My sister Daphne Wolf studied Burmese music in Yangon. Her music school is organizing relief aid. Daphne wrote this guest blog post:

Small and local aid agencies are best equipped to help the victims of cyclone Nargis because they are already operating on the ground. Donations to these agencies are more effective since big aid organizations are still struggling to access the affected areas.
Local relief groups such as the Music School Gitameit, are providing the most urgently needed first-aid supplies.

For two years I lived in Yangon, studying Burmese traditional music and teaching classical flute at the Gitameit Music Center, a private school founded by the American pianist Kit Young in 2003. I returned to Berlin in December 2007 to finish my masters in Musicology and Southeast Asian Studies.

My friends, former colleagues, and students all tell me that Yangon, the old capital, is widely devastated and that the fertile delta of the Irrawaddy River is still flooded:

NYT Columnist Roger Cohen wrote Europe Votes Democrat, but Asia Tends Republican and Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council staff from 2001 to 2005, claims that the Iraq war has been good for US interests in South East Asia. He writes in The Washington Quarterly:

If anything, most major powers in Asia have used the war on terrorism and the conflict in Iraq to align more closely with the United States in order to balance rivals within the region or to advance their global standing.

Greg Sheridan agrees with this analysis and adds in The Australian (HT: Joe Noory):

Australian commentators almost universally mimic the European critique or more often the liberal American critique of the Bush administration and all its works. What is clear is that they have almost no sense of the Asian context at all.

Other conservatives, however, worry about the US standing in in East Asia: Michael Austin from the American Enterprise Institute opines that appeasement politics weaken US credibility in Asia: "Some of America's most important bilateral alliances are at risk of coming unmoored."