suu Kyi in 2010 from 15 years of house arrest.

But he has since co-opted this former ‘democracy icon’ into his political establishment – as leader of the loyal (i.e., powerless) opposition in parliament. Nothing demonstrates the extent to which he has co-opted Suu Kyi quite like her deafening silence while majority Buddhists continue their ethnic cleansing of minority Muslims. This, even in the face of the UN designating Myanmar’s Muslims ‘the world’s most persecuted people.’ …

Yet, whenever challenged to explain her silence, the Buddhist Suu Kyi demurs, saying self-righteously that she is not taking sides to preserve her impartiality as repairer of the breach. But just imagine how much worse the religious cleansing of minority Muslims by majority Hindus in India would have been if the Hindu Gandhi had not been so vocal in condemning it.

But I warned that her (personal and political) liberation would do little to facilitate democratic reform in Myanmar:

To read some accounts, you’d think long-imprisoned pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi being elected to parliament in Myanmar is every bit as significant as Nelson Mandela being elected president in South Africa. …

[But] despite Suu Kyi’s celebrated participation, yesterday’s parliamentary elections are no more a harbinger of democratic change in Myanmar than quinquennial elections are in Cuba.

(“Myanmar: One Small Step for Democracy; One Giant Leap for Aung San Suu Kyi,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 2, 2012)

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Again, with all due respect to Rhodes and Obama, even I could see, six months before their fateful trip, that Suu Kyi was no Mandela or Gandhi.

Everyone clearly hoped it would put a feather in Obama’s cap. But, if nothing else, the cringeworthy way she flinched from his embrace when they first met prefigured the stain this trip would put on his legacy.

In fact, it ranks right up there with his failure to close Guantanamo; his failure to end unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and his failure to oversee Libya’s transition to democracy – after lording over the assassination of its dictatorial leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

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Yes, nobody was more enthusiastic when Obama deserved praise. But nobody was harsher when he deserved criticism.

As for Suu Kyi, she doesn’t have a prayer of becoming a cause celebre in the West again. Hell, she’ll be lucky if anyone remembers she’s in jail, where I fear the generals will see her rot.