DMZ Twist: U.S. Retreat Unsettles North Korea
By JAMES BROOKE - NEW YORK TIMES
SEOUL, South Korea, June 10 - When the Pentagon announced its plans to pull American troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Ever since the armistice ending the Korean War was signed on July 27, 1953, North Korea has bitterly denounced the presence of American garrisons near the border. While the 700,000 North Korean soldiers in the border area outnumber the 14,000 American troops by 50 to 1, North Korea implicitly accepted the real strategic value of the tripwire: if the North Koreans ever repeated their surprise attack of 1950, American deaths would draw the United States into a second Korean War.
In a new twist, North Korea now fears that if the United States rolls up its human tripwire, it will free the United States to bomb nuclear sites near Pyongyang, the capital. In the military chess game on the Korean Peninsula, by moving American troops out of range of North Korea's border artillery, the United States gains a strategic advantage.
"Our army and people will answer the U.S. arms buildup with a corresponding powerful deterrent force and its pre-emptive attack with a prompt retaliation to destroy it at the initial stage of war," North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency said recently.
Alexandre Mansourov, a former Russian diplomat in Pyongyang who now teaches at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii, translated North Korea's concerns, saying, "If the U.S. pulls out of the bases, North Korea knows that the U.S. is preparing a pre-emptive strike."
Removing the tripwire deprives North Korea of two other critical strategic advantages. Without the American bases near the demilitarized zone, North Korean military leaders lose the chance to drape themselves in nationalist colors by killing large numbers of Americans. Lacking those American targets, North Korea would have to resume threatening to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire," which would undermine its stated desire for harmonious relations with South Korea.
In addition, China, which increasingly sees North Korea as an economic millstone, is likely to oppose strongly any attack on South Korea, which is now one of China's top five trading partners and foreign investors.
For their part, South Koreans, by and large, are almost as nervous as the North Koreans. While the public image of South Korea is which often focuses on anti-American protests, polls indicate that a largely silent majority want the American troops to stay put.
Calling the tripwire "a psychological defense line" against North Korea, a group of 133 National Assembly members, about half the total, have begun a drive to collect 10 million signatures to oppose the move.
To reassure the South Koreans, the United States promised to continue to carry out training in areas near the demilitarized zone.
This American pledge "will mean that U.S. troops will continue to play the role of a tripwire to deter war," said South Korea's assistant defense minister for policy, Lt. Gen. Cha Young Koo, in an effort to sell the public on the unpopular deal that he was forced to accept.
For Americans, this concept is glaringly out of date in light of the war in Iraq, where much of the attack was waged by long-distance bombs and cruise missiles instead of soldiers climbing out of trenches. In an age when American and British forces took over Iraq in three weeks and lost fewer than 200 soldiers, the idea of leaving 14,000 troops exposed to withering bombardments seems nonsensical.
"The term or concept of tripwire is an antiquated one and doesn't bear a lot of relevance to current data," Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, commander of the American Pacific Command, said recently in Tokyo. "When you have missiles that go hundreds of miles or actually thousands of miles; you can threaten a porch or an airfield a couple of hundred miles away, forces that are tens of miles away don't constitute a tripwire. So that's a term that I think has outlived its usefulness."
But not, perhaps, to the North Koreans.
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