Banning landmines - naive and dangerous idealism

Now that a bunch of naive idealists in the government have agreed to get rid of landmines, it's fitting to quote Charles Krauthammer (2004):

Realists do not live just in America. I found one in Finland. During the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty, one of the rare holdouts, interestingly enough, was Finland. The Finnish prime minister stoutly opposed the land mine ban. And for that he was scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors. To which he responded tartly that this was a “very convenient” pose for the “other Nordic countries”--after all, Finland is their land mine.

Finland is the land mine between Russia and Scandinavia. America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization. 

Our president (and commander in chief), Tarja Halonen, has been an advocate of the landmine ban. An officer in the Finnish military was recently fined for calling her incompetent.