This, from Bloomberg, is a fascinating account of how the NK hostage situation unfolded, how Bill Clinton ended up playing Superman this week.

I guess I could always understand why if the Obama-ites wanted a major non-administration figure to show up in Pyongyang, they'd have called on Clinton. What I hadn't appreciated is that NK were adament that Clinton himself should be the major figure to show up.

One piece of the narrative in Bloomberg that I don't necessarily buy is that nothing but the release of the hostages was discussed - and to be fair, that is only the narrative in as far as the mission was explained to Russia and China. The reason for my skepticism is the reporting that Clinton met Kim Jong Il for over 3 hours. Given the hostage release seems already to have been agreed in principle, 3+ hours seems an awfully long time to talk about that and nothing else.

I expect it will be years until we learn the agenda of this meeting, if indeed we ever learn of it - an advantage I suppose of an ostensibly private humanitarian mission, rather than an official state meeting.

What has surprised me in the aftermath of the mission, however, is not the right-wing convulsions about Clinton showing up in NK. It is not seeing Dick Morris tell us that Americans are expendable. It is seeing normally cautious people jumping to extreme conclusions about why this mission was wrong-headed.

We only know, right now, that two American hostages - very likely wrongly arrested in the first place - were released. We literally know nothing else about what was agreed, bar the agreement to have Bill Clinton front the American effort. We can only speculate.

And this is where I think the chatterers need to take a deep breath. Of all the areas of government, it is in foreign policy where Obama is the continuity Clinton administration. (That is one key reason why I reckon they were quite okay having Clinton out front in NK.) And given the Clinton record in diplomacy, it takes someone with dangerous confidence in their own certitude to argue that the Obama-Clinton nexus is screwing up.

Carne Ross's piece, which argues that the NK episode will encourage hostage-taking, carries the most striking resonance with the decision by Bill Clinton in 1994 to grant visas to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein. I'm old enough to remember the furore this created, and the argument that by doing what he did, Clinton was turning a blind eye to terrorism etc and it would encourage other IRA-inspired groups to turn to violence.

It seemed like a fair argument at the time, but don't think anyone can fairly say in hindsight this the argument has held out.

And I think the point that the Adams-McGuiness visa example proved, was that a sudden change of policy, and an unexpected show of largesse on the part of the world's only superpower, is a game-changer.

That's surely what Obama and his team saw here. Their judgement may turn out to be misplaced, the problems regarding NK aren't remotely comparable to those in Northern Ireland, but jumping only on the strategic risk posed when Clinton/Obama play a diplomatic wild-card seems oddly myopic. These people have an enviable record of successful diplomacy in the world's most difficult neighborhoods, and we'd perhaps do a little better trying to learn lessons from what they are doing - instead of lecturing them on what we think they don't know.