Then there is the discouraging profile of Special Envoy Christopher Hill, the driving force behind U.S. capitulations to the North Koreans. In his pursuit of the will-o’-the-wisp of denuclearizing the North, Amb. Hill has insisted that the Treasury Department accede to Pyongyang’s demand for the return of $25 million frozen when a Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia, was sanctioned for laundering high-quality North Korean counterfeit American currency.

Alas, Kim Jong-Il has Hill’s number. It is predictable that the North’s next precondition for further "progress" in negotiations (not to be confused with actual disarmament) will be an end altogether to the sanctions aimed at countering such acts of economic warfare against the United States. Treasury has rightly been resisting, but without strong support from Congress, it may not be able to stave off the appeasers much longer.

This illustrative list of discouraging profiles would be incomplete without at least passing mention of behavior so contrary to the national interest that our government refuses even to acknowledge that it is afoot. It is going forward under the rubric of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) and is shaping up to be one of the greatest threats to U.S. sovereignty of all time.

The Bush administration has generally dismissed concerns about the roughly two-dozen U.S.-Canadian-Mexican working groups beavering away in secret to produce tripartite understandings, rules and regulations that will "harmonize" virtually every facet of business and society in North America. In much the same way the European Common Market inexorably mutated into the European Union, the idea is, in the words of the new trilateralists, to "evolve by stealth" a "North American Community" out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Indeed, it has only been possible to ferret out information about these groups and their ominous ambitions by filing Freedom of Information Act requests – something the public interest group Judicial Watch has done in recent months.

Instead of trying to abandon our vital interests in Iraq, Congress should be demonstrating the courage it will take both to win the war and to deserve to win future elections. Our leaders must support our friends, oppose – rather than reward – our foes and assure the continued survival and success of liberty here at home in the face of bureaucrats and business interests that would stealthily undermine both.