I was born in Myanmar and grew up there for more than two decades. The impact of economic sanctions are felt not by the ruling class (the military generals), but by the average citizen. Looking back, I firmly believe that sanctions simply deteriorates the human capital and resource (and thus the potential to spur any progressive change) rather than creating any sort of difficulty for the military.<p>Because of the sanctions, there's always constant emigration and drained my country of a lot of intelligent and hard working people. We are still suffering from that and the current democratically elected government can't easily find competent people to help rebuild the country...