I hate to be the killjoy, the one raining on a parade, but someone has to do it. All the optimism over North Koreas promise to stop building nuclear weapons is misplaced at best, at worst it is downright stupid.

Let's review shall we? North Korea is a brutal, anti American, stalinist dictatorship. When you have people fleeing to the relative freedom of China that should tell you something about a country. This is a country that enslaves, starves, and brutalizes its own people. So forgive me if I don't take their promise at face value. After all we've seen these kinds of things before. The Clinton Adminastration reached a similar deal with North Korea in the mid 1990's. A deal that North Korea promptly broke, as they went ahead with their nuclear program.

When you make a diplomatic deal, you give something, but you get something in return. We are giving, energy aid, economic cooperation, and security assurances. What are we getting? The word of a psychotic dictator, who fires rockets to scare his neighbores, that he will behave himself. Fellow travelers, left wing idiots, and those who can't pry themselves away from the tombstone of communism might believe the promise of Kim Jong Il, but I don't think any normal person would.

Oh, they are promising to allow inspectors into the country. Well doesn't that just give you a warm fuzzy feeling all over? I think we have been through the inspector thing before. Oh what was his name? Funny looking Arab guy, wore berets, we drug him out of a whole near Tikrit. Oh that's right Hussein. Yeah, he promised to allow inspectors into the country to. They didn't get a whole lot of cooperation, whether it was 1998 when the threw them out of the country or 2002 when he let them back in. I don't think we can expect much cooperation from North Korea.

This is a stall tactic. It is used by dictators and thugs all the time. They promise to be good, and once the world has turned its attention elsewhere they go right back to their old habits. It's like Yasser Arafats promises in English that he wanted peace and coexistence,then when no one was watching anymore he would deliver one of his hate filled rants in arabic and order a wave of suicide attacks. Call me pessimistic, but I think all of North Koreas promises are worth about as much as a warm bucket of spit.