Back in 2008, the United States unwisely removed Communist North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. That decision was based on wishful thinking that North Korea might abandon its nuclear weapons program.
But trying to butter up Communist North Korea obviously didn’t work. Not only has it not dismantled its nuclear weapons program but it is expanding it, menacing its neighbors and creating the danger that it could sell a nuclear weapon on the black market.
Now the Obama administration is continuing the bad policy that the Bush administration started by leaving Communist North Korea off America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The issue came up after North Korea’s recent, unprovoked torpedo attack on a South Korean naval vessel. The South Korean ship sank, and 46 innocent South Korean sailors were killed.
But the U.S. State Department says the unjustified attack by a North Korean submarine does not count as terrorism.
It was only a “provocative action,” the department said, because it was one nation acting against another. “That in our view does not constitute an act of international terrorism,” a spokesman told reporters.
That would be news to grieving, “terrorized” South Koreans, who have had to watch as the U.N. and the “international community” have at most lightly criticized Communist North Korea over the brutal attack.
We certainly hope the U.S. government would call such an attack terrorism if it were perpetrated against an American ship and American sailors.