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Japan's military on
risk-free route to Iraq
By Axel Berkofsky
Japan's military is getting bored. The country's
Self-Defense Forces (SDF), currently refueling US, UK,
Canadian and French warships in the Indian Ocean, would
like to move on or sail home.
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According to the
proposed bill, the Japanese military is ready to
help the United States and Britain to "collect",
"store" and "neutralize" the biological and
chemical weapons that the Pentagon until recently
was claiming were all over the place. Dismantling
WMD, at least for the time being, looks like a
risk-free operation.
| "Demand
for fuel has been flat and there is very little military
significance," a senior Defense Agency official
complained recently, suggesting that the troops sail
home now that the Taliban have ousted from power in
Afghanistan and are mainly on the run.
Japanese
supply ships were dispatched to the Indian Ocean at the
end of 2001 to provide logistical support for the US-led
military campaign in Afghanistan. The ships and troops,
accompanied by two destroyers, were dispatched under
Japan's anti-terrorism law, due to expire this November.
While the navy sees no point in continuing to
refuel other countries' warships far from home, the
remaining supply ship is still making a major
contribution to the US-led fight against terrorism as
far as the Japanese government is concerned.
The
government has no plans to withdraw the floating gas
station any time soon. On the contrary, much to the
navy's chagrin, Tokyo has decided to revise the
country's anti-terrorism law to extend the navy's
refueling mandate for another two years.
"We
have to continue efforts to round up and capture the
remaining elements of the terrorist groups who may
attempt to flee," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda
announced, urging the Japanese navy-turned-petrol-pumps
to hang on for now.
Just as the Japanese
military seemed to be running out of enthusiasm for
fighting global terrorism from its outpost in the Indian
Ocean, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi submitted a
long-awaited bill to the Diet (parliament) authorizing
the armed forces to dispatch troops to Iraq.
"Many other countries are doing it. Our country
should not be again the only one that won't do it,"
Fukuda said on Monday, signaling that Japan has grown
tired of being the odd man out in the politics of
international security.
The concept of "many
countries", however, is still limited to a few nations
hand-picked by the United States, and many commentators
suspect that Japan's constitutional restrictions might
lead to it to overplay its security-policy hand before
too long.
Before rhetoric had a chance to catch
up with reality, though, the government presented the
draft bill to a meeting of the ruling coalition's
liaison council for Iraqi and North Korean affairs, and
the cabinet is likely to adopt the bill by the end of
this week. Backed by Koizumi's familiar high-sounding
rhetoric calling the deployment "a matter of national
security", the bill will make it to the Diet this
Friday, promised the government. The current
parliamentary session ends next Wednesday, although
Koizumi has requested that Japan's lawmakers hang on for
another 40-50 days to discuss the bill before heading
off for the summer break.
If the hurdle of
Japanese-style deliberations is scaled by mid-July, the
Diet will be asked to approve the deployment within 20
days of Koizumi's go-ahead to dispatch his troops.
Parliamentary approval would very likely be a mere
formality once the troops are heading toward postwar
Iraq, since the ruling coalition holds a comfortable
enough majority in both the upper and lower houses of
the Diet.
The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun,
cheering the government's decision to send troops off to
Iraq, thinks that Japan's military won't have a problem
serving in a "wartime Iraq". Admitting that bullets are
still flying here and there on site, the paper advises
Japanese troops only to operate in "areas in which no
conflict is occurring or expected to occur during the
time the SDF will be stationed".
In order to
find these Iraqi safe havens in advance, Japan plans to
send a fact-finding mission to Iraq, although the
government has already acknowledged that the search
might result in recommendations to station Japan's
troops at airports already guarded by US forces.
In Iraq, Japanese troops would, based on United
Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 calling for
international assistance to rebuild Iraq, provide
humanitarian assistance and transport food, water and
fuel and would help reconstruct what the US military
destroyed recently.
And Japan can do even more than
that, announced the government. Japan's armed forces
would even be able to "handle weapons of mass destruction
[WMD] in Iraq", reported Kyodo News this week.
According to the proposed bill, the Japanese military
is ready to help the United States and Britain to
"collect", "store" and "neutralize" the biological and
chemical weapons that the Pentagon until recently was
claiming were all over the place.
Dismantling
WMD, at least for the time being, however, looks like a
risk-free operation for Japan given that Iraq's alleged
WMD continue to exist only in souped-up US and British
intelligence reports.
To make sure that the
United States does not even get tempted to ask its ally
to move too close to danger zones, the bill stipulates
that Japanese soldiers will not provide weapons and
ammunition to the US military.
Koizumi for his
part seems convinced that an operation in Iraq is a
risk-free peacekeeping operation in a country welcoming
invaders-turned-liberators. Reports of attacks and
ambushes on US soldiers on a daily basis, however,
suggest a different reality, and Tokyo will very likely
put its troops on the next plane home as soon as the
first Japanese soldier gets killed in Iraq.
What's more, the provisions on the use of
weapons have many flaws, some of them lacking any kind
of common sense, as usual. Let alone soldiers from other
nations, Japanese troops are not allowed to defend each
other, since the use of force is limited to individual
self-defense.
Japan's military begs to differ
and has repeatedly announced that these limitations will
not apply on battlefields outside the Japanese
parliament. Japanese soldiers are "of course" prepared
to defend themselves and comrades from other countries,
high-ranking officers say.
But if the issue of
the use of military force should threaten to the effort
to hammer the bill through the parliament within six
weeks, the government is likely to stick with its
tactics of keeping the military away from the megaphone
for a while.
When the military headed for the
Indian Ocean back in 2001, it turned out that Koizumi
himself had a word with overly trigger-happy officers,
agreeing to leave it up the officers' discretion when to
order troops to shoot and when to run.
Taku
Yamazaki, secretary general of the ruling Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP), doesn't see the problem either,
claiming that the stipulations within Japan's
anti-terrorism law already give the answer. Soldiers are
permitted to use their weapons to defend themselves and
those "under their care", Yamazaki quoted the law as
stipulating.
"Under their care", however, was
never defined in any detail, and while cautious
lawmakers within the ruling coalition assume that
unarmed civilians are included in the definition, the
military not only includes troops from other countries
but usually everybody else in the line of fire.
The United States' warmonger-in-chief, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, likes the idea of an
armed Japanese handyman in Iraq. He left Japan's
policymakers with a things-to-do-list during a visit to
Tokyo this month requesting rear-area support in areas
such as transportation, telecommunications and
reconstruction. In return Wolfowitz assured his
concerned ally that 20,000 US troops stationed on
Okinawa will not be removed just yet, although he
admitted that this is "under review".
Recently,
the Pentagon announced the relocation of US troops in
South Korea, sending shock waves toward Tokyo, which
feared that the United States might one day decide to
leave Japan defenseless against North Korean missile
attacks.
Downtown Tokyo and US troops on
Okinawa, however, seem safe enough as long as US
intelligence on North Korean missiles and nukes is as
"accurate" as US and British intelligence was on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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