Diplomacy....You Have to be Kidding!

This week the United States celebrated a huge victory. It sent hundreds of thousands of ground troops, several thousand aircraft, and two carrier groups to invade North Korea. The result: Pyongyang agreed to shut down its main nuclear reactor and resume talks on ending its nuclear program. Wait, you didn't see the invasion on the news? Oh, thats right, we decided for some strange reason that invading another soveirgn state without first exhausting diplomatic options was not such a good idea. It seems that instead of hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of dollars, all it took was one little man named Christopher Hill. The result is that we have one of the worlds most rogue nations (and a member of the notorious "Axis of Evil"...I think they have their own show on cartoon network) ready to sit down at the negotiating table and have a real dialogue with the rest of the world. Seems like a pretty big success to me, but for those of you who still are skeptical, lets compare this with our other recent exploit into international action.

So a few years ago we knew that North Korea was trying, if not already successful in enriching uranium. We knew that Kim Jung Il was at best an unstable leader, and more likely was a complete lunatic. We knew that North Korea had no real economy to speak of, and would be more than happy to generate a little revenue by selling weapons to the highest bidder.

In the same "Axis of Evil" bubble-gum card pack as you would find Kim Jung Il, we had another leader named Sadaam Hussein. There was a little bit of a question as to whether he had weapons of mass destruction. In fact so much of a question that we figured that instead of finding out, we would just overrun his country with our Army and Marines. Now, this was not such a terrible idea, outside of the fact that we really didn't make any plans as to what to do in the event that there were no weapons of mass destruction, or in the highly unlikely event that the entire country collapsed into civil war.

Now, I am no foreign policy expert, but it appears to me that we invaded a country that posed less of an immediate threat, while leaving little Kim Jung to continue cooking up his nuclear recipe. Of course, as we all know diplomacy was not an option for dealing with Saddam because we don't negotiate with terrorist (and it was Iraq that was responsible for 9-11, oh wait, maybe not). Good thing for us that the regime of Kim Jung IL is far more humane (they kill their own citizens, but they don't brag about it) than Saddam.

I guess my point in all this is that if we would have pursued diplomacy, through international channels, we very may well have been able to avoid this war. Imagine being able to use those hundreds of billions of dollars on health care and education. Imagine being able to close the deficit gap for our children and grandchildren. And most important of all, imagine being able to bring back the lives of the thousands of young men and women who have perished in the service of their country. Hopefully, this has taught us that diplomacy, while not as expedient or glorified as war, is often the best solution. It is an increasingly small world that we live in, and if we can't figure out how to be pragmatic in our foreign policy dealings, the world is bound to get worse not better.