First it was Bill Clinton in North Korea, escorting home two scared US journalists from the clutches of Kim Jong Il. Now, Senator Jim Webb returns from Burma with the hapless American eccentric, John Yettaw.

For a politician, there are few more glorious moments than jetting home from a despotic regime with imprisoned compatriots in tow. But the liberation of Mr Yettaw was the least important and interesting achievement of Mr Webb’s trip.

Whether you regard Mr Yettaw as a well-meaning buffoon or an arrogant busybody, he hardly deserved such a prompt and high-level intervention.

The ironies of his release this weekend are painful. In setting him free, the Burmese junta manages to project an image of magnanimity for cancelling a sentence out of all proportion to Mr Yettaw’s “crimes”. And, as he flies back to obscurity in Missouri, Aung San Suu Kyi and her two female companions are left to pay the price of his fecklessness.

Mr Webb did at least see Ms Suu Kyi and their conversation must have been an interesting one. For the senator is a firm supporter of an approach very different from her uncompromising idealism. In the absence of any ideal solutions for dealing with the regime, he believes in making the most of a bad lot and in engaging with the junta, dropping sanctions, and also backs participation in the bogus-sounding election promised for next year.

These would be highly risky steps, but the time is long overdue for a serious debate about alternatives to the present policies of Ms Suu Kyi and her Western supporters, which have achieved nothing very obvious other than high-minded isolation.

For encouraging such a conversation, Senator Webb deserves credit.

He would have done much to overcome stereotypes about American parochialism, and made a valuable point to the dictatorship, if he had requested Ms Suu Kyi’s release before that of Mr Yettaw, rather than vice versa.

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