The letter from the White House to the Speaker of the House tonight was simple, neat, and wrong:

Pursuant to section 1255 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (Public Law 111-84), and in order to keep the Congress fully informed, I am providing a classified report prepared by my Administration. This report includes information on our examination of the conduct of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) from June 26, 2008, through November 16, 2009, and concludes that the DPRK does not meet the statutory criteria to again be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.

If words and facts mean what they say, there is no explanation for President Obama’s decision but that his desire to appease Kim Jong Il means more to him than a principled response to terrorism. If it is not the sponsorship of terrorism for North Korea to supply man-portable surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades to terrorists — terrorists who may well intend to use them to kill Americans, the law has no meaning, and neither does America’s deterrence of such sponsorship.  It is difficult to understand why the President has decided not to list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism as the consensus grows that North Korea has recently and repeatedly done precisely this.

Since the seizure of a planeload of North Korean weapons on December 17th, more news reports are validating my initial suspicions that the weapons were headed for Iran, and after that, for Iran’s terrorist clients. Just yesterday, the Washington Post published this AP story, which stated the obvious:

The weapons found on board the aircraft were reportedly light battlefield arms, including grenades – hardly the ones Iran’s sophisticated military would need. From the start there has been speculation that the weapons were to be shipped on to some of the radical Middle Eastern groups supported by Tehran.

Left unmentioned are the Iranian-backed “Middle Eastern groups” that are killing American soldiers in Iraq, though I see no evidence that Ahmedinejad or Kim Jong Il would abstain from supplying them.  The 40-ton shipment of weapons also reportedly included “multiple rocket launchers, 40 surface-to-air missiles, and hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades.” A Bangkok-based freelance journalist reports that those surface-to-air missiles were the man-portable kind, perhaps the sort that Al Qaeda terrorists used in their 2002 attempt to bring down an Israeli airliner over Kenya. They may also have included parts for ballistic missiles, the transfer of which is banned by U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1695, 1718, and 1874.

Isn’t our President interested in knowing the rest of the Bangkok story before he lets Kim Jong Il off the hook?  Aren’t these the kind of questions that deserve answers instead of  preemptive dismissal?  The list of state sponsors of terrorism is not an insignificant thing. Financially, a listing means that U.S. representatives must block World Bank loans to North Korea, at a time when North Korea is falling into a state of such economic and political chaos that angry citizens are reported to be killing officers of the hated Bowibu and Anjeonbu in the streets.  It is also a principled statement that America will not tolerate the state sponsorship that manifestly amplifies the capacity of terrorists to murder innocents.

It is not lost on me that the Administration truncates its review period in mid-November, a month before the Bangkok incident. This is cause to at least hope that the administration is waiting for the intelligence community to study the Bangkok incident and draw appropriate conclusions, but just barely. It’s more likely that the Administration is merely looking for a loophole to escape criticism and embarrassment if the details of Bangkok leak out. After all, North Korea was also caught shipping rocket propelled grenades to Iran in June, when the UAE opened a crate that had been loaded on a port in China. Here’s what they found then:

Inspectors from the United Arab Emirates quickly swarmed the ship and uncovered a truck-size container packed with small arms made in North Korea. Concealed deeper in the ship was the real find: hundreds of crates containing military hardware and a grayish, foul-smelling powder, explosive components for thousands of short-range rockets.

The nature of the cargo, seized in July and described for the first time in interviews with officials and analysts in the UAE and Washington, has raised fears that Iran is ramping up efforts to arm itself and anti-Israel militias in the Middle East. Israeli officials have warned that they may use force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The freighter seized in this port enclave was one of five vessels caught this year carrying large, secret caches of weapons apparently intended for the Lebanese group Hezbollah, the Palestinian organization Hamas or the Quds Force, a wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that supports insurgents in Iraq, according to U.S. and U.N. officials and intelligence analysts. In three cases, the contraband included North Korean- or Chinese-made components for rockets such as the 122mm Grad, which has a range of up to 25 miles and which Hamas and Hezbollah have fired into Israel.

Among the weapons components discovered aboard the ANL Australia were 2,030 detonators for 122mm rockets, as well as electric circuitry and a large quantity of solid-fuel propellant, according to an account given by UAE and U.N. Security Council officials. The materials were bought from North Korea and shipped halfway around the globe in sealed containers, labeled as oil-drilling supplies, that passed through a succession of freighters and ports.

Even then, I observed that Iran hardly needs to import RPG’s for its own use; after all, it is a major manufacturer. There’s only one plausible reason to import RPG’s from North Korea, and that’s plausible deniability. Given that some of Iran’s terrorist clients operate in Iraq and kill American soldiers, it is an outrage that they may actually get away with this. It is especially so that our current Ambassador to Iraq is the one who championed North Korea’s removal from this list to begin with, as a reward for Kim Jong Il’s purported “progress” toward denuclearization.

And how is that working out? Since President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2008, Kim Jong Il has not only tested ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons in defiance of its own agreed obligations and multiple U.N. resolutions, it has repeatedly used its official state media as an instrument of terrorism. In March of last year, for example, North Korea stated that it could not guarantee the safety of airliners near Incheon International Airport, which is within easy range of North Korea’s surface-to-air missile batteries. And in recent days, it has engaged in the diplomacy of “boom boom, splash splash” with South Korea, firing heavy artillery into the two countries’ disputed sea boundary. It is always so with the North Koreans. They delight in doing the very things we reward them for not doing, because they know we lack the will to impose consequences.

You can read the President’s original letter here:  2010northkoreaidlrel.pdf