When Barack Obama naÃvely suggested some months ago that the president of the United States should engage in talks with foreign despots -- which would only dignify and embolden them and give them a public relations coup, and maybe strengthen their hold on power -- he was roundly and rightly scolded. Including in this space.

But there's no reason in the world why we can't send in our orchestras.

And, in fact, we should whenever possible.

There may be no better way of waging peace -- which is, after all, what Obama was aiming at.

The truth is, the people have always been better at waging peace than their governments. President Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized this decades ago when he said, "I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."

This, from an army general no less, is the spirit that took the New York Philharmonic to the foreboding, sequestered and mysterious communist enclave of North Korea this week for an unprecedented performance and outreach of hands.

No one should think a little night music and standing ovations and warm waves will change things overnight. Or maybe at all. But it's a seed. And there have been far too few such seeds in the barren cultural landscape of North Korea.

"I don't think we should get carried away with what listening to Dvorak is going to do in North Korea," advised U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Indeed, one of the photographs sent back from Pyongyang was of a group of North Koreans bowing to a statue of former "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung. Today, they bow to his son. What they hear and see of the outside world, he largely controls. And Kim Jong-il has done his best to convince his people that America is their mortal enemy.

All the more reason to get inside when you can and show the North Koreans the outside world isn't so bad after all. Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel noted that the group's 1959 performance in the Soviet Union was just one of the influences that helped Soviets see what they were missing in the outer world.

Presidents and premiers and "dear leaders" are fairly limited in the ways they can wage peace -- if they're of a mind to do so in the first place.

But for musicians and dancers and artists and comedians and missionaries and engineers and Rotarians and businesspeople and the rest of us, there's no limit to the good we can do.

Sometimes an overture is enough.