As you may have noticed, Kim Jong-Il has the world’s leaders running around like headless chickens. Now that he’s taken advantage of both Clinton and Bush and has achieved nuclear capability, everybody is wondering if the United Nations or Red China can make him heel. The fact is, the U.N. couldn’t make a Chihuahua heel. China, which provides North Korea with most of its food and energy, probably could, but there’s nothing its leaders enjoy more than to see the United States frustrated and impotent. Besides which, anybody who thinks we have more to fear from North Korea than from Communist China is a screwball.

What do you do about Kim Jong-Il? The answer that comes to mind is in fact a question; namely, where is a real life James Bond? Time after time, when the free world was being held hostage by the evil likes of Dr. No, Goldfinger, Dr. Kanaga, and Maximilian Largo, Agent 007, in the service of her majesty Queen Elizabeth II, took care of business. Professional that he was, Bond always managed to dispatch the villain and his cronies, departing from the megalomaniac’s realm just as it was exploding into oblivion. And he still found time to visit his tailor, instruct bartenders on the proper way to mix a martini, and indulge in some heavy-duty smooching.

I understand that there’s a gentleman’s agreement among national leaders not to knock each other off. That’s fine for them, but it’s not so great for the rest of us. Eventually, after all, it’s everybody else who dies when wars break out, even though it’s people like Kim Jong-Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Bashar Al-Assad, who leave the world a far better place simply by leaving it.

What’s the point of having to bribe tyrants or to compromise our principles by appeasing them when it makes so much more sense to simply eliminate them? I realize that some folks are going to be offended at the mere notion of assassination mainly because, in the wake of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers, the word has come to have such a negative connotation. But there is a world of difference between a good assassination and a bad one, just as there’s a great divide between a cold-blooded murder of a child and the execution of the killer.

Understand, I’m not entirely opposed to diplomacy, although I do believe that, in nearly all cases, the best thing to be said for diplomacy is that it provides gainful employment for people who would otherwise be wards of the state.

Quite honestly, in the final analysis, I would far rather leave negotiations in the hands of Bond, James Bond, than in those of Rice, Condi Rice.