Apparently some, but the news there is also not encouraging. I returned home a week later and heard the Sept. 1 NPR "Talk of the Nation," which discussed the issue for an hour with Patrick Clawson, the director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Rania Masri, the coordinator of the Iraq Action Coalition. "Discussed" might be a bit too euphemistic for the polite attempt to maintain any semblance of decorum that ensued. Exchanging charges of American obstinance and anti-Islamic biases with claims of Iraqi corruption and noncompliance, the guests agreed on very little except the dire state of the average Iraqi family--especially its women and children.

When children die and people suffer, both the Iraqi and American governments have blood on their hands. To argue who is more culpable--to see whether sanctions are stifling resistance to oppression or creating it--is, in the end, missing the point. The people in Iraq will suffer and die while negotiations continue back and forth. As responsible human beings, we must ask if an open-ended international game of chicken is what is best for our fellow human beings unlucky enough to live in Iraq.

If the United States declares war on a nation's leader--as Congress effectively did do by passing the Iraq Liberation Act last year--can it still work with that leader? It is probably a faux-pas beyond even the smoothest of diplomats to simultaneously vow to remove a nation's leaders and then invite them over for tea and deal-making. Perhaps this is the most important lesson from the corrosive experience of Iraq, we must be careful not to cut connections with powerful despots, for they may be our only chance to help their nation's people. As we stare into the eyes of Slobodan Milosevic today, and the leaders of Indonesia, Pakistan, North Korea or China tomorrow, we cannot overestimate the power of the peaceful solution and working through the existing channels of power.

Working with leaders who govern with a palpable tyrannical manner is, obviously, not without its faults. The failed policy of appeasement has left a long shadow: 60 years ago this month Great Britain and France learned that working with Hitler and overlooking violations of international law might mean helping to ensure their own demise. Clearly, discretion must be used to know when and how negotiation will work and when it is simply too late.

There must be a delicate balance, a distinction between being a source of international justice and merely policing based on one's own agenda. American foreign policy over the past decade, and through it the actions of the United Nations have been frighteningly stopgap, often forced to make ultimatums when a situation springs full-form onto the international stage as a crisis no longer waiting to happen.

There will be no easy answers to such a complex question. International regulation and monitoring must play a greater role, and regional organization must be empowered to resolve some of these issues on a smaller scale. The future will hold the opportunity to learn the lessons of failed policies in the world's current stalemates.

Yet to take new situations with greater wisdom does not free us from the errors of the past. There are still problems in Iraq, deepening while in our actions amount to inaction.

We must consider if the solution will lie in working with Saddam for his people and not continuing to fail to work against him. American foreign policy seems to make a choice between the battle against tyranny, terrorism and militarization, and the war against disease, infection and without concern for borders. The United States, hearkening back to the founding of the United Nations it so proudly hosted in San Francisco a half-century ago, must choose to do both, and make a priority of human life and dignity for the greatest number--with any potential partners.