Collegiate Times

Today will mark the thirteenth day of protests against Burma's dictatorial regime. As the Tiananmen Square massacre of our day unfolds, the American Left remains infuriatingly silent as authorities estimate that more than 200 protesters have been murdered for nothing more than demanding their liberty.

If the American Left is exasperatingly silent, the American Right is hypocritically so. In his second inaugural address, our president declared, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in the entire world."

I agree, and while the president has (quite admirably) spoken out against the thuggish Rangoon government, he has yet to take any serious action against them.

There appear to be two reasons for this: America's sick obsession with the Middle East and the institutional paralysis of the United Nations.

The American government has oafishly bumbled its way through what was a just and winnable war in Iraq. In the process, bungler-in-chief George W. Bush has estranged our allies and fortified the positions of the thugs, theocrats and tyrants of all political stripes around the globe: left, right and certifiably insane.

I agree that we must actively promote freedom abroad. Nevertheless, as for Iraq's more obsequious defenders, I challenge them to answer with a straight face: if Iraq's principle export were goats, dates or rugs, would we have ever invaded?

Although I would agree that the Iraq War is more about oil than freedom, we mustn't let that cheap standard lead us to abandon Iraq or Burma, whose principal export seems to be exiled democracy activists.

So while the best of a generation bleed for the criminally avoidable blunders of our president and his advisers, democracy activists bleed in the streets of Rangoon and Mandalay. Had Iraq been handled at least competently, we wouldn't be in the weakened position in which we find ourselves, morally or in fact.

Then there's the neoconservative obsession with Iran. Norman Podhoretz, the doyen of the neoconservative movement, has alleged along with the New Yorker's Sy Hersh that the Bush administration has already given the green light to some form of military campaign against the Islamic Republic.

Setting aside the nuclear issue for now, there remains the patent idiocy of attacking what could be a cultural and economic ally given some measure of patience and diplomacy.

Attacking Iran will make militant nationalists of more or less every Iranian.

It will unleash Hezbollah, the terrorist "A" team, which has global reach and a fundraising network that Al Qaida can't begin to match. Finally, it will provide further encouragement for those that paint promotion of liberty as a clash of civilizations, further fueling Islamic militancy and follow-on terrorism.

Then there's China. Behind every atrocity, every dictator and every bad guy, there's China. When China isn't backing and funding bloody dictators, it's shielding them from international censure.

From Slobodan Milosevic to Robert Mugabe to Saddam Hussein, it's hard to list a modern outrage against human rights and simple human decency without flipping it over to see the sickening hallmark: "Made in China."

Using their U.N. veto power, China has stymied nearly every effort to employ the United Nations for its intended purpose: the maintenance and enforcement of global peace and human rights.

The United Nations has become a mausoleum, the crypt of democracy. Without serious overhaul, this professed bastion of freedom will continue to allow the most oppressive regimes in the world to abuse its liberties to preserve their own grip on power.

As a consequence, we lack international legitimacy to act on Burma because our moral authority is compromised by amateurish neoconservative fumbling and because the relevant institutions are not, in fact, relevant.

As a result of this and the simple fact that our military apparatus is engaged elsewhere, we are left to meaningless gestures against a government quite happy to ignore such token action and to engage in real, homicidal action of its own.

If we're reduced to tokens, let us use one that will place the Beijing regime and its Rangoon subordinates in the glare of publicity. We ought to boycott the 2008 Olympic Games.

Beijing is so proud of this meaningless spectacle, and this action is not without precedent: we boycotted the 1980 Moscow games to protest the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. If we are left to pointless gestures, can we at least cry "no blood for sport?"