November 25, 2010 With Limited Options, South Korea Shifts Military
Rules By MARTIN FACKLER and MARK McDONALD

SEOUL, South Korea — Responding to growing public criticism after
Tuesday’s deadly attack, President Lee Myung-bak accepted the
resignation Thursday of his defense minister and announced changes in the
military’s rules of engagement to make it easier for the South Korean
military to strike back with greater force, especially if civilians
are threatened.

The government also announced plans to increase the number of troops and
heavy weapons on Yeonpyeong Island, where two marines and two civilians
died Tuesday in an artillery fusillade from the North.

But Mr. Lee, who came to office two years ago vowing to get tough with
the North, has little maneuvering room in formulating a response. While
the attack appears to have pushed anti-North Korean sentiment here to its
highest level in years, there is little public support for taking military
action against the North that might lead to an escalation of hostilities.

“North Korea has nothing to lose, while we have everything to
lose,” said Kang Won-taek, a professor of politics at Seoul National
University. “Lee Myung-bak has no choice but to soften his tone to
keep this country peaceful. It is not an appealing choice, but it is
the only realistic choice.”

The South’s powerful neighbor is also counseling restraint. The Chinese
prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said on Thursday that Beijing opposed any
provocative military behavior by either side on the Korean peninsula,
Xinhua, the state news agency, reported.

On Thursday, while North Korea warned through its official news agency
of further military retaliation if provoked by South Korea, Mr. Lee
said only, “We should not drop our guard in preparation for the
possibility of another provocation by North Korea,” according to his
chief spokesman, Hong Sang-pyo. “A provocation like this can recur
any time.”

The changes in the rules of engagement were similarly restrained. South
Korean defenses on its five coastal islands in the Yellow Sea had been
set up primarily to guard against possible amphibious landings by North
Korean troops. Critics said Thursday that the military had not anticipated
the possibility of an attack by North Korean artillery batteries, which
are reportedly in caves along the North’s coastline.

“Now an artillery battle has become the new threat, so we’re
reassessing the need to strengthen defenses,” Mr. Lee told
lawmakers. The new measures he outlined include doubling the number of
howitzers and upgrading other weaponry.

New rules of engagement will be based on whether military or civilian
sites are the targets, said Mr. Hong, the presidential spokesman,
adding that the move was to “change the paradigm of responding to
North Korea’s provocations.”

This week’s artillery attack was not the first time Mr. Lee has
come under criticism for sitting on his hands in the face of a deadly
provocation by the North. Two years ago, when a South Korean tourist was
shot by a sentry at a North Korean mountain resort, his government’s
response amounted to a slap on the wrist: suspending tours to the resort
and barring South Korean civic groups from visiting the North.

But the clearest case was Mr. Lee’s response in March to the North’s
sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors.

Mr. Lee at first seemed to stall by waiting for the results of an
international investigation, which took two months to conclude the ship
had been sunk by a North Korean torpedo. When Mr. Lee responded, it
was with relatively mild measures like reducing the South’s already
minuscule trade with the North, resuming the South’s cold war-era
propaganda speakers along the demilitarized zone and demanding an
apology. And he even backed off some of those: the speakers have yet
to be turned on after North Korea threatened to shoot at them, and he
dropped the apology demand as a precondition for talks.

Mr. Lee was widely blamed in South Korea for having provoked the Cheonan
incident by ending unconditional aid at the start of his presidency.

“Before, the public saw him as too hard, and now they see him as too
soft,” said Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor of North Korean studies at Korea
University in Seoul.

Despite public pressure to do more, Mr. Lee does not have many options
for using less lethal forms of pressure on the North, whether diplomatic
or economic. North Korea’s impoverished Stalinist state has already
weathered years of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. In fact,
the tough economic conditions appear only to give the North additional
motivation for continuing its dangerous brinkmanship, to extract aid as
it faces a winter of food and fuel shortages. Analysts say the North is
also using the recent provocations to burnish the military credentials of
the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s youngest son and heir apparent,
Kim Jong-un.

Analysts say making sanctions effective would require greater support
from China, North Korea’s traditional protector, which has so far
been reluctant to tighten the screws on the North’s already decrepit
economy. In recent days, Mr. Lee and President Obama have agreed to make
new appeals to Chinese leaders to put more pressure on the North Korean
dictator, but analysts say they are not optimistic that the Chinese
will comply.

Still, South Korean officials said they will urge China to act more
responsibly by pressuring the North to end its attacks. They also said
they will ask Beijing to more closely monitor trade with North Korea
by Chinese merchants, which they said has been a route for the North to
bypass international economic sanctions.

Analysts say that Mr. Lee and his advisers appear to have concluded that
a less confrontational stance is the only way to persuade North Korea
to end its provocations. A few analysts speculated that Mr. Lee might
eventually end up not far from his liberal predecessors like former
President Roh Moo-hyun, who used economic aid to appease the North and
reduce tensions on the peninsula.

“Anyone would conclude that the peaceful approach is best to reverse
the situation,” said Moon Jung-in, a politics professor at Yonsei
University in Seoul and a former adviser in the Roh administration. “A
hard-line approach is not a real option.”

Su-Hyun Lee contributed reporting.