Hillary Clinton: Mother, Stateswoman . . . Schoolgirl?

I have to admit I'm hoping for some adult intervention after the latest scrap between Hillary Clinton and the North Koreans.

While in Phuket, Thailand, for the regional ASEAN conference, the Secretary of State has been trying to drum up regional support for isolating the North Korean government and for U.N. sanctions on North Korean arms and missile development. In an interview with ABC on Monday, HRC had this to say in response to Pyongyang's recent missile tests: "What we've seen is this constant demand for attention. Maybe it's the mother in me, the experience I've had with small children and teenagers and people who are demanding attention: Don't give it to them."When she added on Wednesday that North Korea "has no friends left," Pyongyang hit back in personal terms, asserting that Clinton was "by no means intelligent" and that North Korea "cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community. . . . Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping."

As a woman, the pointed attack on Clinton's gender initially struck me as nasty and unfair, not to mention bogus. (Primary schoolgirl? Really?) But then I considered the fact that it was Hillary, not the North Korean Foreign Ministry, that first put gender on the table. In her capacity as secretary of state, she mixed motherhood and foreign policy, comparing the North Korean government to an unruly teen.

Would Colin Powell have addressed such matters from his perspective of a father? More to the point: I can't think of any instances where Condi Rice brought gender into the equation, and especially not when dealing with rogue regimes.

Clinton's sentiment -- that the missile tests should be discounted as a simple gambit for global attention, albeit a particularly nerve-wracking one -- might have some truth to it, but I'm not sure the gravity of the North Korean action was best met with a mother-knows-best response. The schoolyard taunt that North Korea has no friends left (you can almost see Clinton sticking her tongue out at Pyongyang), unsurprisingly was met with a similarly juvenile retort. I don't suppose we'll get into an "Am not," "Are too" exchange, but it's worrisome to me that our foreign policy dialogue has all the sophistication of a high school slam book.

With an ailing Kim Jong Il still in power and the lines of succession far from clear, the White House should be using a scalpel in dealing with North Korea -- not a spitball.