Feel-Good Cave-Ins Costly In Lives, Too Incomplete Without Countries Like China On Board, The Treaty Means Nothing.

The implements of war are hell.

Bombs. Guided missiles. Machine guns. Fragmentation grenades. Land mines.

They’re designed to kill and maim. That’s what war is about. Our guys blowing up their guys. As long as evil lurks in the hearts of tin gods who subjugate countries, it’ll always be that way.

Unfortunately, war doesn’t always stop when the troops pull out. Greed and hate that fueled the war may continue to fester, ready to explode again on a moment’s notice - unless an intimidating force intervenes. North Korea would’ve invaded prosperous South Korea again if U.S. troops and a demilitarized zone peppered with 1 million land mines weren’t standing in the way.

In Korea, land mines serve an important military purpose. In Pentagonspeak, they’re a “force multiplier.” They protect our outmanned troops - and one of the world’s most prosperous countries, whose capital was easily overrun at the start of the Korean War. Seoul is still just 30 or so miles from the DMZ.

Therefore, the Clinton administration was right this fall to take a go-slow approach to the feel-good Ottawa treaty to ban land mines. Without the participation of leading exporters and users of land mines - like China, Israel, India and Pakistan - the treaty was meaningless. The Saddam Husseins of the world weren’t going to quit using the deadly devices simply because the U.S. and dozens of other countries asked them, pretty please, to do so.

Still, Clinton was willing to approve the treaty - if the U.S. was permitted an exception for Korea and the Pentagon was given an adequate phaseout period to come up with comparable alternative weapons. Reasonable demands. But the activists pushing the treaty rejected them.

The U.S. isn’t the heavy here. Our country no longer produces land mines. President Clinton, to his credit, has said the U.S. would unilaterally stop using land mines everywhere but Korea in 2003, and by 2006 in Korea. He also ordered more money for U.S. efforts to deactivate mines around the world.

No one wants to see women, children and farmers torn apart by land mines. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to ban them. An immediate ban applying to the U.S. but not to leading abusers of land mines was foolish. It would have endangered our troops and a key ally.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view, see headline: Feel victims’ pain and act accordingly

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