We could certainly learn a thing or two about keeping the peace from the honorable Buddhist kingdom of Thailand. When they start to have the kind of trouble with the Muslim population that has led to horrors worldwide, the premier Thaksin Shinawatra (you’ll want to memorize that name — it’ll be on Jeopardy someday) wastes no time with acts of complicated diplomacy or messy police actions — nope, he gets people folding origami cranes.

This is a front-page story in today’s Wall St. Journal (again, a subscription-only thing so I can’t link), but it should have come from a Dave Barry column. Apparently, Shinawatra has been sensing unrest in the Muslim-dominated southern provinces, where hundreds have died in violence that escalated after a brutal police crackdown on Muslim protesters resulted in 85 deaths, mostly through ill-treatment.

So, what to do? Wellllll, through the kind of enlightenment that would only come to most of us after a Nyquil enema, Shinawatra arrived at the absolutely wonderful idea of having the entire population fold paper cranes (which bring peace and hope to their beholders, according to Japanese tradition) for every man, woman and child in Thailand. That’s 63,000,000 paper cranes.

And how to bestow these favorable tidings? Why, you take them up in planes and drop them out of bomb-bay doors on the unsuspecting heads of the southern Muslims, of course. After all, what could possibly soothe those jihad-invoking hotheads more than being pelted with 63 million pellets of carefully folded — and altogether meaningless — good will?

Well, not altogether meaningless. Actually, some Muslims are already offended by the gesture, since their religion considers representation of any created thing as idolotry.

As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.