Then again, wars are rather terrible things and the “Peace Dividend” has already been spent…

They have sat around thinking about the worst case scenarios about a collapse: “millions” of North Koreans flooding into China and China slaughtering them, tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers and rockets and artillery shells raining down on Seoul and killing tens of thousands of Koreans, longer range missiles perhaps with WMDs slaming into Japan and causing Japan to attack the North setting off a possible conflict with China and perhaps even South Korea, a mushroom cloud rising over Seoul and millions of South Koreans being killed in an instant and perhaps millions more through fallout.

Or, perhaps just as simple as, “What if the guys replacing the Kim Jong Il regime are even worse?”

These kind of thoughs must be behind what we have seen over the last year.

The Bush administration brought North Korea to the brink, apparently, with the banking sanctions – coupled with North Korea’s inability to function on its on – and people started to get weak kneed and decided they just could not possibly be part of leading NK to collapse.

That such an outcome actually must be actually be avoided. That we have to do “something” to prevent that from happening.

And Bush agreed and told his team to work toward that end.

But, what makes it even more depressing —– we won’t see the US decide to become North Korea’s best friend and pump it full of money to prevent starvation and the ability of Pyongyang to use food as a means of social control.

We’ll do what we think is enough to keep the regime alive.

And we’ll wring our hands about the human rights violations.

But we don’t have the guts to attempt to solve the problem by taking the regime out.

And we never will.