Joining the Club

The problem with evil dictators is they never seem to know when the time is right for a graceful climb-down. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad should have provided a strong visual cue to Kim Jong Il of North Korea to abandon his nuclear weapons-development program and come in from the cold. The message even appeared, briefly, to have been received when North Korea agreed in March to sit down for three days of preliminary talks with the U.S. and China in Beijing. But the dim hope that Kim had drawn "the...