One April day in 1991 the world awoke to the news that a devastating cyclone and tidal wave had struck the coast of Bangladesh. As bodies washed ashore by the thousand and the death toll rose to 139,000, with millions homeless, a huge aid effort swung into action.

Seven thousand American troops, diverted on their way home from the Gulf, boosted the relief effort. The American amphibious taskforce lifted 300 tons of relief materials in one day, matching the entire effort in the first two weeks of the Bangladesh government and its allies.

In January 2005 another huge American military relief mission was estimated to have saved tens of thousands of lives in the tsunami-battered countries of southeast Asia.

Marines with water-purifying equipment headed for Sri Lanka, giant cargo planes loaded with relief material landed at a former base for B-52 bombers in Thailand and helicopters ferried supplies to isolated survivors clinging to life in Aceh, Indonesia, where the wave had killed about 100,000 people.

This American humanitarian intervention was particularly noteworthy because Aceh was the scene of a civil war. Also, Washington’s relations with Jakarta were strained over human rights violations. None-the-less Indonesia welcomed American assistance.

The people of Burma have no such luck. “We are in a long line of nations who are ready, willing and able to help, but also, of course, in a long line of nations the Burmese don’t trust,” said Eric John, the American ambassador Burma’s ruling junta suspects that American aid has political motives, and not totally without cause. A day after Laura Bush highlighted Burma’s failure to warn people before the cyclone President George W Bush criticised the generals’ rule and told them to open up to the world.

He simultaneously signed legislation awarding a congressional gold medal to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy leader whom the junta holds under house arrest.

There is no doubt an American humanitarian mission would save a significant number of Burmese lives if allowed. Faced with the junta’s refusal, ought America be prepared to intervene regardless?

One strong advocate of intervention is Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister. Expressing righteous anger over the junta’s callousness last week he proposed forcing the delivery of aid on Burma.

Kouchner invoked the United Nations’s “responsibility to protect” civilians, a concept conceived at a summit in 2005, partly in response to atrocities in Rwanda and Darfur in Sudan.

His call was echoed by Andrew Natsios, the former head of the US Agency for International Development. “Sometimes you have to . . . intervene against the wishes of the local government,” he said.

Such views encountered opposition from Douglas Alexander, Britain’s international development secretary, who said threatening to airdrop aid into Burma without permission was “incendiary”. “I don’t think we have any legal right to impose [air drops],” he said, though he added: “We might have a moral obligation.”

There is no indication that Bush is preparing a unilateral rescue mission in Burma. But there have been precedents, both happy and unhappy, in recent years. Interventionism was tried in Somalia in an operation to protect aid that backfired when the Americans were caught in a civil war and withdrew.

The Americans justified intervention in Iraq by reference to the “war on terror” at the price of damaging the military’s reputation as a force for good. Saving the lives of the people of Burma could help to redress the balance but it could backfire if it turned into a shooting war.

Jan Egeland, the former United Nations emergency relief co-ordinator, said nonmilitary pressure could be brought to bear on the Burmese government by freezing its assets and issuing warrants for the arrest of members of the ruling junta.

“We’re in 2008, not 1908,” Egeland said. “A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.” But he was wary of the use of force. “I can’t imagine any humanitarian organisation wanting to shoot their way in with food.”

Another option is to channel aid to third countries such as Thailand or Indonesia that can pass it on to Burma.

“We can pay for it. We can provide repair parts to the Indonesians so they can get their air force up. We can lend them two C130s and let them paint the Indonesian flag on it,” retired Major-General William Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank, told Time magazine. “We have to get the stuff to people who can deliver it and who the Burmese government will accept, even if it is not as efficient as the good old US military.”

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