Reasons To Be Pessimistic.

The protests by the brave Burmese* monks appears to have been extinguished ruthlessly and sadly successfully. There is obviously an urge to 'do something' when regimes as vile as the junta go in for brutality on this scale, but it is hard to admit that there is very little that we can plausibly do as this article explains:

In essence, the situation in Burma is one where the Western Powers have played all of their cards to date, and have nothing to show for it.

We have no other sticks to use against the regime short of military action, and we know that this is not going to happen for the sake of a smallish country with a pwerful patron which has no potential to become a strategic threat even to its neighbours, not anymore at any rate.

* I'm using 'Burma' instead of 'Myanmar' because they are actually the same word, just different pronunciations. Burma is the proper English pronunciation and pretending otherwise makes about as much sense as calling Spain 'Espana'.