Long standoff better than open warfare

If Americans know nothing else about Korea, most know North and South have been engaged in a tense stalemate along the 38th parallel since a 1953 cease-fire halted shooting in the war that "M*A*S*H" made famous for a younger generation.

After more than a half-century of no peace but also no war, the two nations are edging toward not reunification but normalization. The three-year-long conflict devastated two nations and claimed the lives of 33,000 American soldiers and 4 million Koreans. And it ended rather oddly, in a 12-minute ceremony involving the U.N. and North Korea at desks yards apart, with silence and no handshakes. Neither the U.S. nor South Korea signed, but everyone agreed to stop shooting.

To Americans who've come to demand that wars be quick, clean and without impact on them, the long wait for such nebulous results after such destruction probably seems bizarre.

But then, wars haven't really been the same since Korea, either. In fact, the Korean conflict was the last great war involving large armies, defined fronts and identifiable enemies. It was also the last head-on conflict involving sovereign nations and competing political systems. Vietnam was a little of the old. Stopping a political system called communism was the motivation on the one side. But it was also a little of the new, following a charismatic leader intent on tossing out foreigners on the other.

Many conflicts since then have been more personal, involving religion, tribe and ethnicity, and messier, with ill-defined fronts and hard-to-identify foes. The former Yugoslavia. The former Soviet Union. Africa. Afghanistan. Pakistan and India. Iraq. Iran. Israel. Indonesia. All have seen bloodshed that was largely about avenging old sins and settling old grievances, with rape and mass murder sometimes the weapons of choice and religious fervor often providing the motivation. Frequently, the explosions shattered sovereign nations into religious or ethnic enclaves.

The fact that such conflicts don't often involve sovereign nations nowadays also makes them nearly impossible to end once they begin, a truth that probably feeds American restlessness with every war since Korea. We -- living in a nation that has put nationhood ahead of religion, ethnicity and tribe -- have trouble understanding those that don't. And it is often hard to determine who is winning, who is losing and on some days, who exactly we are fighting and why.

We formed this nation by basically doing the same to the British -- not fighting fair or according to accepted military traditions. But we no longer are the rebels, the insurgents, the guerrillas, but the target.

Which is why a 50-year-long stalemate and a half-century of tense silence holds more appeal than it once did.