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Feckless opposition can't halt troop
dispatch
By Axel Berkofsky
In
an overwhelmingly pacifist nation, with a virtually
sacred constitution that renounces war and combat,
Japan's political opposition has appealed to a populace
evenly divided over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's
controversial decision to dispatch at least 600
non-combat troops to Iraq on a humanitarian mission. Few
humanitarian missions have been so dangerous, and yet
the opposition has foundered. Why?
Some reasons
are obvious: better government public relations.
Further, Koizumi's governing Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP) holds a comfortable majority in the Lower House
and a less substantial but still significant majority in
the Upper House of the Diet, or parliament. Crucial
Upper House elections are scheduled for July and Koizumi
aims to recover a number of seats lost in the last
election in 2000.
Opposition parties have
boycotted and stalled debate on a July 2003 Iraq
reconstruction bill that authorizes troop deployment,
but they cannot prevail. If the dispatch of some 600
troops in the near future results in casualties,
however, Koizumi has a major problem when it comes to
the elections for the Upper House.
So far, the
government has benefited from a public perception that
military and security issues are best left to the LDP,
and the North Korean nuclear issue reinforces the
perception. On Iraq, the government is emphasizing that
the troops helping to rebuild the nation are engaged in
a strictly humanitarian mission, and some official
spokesmen say there is "no way" that the troops will get
involved in fighting.
A major selling point is
the idea that taking part in the Iraq mission is part of
Japan's grander strategy of taking its rightful,
recognized and powerful place in the the world.
The government has been trumpeting what it calls
a slight increase in public support for the troop
dispatch, but many analysts question the true extent of
this support, noting that favorable polls were conducted
by the conservative, pro-government Yomiuri Shimbun
newspaper - the only poller with slightly positive
numbers for the government. The Yomiuri, identifying
"broad support" for the government's Iraq policy, is
Japan's biggest newspaper, with a daily circulation of
10 million.
Support for Iraq deployments
overstated
The latest Yomiuri polls show 51
percent in favor of troop deployment, while other major
papers, the Asahi and Mainichi shimbuns identify
significantly less support - the Asahi around 40 percent
and the Mainichi even less. The differing approval rates
result from the way the questions are asked - true in
all opinion polling. This is especially striking in the
case of the Yomiuri, since its questions make it very
hard to be opposed to something presented as beneficial
- in this case the troop dispatch. Further, those who do
not "strongly oppose the deployment" are still
classified as supporters for the deployment.
So,
it's a close call on combat/non-combat. Many in the
political opposition argue eloquently but ineffectually
against the deployment and emphasize that Japan will be
sacrificing sacred values of nonviolence, becoming like
the rest of the world.
But the message isn't
getting across. The opposition, and even the LDP's
pacifist religious partner, are sending mixed signals
and some have given up their anti-war missions.
Back in the 1990s the Social Democratic Party,
until then always Japan's strongest opposition party,
gave away its pacifist principles, acknowledged the
constitutionality of the army as constitutional and
subsequently, lost all his voters. Now, the party has
become irrelevant in Japanese politics.
The once
"peace-loving" New Komeito, the LDP's coalition partner,
has fallen in line with the government's eagerness to
join the coalition of the more or less willing in Iraq.
Komeito is complementing its "one-nation pacifism" with
political opportunism, according to Glenn Hook, director
of the School of East Asian Studies at Sheffield
University in Britain. The New Komeito is supported and
financed by the Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai, which
recently threatened to withhold funds if Japan violated
the pacifist principles on which the party bases its
very existence. So much for principle.
In recent
months, the New Komeito's public objection to the
Japanese troop deployment in Iraq was mainly reduced to
requesting that the mission "must not be dangerous". The
party probably decided to exert its influence quietly
and away from the limelight, according to analysts.
"It was only the Komeito's final agreement that
really made the dispatch possible, and it managed to
hedge around the Self-Defense Forces dispatch with a
number of additional conditions," said Chris Hughes,
senior research fellow and deputy director at the Center
for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization,
University of Warwick in Britain. "Ultimately, though,
the party also gave in to keep a grip on the [governing]
LDP. The irony is that it is the coalition partner,
rather than the opposition parties, which have put up
the most effective opposition to Iraq dispatch."
Real political opposition is
lacking
So then what about the "real" political
opposition? Although the Democratic Party of Japan
(Minshuto) is strongly opposed to the troop deployment
to Iraq, its lawmakers turned out to be rather
unskillful in undermining the party's credibility when
speaking without a script.
"Japan must not
deploy troops to Iraq since the notion of non-combat
areas in Iraq is in the realm of fiction," Seiji
Maehara, the Minshuto's self-appointed "key man" for
security issues said, only to undercut his own criticism
a sentence later. "If we stop there, then it will be
only criticism. Working for the Iraqi reconstruction is
necessary," he added, confirming that the LDP does not
have to be overly preoccupied with the cross-examination
and tough questions coming from the biggest opposition
party.
The Social Democratic and Communist
parties are opposed to the mission in Iraq and other
"military adventurism", but they have neither the
political leverage nor the right responses when the LDP
refers to them as "crazy" and "out of touch" with
reality.
In a last-minute attempt to seize
headlines and show their disapproval of plans to
dispatch troops to Iraq, the Democratic, Social
Democratic and Communist parties boycotted last
weekend's plenary session in the parliament's Lower
House. Debates on the troop deployment began last Friday
and ended when the governing coalition pushed the troop
deployment proposal through the Lower House special
committee on Iraq's reconstruction.
While the
opposition took the weekend off and abstained from
voting on the proposal, a growing number of lawmakers
within the LDP took the time to disapprove of the the
prime minister's plans to send as many as 1,000 troops
to Iraq by April. The LDP's trouble-maker-in-chief, the
party's ex-secretary general Kato Koichi, was one of
three LDP political heavyweights who walked out of the
debates over the weekend. In 2003 Koichi lost his job
over a scandal involving the misuse of political funds
by one of his former aides,
The proposal was
pushed through the Lower House all the same, not
uncommon by the standards of LDP-style democracy. Party
rebels are usually asked to go for long coffee breaks
and to stay away, or strongly urged to fall in line with
the majority in one-to-one chats with the party's
leadership in order to secure decisions backed by what
Koizumi calls "consensus". Although the opposition
parties for their part continued their boycott after the
weekend, talking about the troop deployment in the Upper
House on Monday, the first batch of the main troop
contingent left Japan on Tuesday all the same. The
Ground Self-Defense Forces (GSDF) will catch up with the
30 Japanese advance unit troops preparing Japan's
humanitarian and reconstruction operations in Samawah in
southern Iraq.
Opposition blamed for
'obstructing democracy'
The government and the
right-wing media have dismissed the opposition's boycott
as an "obstruction of democracy" and LDP Secretary
General Shinzo Abe wants to get it all over with now.
"It's the duty of lawmakers to approve the dispatch of
SDF members after all the parties carry out exhaustive
discussions," he said.
And now the opposition's
objections that revolve around pacifism are being used
by some to provide support for deployment.
Sending troops to Iraq and violating Japan's
current war renouncing "peace constitution" will finally
turn Japan into a "normal nation", said Terumasa
Nakanishi, professor of international politics at Kyoto
University. "The troop dispatch will de facto nullify
the constitution, and it will be an urgent task to amend
it, giving Japan back its sovereignty over military
affairs as a normal state," the outspoken and hawkish
academic said in a recent newspaper interview.
Throwing overboard what is left of Japan's
pacifism and ignoring the public's concern - in order to
send Japanese soldiers to the danger zone in Iraq - is
not such a bad decision because it would keep the United
States, a powerful ally, happy and Pyongyang in check,
Nakanishi said. He also warned, "If Japan fails to
maintain its alliance with the US ... it may invite an
attack from North Korea."
While Japan's
policymakers these days conveniently adopt
"there-is-nothing-we-can-do-rhetoric", blaming
Washington for Tokyo's enthusiasm to dispatch troops to
Iraq, some commentators say Japan is up for the job of
being a full-fledged military ally - even without US
pressure.
US pressure is just one factor, said
Hughes, of the Center for the Study of Globalization and
Regionalization at the University of Warwick. "Japanese
policy makers are making these changes themselves of
their own will, and there is an increasing consensus
that Japan's international contribution, whether
international or other, means the US or whoever else,
should be synonymous with [the] SDF (Japanese
Self-Defense Forces) dispatch."
And Iraq could
only be the beginning if Prime Minister Koizumi gets his
way, Hughes said. "Koizumi has deliberately conflated
the international community with the US, and he is
certainly using it as an instance to set precedents for
SDF deployment that can then be used in future
situations either in East Asia or beyond."
Revising the constitution is front and
center
While it is changing the fundamentals of
Japan's security policy, the prime minister and the
country's defense establishment are keeping the issue of
constitutional revision front and center in the Japanese
media. Scrapping the constitution's war-renouncing
Article 9 is the next big item on Koizumi's agenda,
judging from his recent rhetoric linking the Japanese
mission in Iraq with the "necessity" of revising the
constitution. This presumably would allow Japan to
assume its rightful place in the international
community.
The constitutional research
commission of the LDP recently announced plans to
publish a revised draft constitution by 2005, and the
Yomiuri Shimbun periodically publishes its own draft
revisions that would allow Japan to undertake
international defensive combat if necessary. It is not
surprising to read in the Yomiuri that the Japanese
public wants to shuck pacifism, go tougher on China and
North Korea and deploy soldiers globally.
While
the virtually sacred, war-renouncing Article 9 is no
longer part of these draft constitutions, it still would
provide the legal framework for Japan's military to
fight off North Korean missiles or guerrillas -
pre-emptively if necessary.
Because amending the
constitution requires a two-thirds majority in both
houses of parliament and approval in a public
referendum, the government for the time being is
prepared to settle for less, only if Japan gets to take
part in international military operations, maintains
Hughes.
Over the short term, beyond a wholesale
constitutional revision, the real government initiative
will simply be to revise interpretations such as the
right to collective self-defense, according to analyst
Hughes and others. What the government really wants,
they argue, is to threaten revision of Article 9 as a
worst-case scenario in order to secure opposition
political support for simply revising interpretations -
allowing military interventions rather than the
constitution itself.
After all the exhaustive
discussions, boycotts and shifting positions, it seems
that all the opposition is good for is a rubber stamp.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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