I can’t say I’m not surprised by this announcement, but I still find it to be utterly unbelievable:

It seemed dramatic. President Bush stepped into the Rose Garden to announce plans to remove North Korea from the U.S. terrorism blacklist and ease sanctions against a country he once branded as part of his “axis of evil.”

But just as soon as he said it, he played down its significance.

Bush said what the U.S. was giving North Korea in exchange for its long-awaited accounting of its secretive nuclear program was largely symbolic — that they would have little impact on North Korea’s financial and diplomatic isolation.  [International Herald Tribune]

If dropping North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List according to President Bush is “largely symbolic” then so is North Korea’s nuclear declaration that is months late and totally incomplete because here is what is not in the declaration:

The number of bombs in storage, or information about what’s going to happen to them. The North proved it could build a working nuclear bomb when it carried out an underground nuclear test blast in October 2006. Details on the bombs, however, will be left to the next stage of the talks, when Pyongyang is supposed to abandon all its nuclear weapons program.

_Details about North Korea’s suspected nuclear program to seek weapons fueled by enriched uranium.

_An account of North Korea’s alleged role in helping Syria build what senior U.S. intelligence officials say was a secret nuclear reactor meant to produce plutonium used in making high-yield nuclear weapons. Israeli jets bombed the structure in the remote eastern desert of Syria in September 2007.

With this much left out it is amazing there is anything in it at all.  It is official that President Bush’s North Korea policy is even worse then the first Agreed Framework signed with North Korea by Bill Clinton.  Critics of the current North Korea policy are currently letting their voices be heard about their displeasure with this announcement:

The White House didn’t want Bush’s announcement to be viewed as the U.S. bowing to the communist regime. It also helped temper outrage from conservative Republicans, who want the U.S. to take an even tougher stance against the regime.

“It’s shameful,” said John Bolton, Bush’s former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “This represents the final collapse of Bush’s foreign policy.”

“Profound disappointment” was the reaction of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.

Bush critics said even symbolism was too much give to a regime that can’t be trusted, but Bush insisted he was not giving in to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

You know who else must be really angered about this agreement?  First of all the Japanese who has citizens still unaccounted for that have been kidnapped by the North Korean regime, not to mention the hundreds of South Korean citizens kidnapped as well, which the South Korean government cares so little about that a 66 year old grandma had to launch her own rescue mission to rescue her husband. So the South Korean government may not be angered but the families of the South Korean abductees surely are.

Then you also have the Kim Dong-shik family.  Reverend Kim Dong-shik was a US permanent resident married to a US citizen who has lived in America that past three decades before being kidnapped in China by North Korean agents for aiding North Korean defectors.  It is suspected he was brought back to North Korea where he was tortured and killed.  Barack Obama promised the Kim family who are his constituents in Illinois that he would not allow the removal of North Korea from the terrorism list until they came clean on the whereabouts of Reverend Kim.  Since starting his presidential campaign, Barack Obama has been in hiding on this issue ever since and is as expected quiet on it now as well.  There is change you can believe in.

However the person most upset about this has got to be Muammar Gaddafi.  Just think Gaddafi had to completely give up his nuclear program, dispose of his chemical weapons, lose a lot of face in the Arab world, and had to pay $2.7 billion dollars in compensation money to the victims of Pan Am flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland to get off the terrorism list.

Kim Jong-il on the otherhand bombs Korean Air Flight 858 killing 115 people plus other terror attacks and does not have to pay any compensation money and is having people pay him instead for being taken off the State Sponsors of Terrorism List.

It is sad days when I’m hoping Jimmy Carter will show up and rescue the Bush administration from this poor North Korea policy choice like he rescued the Clinton administration from its poor policy choice of deciding to attack North Korea in 1994.

One Free Korea of course has more on this issue that is of course a must read.

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