The following is from a Washington Post report on the cancellation of a trip to Seoul by U.S. President George Bush due to demonstrations against U.S. beef imports there. Emphasis is mine.

President Bush canceled plans Tuesday to visit Seoul next month amid protests over U.S. beef imports, and his administration made a key concession to North Korea by allowing it to exclude atomic bombs from a required disclosure of its nuclear activities.

You mean this whole exercise was intended to limit North Korea’s electrical power generation options!?!

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has assured Japan that The United States will continue to press for the release of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea.

Japan worries that the United States will remove North Korea from its list of nations sponsoring terrorism before a resolution of the issue.

“We have made very clear that the United States is not going to set aside or forget the Japanese abduction issue,” Rice told reporters on the plane to Berlin, where she will attend a conference on security in the Palestinian territories on the sidelines of a donors conference.

“We’re going to continue to press North Korea to make sure this issue is dealt with,” Rice said. “Japan is one of America’s strongest allies in Asia, I should say one of America’s strongest allies in the world and we recognize the sensitivity of this issue,” she said.

Right. . . Just about no one is falling for this in Japan, where the latest U.S.appeasement concession is being met with condemnation by people on both sides of the aisle.

A top LDP politician bitterly criticized Washington for repeating a past mistake. “The United States is doing the same thing over again.”

He was referring to the U.S. government’s failure to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons even though it promoted reconciliations with Pyongyang by dispatching then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang at the end of the Bill Clinton administration that stepped down in 2001.

“The Bush administration has become too lenient toward North Korea as its tenure is approaching an end,” he said.

Many politicians feel that the administration of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has supported the U.S. position even though there has been no tangible progress in the abduction issue because it places top priority on Japan’s ties with the United States.

However, some politicians expressed concern that the U.S. decision to remove North Korea from its list of terrorism-supporting countries could adversely affect Japan-U.S. relations.