Suu Kyi to Mr. Clinton:Use your Fre

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Subject: Suu Kyi to Mr. Clinton:Use your Freedom

Tom Paine declared, "These are times that try men souls". That was 1776.
American was fighting for freedom and its nationhood against a world
imperial power and tyranny. Today, Burma is fighting for their freedom, 
and it is our trial here at home. "Use your freedom to fight for ours",
declared Suu Kyi in her acceptance speech to American University last
month, knowing well that when she and her people lose, 
freedom everywhere suffers, and sadly we lose a little more of ours,
too.Tom Paine would shake his head in disbelief.

Restraint is a virtue, yet sometimes speaking up must take
precedence over silence. Here staffers and senior diplomats in the Paris
based Mexican embassy are laughing at the sudden uproar over
the corrupt Mexican Drug Czar and the battered DEA. Of course, whoever
said spies and spookes were angels, but does the US established press
really get off treating american readers like dupes. The Mexicans here
know of the millions of drug dollars siphoned off by  former 
Mexican president Salinas, and his brother. Salinas now lives in lavish
exile in Ireland and France, notorious haven for Swiss-banked dictators.
Which leaves us to wonder who really is running the US Presidency? We
all know that Clinton never had a foreign policy agenda when he
first came to office. Now he expects to gain sudden star-quality class
with Ms Albright who DOES appear to have a policy agenda and more than
ever seems smitten by the top general brass who DO have policy agenda
for decades, trascending minor political dressings every four years so
that Presidents can earn a good historical report card. Well, he's
failing. With the Slorc embassy just doors down the street from Woodrow
Wilson's retirement colonial home, the memory of that beleaguered
veteran of World War I returns to haunt, recalling how
Morgan's Wall Street, a Republican Congress, and international secret 
alliances steam-rolled american victory in Europe, stiffled the free
press and smashed intellectual dissent at home.

That legacy is still with us, as the mexicans laugh at the gringos over
this latest fiasco of trust and confidence.

As though to make it seem even more unreal, Mexican diplomats in
Paris,destroying copies of pirated software,  appear more preoccupied by
by copyright police, and pay software royalties at the same time
millions of drug dollars continue to fill Swiss bank accounts and
corporate treasuries...Doubtful that it will assure General McCaffrey of
their honesty.

But Americans can rest assured that they have a great President able to
please almost everyone. This president can make a deal even with the
Devil. It doesn't convince the Free Burma advocates or their friends
fighting for freedom of his sincerity. Remember, they are fighting for
our freedom, too.

We have come a long way in this century to enter a digital era of
simulation and clones. And foreign policy tends to follow history in its
tracks.We have passed from the days of a Princetonian president to a
reportedly CIA-tapped Rhodes scholar, who bucked Vietnam now only to pay
the price of his flight as freedom demonstrators at home took the heat,
and still do. 

Wilson buckled under pressure, and left the Presidency a broken and sick
man. If only this younger president would follow the advice of his new
Secretary of State, and "tell it like it is", passing sancitons on
Burma. 

Or is there nothing more to tell -- until "another massacre". 

Dawn Star, Paris
http://www-uvi.eunet.fr/asia/euro-burma/