Of Hollow Men: Obama Flip-Flops on Removing N. Korea from Terror-Sponsor List

In March of 2005, I blogged about this letter from the Illinois congressional delegation to the North Korean government, in which all members of the delegation warned Kim Jong Il that they would firmly oppose removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism unless North Korea accounts for the fate of the Reverend Kim Dong Shik, a lawful permanent resident of the United States who had resided in Illinois.

In 2002, Rev. Kim was in northeast China assisting North Korean refugees. It was at this time that Kim, who was in his 60’s and wheelchair-bound, was kidnapped by North Korean agents and spirited back across the border to North Korea. (All of this somehow escaped the notice of the Chinese police, although only a few bridges cross the border between China and North Korea.) One of Rev. Kim’s kidnappers, Ryu Young-hwa, confessed to his role in the kidnapping in a South Korean court in 2005. Leaked details from South Korean prosecutors suggest that 10 other North Korean agents took part in the plot. We still do not know whether the Rev. Kim is alive or dead, although Andrei Lankov’s new book reports that, according to a recent defector, Rev. Kim died under interrogation.

Rev. Kim is the forgotten “American” abductee. Although he was abducted and possibly killed by an act of politically motivated intimidation, he is an inconvenience the State Department desperately wishes to overlook so that it can falsely say that North Korea does not sponsor acts of terrorism, which 18 U.S.C. sec. 2331(1) defines as activities that:

(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;

(B) appear to be intended –

(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;

(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or

(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

Oh, well. That was then:

U.S. Democratic presidential frontrunner Senator Barack Obama has recently indicated he no longer opposes the removal of North Korea from a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. Obama in January 2005 came out against the removal of the Stalinist nation from the list until it gives an account of the kidnapping and death in the North of the Rev. Kim Dong-shik in 2000. [Chosun Ilbo]

Obama’s latest shift goes far to confirm my worst fears that he is a political cream puff — sweet, squishy, and mostly hollow except for the airy, sugary filling. When the prevailing winds blow in the direction of principled outrage, Obama gives us principled outrage. When the winds shift toward easy accommodation, so shifts Obama. Take the question of genocide. Apparently, Obama believes that “[s]ilence, acquiescence, paralysis in the face of genocide is wrong.” Meaning, we should break our silence with mere words, or by forming a large drum circle? Or should we should actually do something effective? It’s far from clear, but what if actually doing something to prevent genocide comes with some unpopular cost? So shifts Obama:

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press. [MSNBC]

This seems to be meant to justify doing nothing effective in either place.

“We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea,” he said.

We’re all ears.

At convenient moments, Obama has readily agreed to sign onto principled-sounding statements about human rights in North Korea. In these final months of the presidency of another well-meaning and “compassionate” — yet essentially shallow — man, we’d be fools not to wonder whether Obama’s words amounted to more than just that. It gives no comfort that Obama has expressed a willingness to fly directly to Pyongyang to supplicate to His Porcine Majesty. To say what that Chris Hill has not already said? What else do we still have to surrender?

If Obama can’t be principled about something as fundamental to our security as terrorism, one can only wonder what other evils he might flutter toward easy accomodation with. Regrettably, it’s his readiness to tell us — and on some level, to believe — whatever we want to hear at any given moment that may well get Obama elected this fall. The American people have never been hungrier to be told that we can have drive-up ease and Barco-lounger comfort without cost or sacrifice, that if we smile at the evils of the world and click our heels three times, apocalyptic prophets will come out of their caves and set up day care centers. It’s not easy to perceive, of course, how much worse things really could be. In the absence of any consistency of principle from either our current president or our next one, however, we have good reason to fear that they will be.

Related: As I had feared, the Bush Administration’s determination to de-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism continues to do harm to our relations with our most important Asian ally, Japan. Two significant points I take from this Washington Post piece are first, that Japan’s Prime Minister made himself available to the Post to show the depth of Japan’s concern; and second, that the Japanese are sensibly turning to China to put pressure on the North. If China secures the release of Japanese abductees after the United States, after years of empty rhetoric, essentially betrays Japan, it will be a major step toward making China dominant in the region at America’s expense. Japanese voters will move in the direction of accommodating China, and away from rearmament and strengthening their defense alliance with the United States.