While I was up in Chiang Mai, at a advocacy workshop for Burmese environmental and human rights activists, we discussed at length some of the difficulties and paradoxes we live with every day in Thailand. Compared to neighboring Burma, Thailand is a paragon of democratic principles. Compared to Cambodia and Laos, Thailand seems quite developed, with an impressive infrastructure. Compared with Malaysia to the south, Thailand seems a hot-bed of liberalism and progressive values. Of course, these labels are all based on a relativism that belies the gravity of the problems that Thailand itself faces today.

For a country that looks stable compared to its neighbors, Thailand has had frequent, albeit bloodless coups. The latest coup in 2006 toppled the Thaksin Shinawatra government, which while popular in the countryside, was widely despised by civil society groups and the urban intelligentsia who despised what they saw as the phoney populist rhetoric of Thaksin who used his political clout to enrich his family and run the country like one of his corporations. The anti-Thaksin crowd is signified by the yellow shirts, the king’s color, and they accuse Thaksin of trying to marginalize the king. They have largely had the support of the military, which did very little to stop the yellow-shirts from running rampant over Bangkok and shutting down the city’s two airports last fall.

Thaksin’s supporters have donned red-shirts, also swear allegiance to the King and have rallied these past few weeks all over Thailand in an attempt to win a royal pardon for Thaksin, who addresses these throngs of crimson admirers via satellite phone from some undisclosed location – likely Dubai.

The yellow-shirts/red-shirt dichotomy presents a serious problem for Thai democracy and for Thai civil society. Thaksin was not a very popular figure in the human rights movement. His war on drugs led to a spike in the number of extra-judicial killing and his administration did a lot to quash the efforts of human rights groups to detail these events. At the same time, he was democratically elected and the toppling of his administration, despite its corruption, its crimes and its undeniable flaws, really dealt a blow to Thai democracy and has increased the likelihood and the expectation that reform can be brought from the barrel of a gun. The currently Prime Minister Abhisit is young, charismatic and seems to be a quite reasonable man. Unfortunately, his mandate is limited because he is dependent on the support of the military to exercise the duties of his office.

Of course the monarchy has a role to play as well in this current mess. Both sides invoke the King in attempts to curry favor with the Thai people, who still revere the old and frail King and who still support the anachronistic and arcane Lèse majesté laws still enforced today. The King, who holds no constitutional authority, has become embroiled in this mess and only his death is likely to change that. His heir does not have the charisma and it is hard to believe that his authority will command as much respect among these warring factions.

All I know is that I wore a red shirt when I arrived in Bangkok the first day, and I have avoided donning it since. I don’t have any yellow shirts either. While I do not have anything more than contempt for Thaksin and his self-serving populism, and I am somewhat sympathetic to the military which has handled these displays of discontent without mowing down their own citizens (for Southeast Asia that is sadly a rarity) my true sympathies are with democracy and human rights in Thailand, even when the two seem paradoxically at odds with each other as they do today.

In Japan, new elections will usher in a new party, but most are skeptical that change will come to their shores in any positive sense. China is dealing with its western provinces with an iron fist, more or less kicking the can of increased hostility further down the road.  India backed away from agreeing to stricter climate controls when pushed by Clinton. In Thailand, a young dynamic prime minister sensitive to both human rights and democracy in Burma is hamstrung by a conservative military that put him in power. In Sri Lanka, tens of thousands have been abandoned in refugee camps stricken with disease and malnutrition, their ostensibly democratic government dismissing them as lesser citizens.

Forty years ago a man was put on the moon, a moon that eclipsed the sun this week in Asia.  Solar and lunar eclipses are scientific facts, they happen and we accept them as phenomenon to marvel at from out tiny speck of a vantage point.  While out endeavors into the far reaches of space should be pursued in the common interest of human kind, we continue to treat both the earth and each other so badly that one has to wonder if we will ever find what we are looking for out there and that we would know how to appreciate it if we did.  Suns and moons get eclipsed, and yet they are still there. Will we still remain when our time has been eclipsed?

On a brighter note, I am off to Chiang Mai next week to work with some Burmese and other ethnic nationalities who have been doing various field research in country and will be taking part in a workshop.  Should be a little more fun than missing a partial solar eclipse through cloud cover, scouring news articles and drinking a lot of coffee in front of my computer.

Dan Twining on Foreign Policy says that the coming change in leadership represents a sea change in US-Japan relations.

The SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), Japanese support for American forces, and the Okinawa bases are the most intractable issues in alliance politics, and DPJ leaders make clear that nothing is sacred in their determination to rebalance alliance relations upon taking power. This position stands in stark contrast to the deference with which generations of LDP leaders treated Washington and the alliance framework that has made possible Japan’s postwar prosperity and security.

Tobias Harris disagrees and argues that this fundamentally change nothing really.

The DPJ’s leaders are hardly radicals. At the very least, the US-Japan alliance will remain an indispensable pillar for the indefinite future, especially because a DPJ government will be no more inclined than an LDP government to spend more on defense. The presence of hawks within the DPJ will probably ensure that defense spending does not fall further than it already has under the LDP, but a DPJ-led Japan will not be gearing up for the development of serious autonomous capabilities. But beyond that, it does seem to be contradictory for Twining to question the DPJ’s ability to address “structural conundrums” but then blithely assert that the DPJ will single-handedly threaten the institution that has been the centerpiece of Japanese security policy for nearly sixty years.

I am more inclined to agree with Harris if only because Twining tips his hand to show his love and affection for two of Japan’s most feckless prime ministers in recent history: “Shinzo Abe and Taro Aso, have possessed a clear vision for Japan in the world.” Both prime ministers were as ineffectual as Yasuo Fukuda and both Abe and Aso’s foreign policies consisted of drumming up fears over North Korea, flirting with the idea of developing a nuclear deterrent and both will have lasted a year or less when the LDP falls next month.

Still, Japanese political debates are like to stay pretty quotidian no matter who is in charge in Tokyo.

Control 2.0 is control that makes a shrewdly realistic assessment of China’s new information environment — the result of the Internet, predominantly — and recognizes there are some events that cannot be entirely controlled. So the core of Control 2.0 is reporting at the first possible moment those news events that cannot be concealed, getting the government’s official explanation and version of the facts out first. This pre-empts other media, including international media.

“In China, many assume that the higher the living standard, the happier the people will be…But at the same time, when the living standard improves, people will receive better education, and this will raise their ethnic awareness.”

None of them are from Asia by the way. All were taken in Yosemite National Park, October 2005.  I’ll have more from Thailand soon…

Juan Cole (scroll down a little to find the article) provides more excellent commentary, this time with regards to the Chatham House report,which argues quite convincingly that the Iranian election was if not stolen than massively sabotaged.

In broader news, Foreign Policy released its annual survey on failed states. Both the quantitative data and the articles and photo essay that accompany the data are interesting reads.

[If] the government is both willing and able to use massive force: China, Burma, Armenia. In these cases, the government wins. There is, in recent history, not a single clear counterexample. If the government keeps its nerve, and the men with guns stay loyal, and the regime is willing to escalate without limit — the government wins.

The regime control over the Revolutionary Guards, and particularly the Basij, means that like in Tiananmen and Rangoon, the demonstrators do not stand a chance. Perhaps the Ayatollah thinks that since they are not calling for regime change, that ratcheting up the pressure will be enough to get them to stand down.

Still, it is unclear how monolithic the theocratic hierarchy is and if change will come then it will come from the people convincing some of the clerics that Khamenei has gone too far.

Fortunately for us, people like Andrew Sullivan have been providing a wellspring of stories, tweets and video clips to let us see events as they unfold thousands of miles away…

So the journalist ventures over to Hanoi to ask some Vietnamese which, in their opinion was more important. The Vietnamese respond, “what is freedom?”

Perplexed and a little annoyed, the journalist heads over to Singapore, where he hopes he can get a straight answer. He approaches a Singaporean and asks them when in their opinion is more important, food or freedom? The Singaporean’s reply: “what’s an opinion?”

For every triumphant people’s power movement witnessed in Wenceslas Square there is a Tiananmen, whose veterans quietly reminisced during the 20th anniversary last week while the Chinese government ostentatiously suppressed its peoples already constrained access to outside information.  Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto and ironically the former Shah of  Iran Reza Pahlavi were brought down by groundswells that ushered in new regimes. On the other hand, in Burma and Zimbabwe, mobilized dissent has been ruthlessly marginalized, co-opted and at times outright annihilated.  This week, the world is wondering on which side of this divide the Iranian people will find their country in the coming weeks.

Far from desiring another revolution, the majority of protesters seem to simply want their vote to count. The clerics that pull the strings behind Iran’s heavily scripted democratic trappings have already rigged the system in their favor by having final approval on who the candidates are. Unfortunately for Ayatollah Khamenei, the facts on the ground were changing faster than they could comprehend. Not only would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lose, but the victor, former prime minister Mir Houssein Moussavi, embraced a reformist platform that was mobilized record turnout and enthusiasm that not only made a Moussavi victory possible, but also promised that anything but a victory for change would be met with incredulous outrage.

Thailand must seem like a world apart from Persia (aside from both countries having similar rates of per capita sex-change operations, but that is a different story altogether). Unlike Iran, which is a republic in name, but a theocracy in practice, Thailand is a feeble and fragile constitutional monarchy. But its recent spat of coups d’etat and demonstrations may help illustrate the current struggles in Iran.

Bangkok has been besieged by demonstrators in the past year, which culminated in November when protesters invaded and occupied Suvarnabhumi International Airport for a week, effectively shutting down Bangkok air traffic.  The protesters were opposed to the current prime minister, who they accused of being the political successor of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra who was deposed in a bloodless military coup in September 2006.  Hugely popular in the countryside due to his populism, Thaksin was despised in the cities by the urban elite and middle classes, who organized the protests. They identified themselves with the color yellow, and were successful in toppling the government of  Samak Sundaravej, eventually ushering in opposition ;eader Abhisit Vejjajiva as the newest prime minister. Thaksin’s followers, donning red, tried their hand at toppling the government, but failed in April 2009. And so it goes, protesters think they can circumvent the political process through demonstrations and activism as opposed to letting the process play out. The military has shown more restraint as of late, but is still quite capable of seizing power when things in their eyes start to slide out of control.

What does this have to do with Iran? Substitute the Thai military for the Iranian mullahs and you have two institutions that will subvert the democratic process when the results are not too its liking. Undermining the democratic process only serves to undermine their own legitimacy as guardians of the state and weakens all institutions across the board. And to those countries that are contemplating letting go of power? Regimes without the veneer of democratic institutions like Burma, Zimbabwe – as well as Saudi Arabia and Egypt – will be less inclined to relinquish their grip on power, even cosmetically.

Whether the mullahs are acquiescing to the demands for an investigation as a means of stalling until the demonstrators lose momentum is unclear but likely, but its impact should be clear in the coming days. How should the rest of the world react is a little unclear. George Packer and Fred Kaplan say that Obama needs to disengage if the results stand. Others argue that national interests override internal concerns. It is understandable that Obama has thus far been circumspect in his statements about the situation; as popular as America seems to be in the Islamic Republic, meddling in its internal affairs has gotten the US in trouble with Iran in the past (understatement of the year award nominee). A more open Iran is in the world’s interests. Let’s hope that Ayatollah Khamenei realizes that it is also in his country’s interests and ultimately in his interest.

The biggest difference it seems to me is that where Japan arrived at order and social harmony(and single-party rule for 99% of the past almost 60 years) as if it were the default setting, Singapore has had this sort of order imposed upon from above. Lee Kwan Yew, oversaw Singapore’s explusion from Malaysia and its rise from a former outpost of the British Empire with no natural resources into a financial powerhouse which has one of the highest standards of living anywhere, not just in Asia. This transformation was not always democratic – Lee was at times ruthless with dispatching his opponents, usually through lawsuits that crippled them financially – but he was focused on creating a stable, prosperous and egalitarian society, civil liberties be damned. In the end, unlike a lot of authoritarian rulers, he has created a stable and functioning state that will prosper long after he is gone.

Well, I made it through my 48 hours there without a fine, a caning or verbal warning even. In fact, from the durian shaped concert hall, the Merlion or the tree-lined Orchard Road, Singapore is almost a little boring in its tranquility.  Still, for the food, the architecture, and the short respite from the noise and grime of Bangkok, it was a good weekend.