The Chevron tanker Condoleeza Rice
(since renamed)

Didn't anyone else think it was kind of weird when, earlier this week, the Bush administration sent out First Lady Laura Bush to chastise the Myanmar regime for its failures to respond adequately to last week's killer typhoon? It's not as though Laura has either a background in foreign relations or a reputation for presenting the image of toughness usually called for in those circumstances.

Indeed, it was basically a signal that Bush was content to shake a naughty finger at the Myanmar junta, give itself a compassion beard, and let it go at that. Normally, if it isn't the president himself making such denunciations -- and we can understand why Bush wouldn't be eager to get up on a podium and denounce another government for its lack of responsiveness in the face of natural disaster -- it's a cabinet member, most often the Secretary of State. Where was Condi?

Well, Condi is almost certainly the source of the problem here.

You see, Condi Rice was for 10 years a director on the board of Chevron. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her (although the company, when it realized that this was a political liability for Rice, later changed it to the Altair Voyager because of the "unnecessary attention" the naming caused).

And the Myanmar government -- a military junta that has ruled with an iron fist, despite the best efforts of pro-democracy agitators like Aung San Su Kyi and the recent protests by Buddhist monks -- is being propped up almost entirely by Chevron.

Amy Goodman wrote about this during the monks' protests:

Fueling the military junta that has ruled for decades are Burma's natural-gas reserves, controlled by the Burmese regime in partnership with the U.S. multinational oil giant Chevron, the French oil company Total and a Thai oil firm. Offshore natural-gas facilities deliver their extracted gas to Thailand through Burma's Yadana pipeline. The pipeline was built with slave labor, forced into servitude by the Burmese military.

The original pipeline partner, Unocal, was sued by EarthRights International for the use of slave labor. As soon as the suit was settled out of court, Chevron bought Unocal.

Chevron's role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. According to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International: "Sanctions haven't worked because gas is the lifeline of the regime. Before Yadana went online, Burma's regime was facing severe shortages of currency. It's really Yadana and gas projects that kept the military regime afloat to buy arms and ammunition and pay its soldiers."

The U.S. government has had sanctions in place against Burma since 1997. A loophole exists, though, for companies grandfathered in. Unocal's exemption from the Burmese sanctions has been passed on to its new owner, Chevron.

As Goodman notes, Condi Rice was on the Chevron board at the time it was involved in bloody suppression of non-violent protesters in Nigeria, so it's not as though she's terribly sensitive to such things as the open murder of Buddhist monks. Far more important to keep the natural gas flowing, you know.

For an administration that likes to defend its oil wars in places like Iraq by holding up the fig leaf of the awful oppression suffered by the Iraqi people under Saddam, isn't it funny how it seems less than eager to end such oppression in other countries where the gas is flowing under the control of American corporations?

With the death toll now at 65,000 and counting, the ruling military junta in the country is refusing all aid -- they even went so far as to seize a large shipment of aid from the United Nations yesterday. So even beyond the 100,000 or so likely to have been killed by the storm, many thousands more are going to die of malnutrition and disease.

The Bush administration, of course, could do something about this, not least by teaming up with its friends at Chevron to apply the appropriate pressure on the junta. But instead it sends out Laura to call them naughty boys. And when the regime refuses aid for its own starving people, the Bush squad just throws up its collective hands and says, "Who could have foreseen this?"

I guess we can call it the global Katrina technique.