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.
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