Albright is right .... sort of
The dull British writer C. P. Snow understood the workings of bureaucracies better than just about anybody. He laid down one simple law: "Be there." Wherever some committee discusses the welfare of your agency, you'd better be present in person or your agency is going to lose.

In the discussion of Kim's multiple orgasm (six Dongs so far) the Second Ford Administration has been totally absent from the public table. On all the news channels we've seen the same committee of Clintonistas making the same points, and no official spokesman has uttered a peep. Larry King allowed Duncan Hunter to participate by phone, but every time Hunter made a good hard common-sense point, the 'real people' around the table smirked and snorted.

Madelyn Albright summed up the Clintonista argument: "This is the result of 5 years of failed diplomacy." Yes, true. And the exact same statement was true the last time Kim shot his wad: 1998, after 5 years of failed Albright diplomacy.

So Maddie is more precise than she wants to be. The plain fact is that no form of diplomacy, bilateral, multilateral, mostly sticks, mostly carrots .... None of it will work against Kim.

Sanctions don't work in the best of circumstances, unless you ratchet them up to the point where you're holding a full Stalingrad-style siege against the offending location. But sanctions are just prima facie pointless when the leader is happy to watch his own people starve.

The correct answer to this threat was to knock the launch site out before the missile flew. Since the Second Ford Administration has already lost that chance, it still could take the launcher out, though it would be less meaningful. What we really need to do is EMP the country to blind its defenses, then eliminate its military facilities entirely. Army and all.

Without his military, Kim will collapse.

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Addendum: Thinking about EMP leads to this observation.... Many people are sighing in relief because the Big Dong apparently failed shortly after launch. I'm not relieved. Remember that Kim has stated repeatedly and clearly that this is a test firing, not an attack. In an attack, a missile that halted early would count as a failure, but that doesn't apply in an experiment. How do we know that he wasn't testing something like an altitude-controlled self-destruct mechanism?
  ¶ 7:00 PM