"Nearly 80 days and 800 deaths after the military coup of February 1, two divergent trendlines have emerged to define the future contours of Myanmar’s crisis: brutal reassertion of control by the military junta over a political and economic wasteland; or descent into civil war pitting the junta against a nascent coalition of forces fighting for federal democracy. Less noted and earlier in the crisis dismissed as quixotic, there is also however a third wild-card scenario involving action aimed at deflecting both of those two disastrous trajectories: foreign intervention to engage Myanmar’s generals in the only language they have ever understood or respected – military power. Impelled by the looming prospect of state collapse and humanitarian catastrophe as an inflexible Tatmadaw ratchets up its repression, the logic of external intervention in the form of US missile strikes against military targets is assuming a compelling momentum. As one well-placed Singapore-based analyst conceded: “We’re in such dire territory now that almost nothing is off-limits.” In the weeks following the putsch through February and into March many, including this writer, saw reassertion of control by the junta, known as the State Administration Council (SAC), as the most probable outcome. The argument was based on an assessment of four salient facets of the Tatmadaw as a military organization: its ample resources, institutional cohesion, proven ruthlessness and unblinking sense of mission. All of these characteristics had been amply demonstrated in earlier periods of popular protest. Where the assessment fell down was in underestimating the extraordinary courage and resilience of ordinary citizens. Led by a youthful vanguard armed with modern communications technology, hundreds of thousands who saw their future being torn away by the same military that between 1962 and 2011 had reduced their country to an economic basket case took to the streets in peaceful protest. This sustained outpouring of anger forced the military to move from relative restraint in the first weeks after the coup to a more characteristic resort to battlefield violence involving first targeted killings using rifles and finally open massacres with machine guns, grenades and rocket launchers..."