Cease-fires work...

"Kofi Anan would have loved it.

On November 19, 1939, Shirer's diary reported: 'For almost two months now there has been no military action on land, sea, or in the air.' On January 1, 1940, he wrote, 'this phony kind of war cannot continue long.' But it was now exactly four months since war was declared. How is that for a cease fire?

Did this de facto cease fire lead to peace? No. Like other cease fires, it helped the aggressor. It gave Hitler time to move his divisions from the eastern front, after they had conquered Poland, to the western front, facing France. Now that military superiority along the Rhine had shifted in favor of the German armies, the war suddenly went from being phony to being devastatingly real. Hitler attacked and France collapsed in six weeks."

...if you're the aggressor! Thomas Sowell