All of us who have ever worked the fields of journalism remember when "Afghanistan" was a joke, not a country, meaning a place no one could place on a map and a place no one would care about if he or she could. That's changed, and now we come to Burma, which has been sitting there, a long, long time, waiting for someone, anyone, to help. Nothing that has Hitch's knickers in a twist is new, save in the details. Burma has been a political sewer for decades, and it's only by the grace of a God that Hitch doesn't believe in that it did not follow the nightmare path of the Khmer Rouge days that reduced the Lao population by half, in a very, very short, very, very brutal time.

But where were we, all these decades? We were ignoring Burma, which the Chinese quite rightly saw would be in their interest to court and support. We could have been on the ground, making inroads, pushing gently-- or harder-- trying to actually help. Burma could have used a lot of help. But no, we were frying other fish elsewhere and no one knew where Burma really was anyway.

Today Burma is the Big Story. Maybe in five years or ten or twenty it will be Laos, whose natural resources are being raped by the adjacent Vietnamese. Maybe not, maybe that pillage too will slip under the radar.

But no mistake, if China is a support of the nasties in charge of Burma, they are a support long unchallenged. This, Hitch, is not new. It's not news. It's old. What's the term for old news? Afghanistanism was one. Maybe in the future it will be Burma.