Japan makes history with its mission to Iraq

By Linda Sieg
Thursday, Jan 15, 2004, Page 9
REUTERS, Tokyo

The country is cautiously moving award from a purely defensive role for its armed forces to one of participating in international military operations

When Japanese soldiers arrive in Iraq later this month, they won't be making war. They will be making history.

The dispatch, expected to become Japan's biggest and riskiest overseas military mission since World War II, marks a milestone in a shift away from a purely defensive posture toward a larger international role for the nation's military.

Japanese troops in Iraq will operate in what experts agree is a conflict zone, where the risk of casualties is high and the blue helmets of a UN peacekeeping force are nowhere to be seen.

"Is Japan's security policy undergoing a major transformation? I think the answer is `yes,'" said Richard Samuels, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.

"Putting `boots on the ground' in Iraq is fundamentally different from anything they have done in the past half century."

If successful, the Iraqi operation could become a model for future missions and accelerate a drive by neo-conservatives in Japan to revise its pacifist Constitution.

No member of Japan's military has fired a shot in combat or been killed in an overseas mission since World War II, and substantial casualties in Iraq could spark a public backlash that would rock Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government and hamper the forging of a new security policy.

"There might be a setback because of severe casualties," said Akio Watanabe, president of the Research Institute for Peace and Security, a think tank. "Public opinion is still very fluid in that sense."

A small advance army team is expected to leave later this week for southern Iraq, where they will act as scouts for a Japanese force that could number some 1,000 personnel on a mission to provide humanitarian aid and help rebuild the country.

A law enabling the dispatch limits its activities to "non-combat" zones, a concept hard to apply in Iraq, where at least 261 US and allied military personnel have been killed in attacks since May, when US President George W. Bush declared major combat over.

Japan's constitution renounces the right to wage war, bans the maintenance of a military except for defensive purposes, and has been interpreted as prohibiting the exercise of the right of collective self-defense, or aiding allies when they are attacked.

Untested in combat

The Self-Defense Forces (SDF), as the military is known, celebrate their 50th birthday this year, and though untested in combat are comparable in terms of spending and manpower to those of Britain.

For most of those 50 years, the forces were kept at home and efforts to expand their reach and role constrained by the Constitution as well as by reluctance to fan fears among Asian neighbors of resurgent Japanese militarism.

But stung by criticism of a "checkbook diplomacy" which gave cash but no troops for the 1991 Gulf War, Japan has stretched the limits of the Constitution over the past dozen years.

A 1992 law allowed Japanese forces to take part in UN-led peacekeeping operations, though with severe restrictions.

In 2001, Japan deployed its navy to the Indian Ocean to provide logistical support for the US-led war in Afghanistan, the first post-World War II dispatch to a war situation.

Experts agree, though, that the level of risk and absence of a clear UN mandate make the Iraq operation qualitatively different.

HUGGING AMERICA

Behind Koizumi's decision to take such a risky step is both a long-felt desire to normalize Japan's gun-shy, postwar defense policies and more recent worries about North Korea's nuclear and missile programs and China as an emerging regional power.

The US, Tokyo's main security ally, has also been pressuring Japan to take a bigger global role.

"If they didn't fear the possibility of abandonment by the United States on North Korea, they wouldn't feel the need to hug the United States more vigorously," Samuels said.

Koizumi backed the US-led war on Iraq despite opposition from the majority of Japanese voters and is moving ahead on the troop dispatch to Iraq in the face of polls showing that most of the public want to wait at least until the country is safer.

While many voters appear to be abandoning the pacifism that defined Japan's postwar security debate, a sense of forced obedience to Washington has fostered some resentment.

"The feeling is mixed. We love America, but we don't like our people always having to obey US pressure," said defense policy expert Satoshi Morimoto.

Few, however, would suggest that Japan try to go it alone on defense in the foreseeable future.

Despite the policy shift, few expect Japan to soon become a "Britain of Asia," fighting alongside US forces overseas.

"The Japanese government cannot be so bold," Watanabe said.

"I think they will stick to providing logistical support rather than actual fighting. My conclusion as to whether Japan has crossed the Rubicon [taken an irrevocable step] is `yes,' but very cautiously."

America's Abominable Record in Okinawa

1-05-04
America's Abominable Record in Okinawa
By Chalmers Johnson

Mr. Johnson's newest book is The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books).

America's 703 officially acknowledged foreign military enclaves (as of September 30, 2002), although structurally, legally, and conceptually different from colonies, are themselves something like microcolonies in that they are completely beyond the jurisdiction of the occupied nation.1 The United States virtually always negotiates a "status of forces agreement" (SOFA) with the ostensibly independent "host" nation, including countries whose legal systems are every bit (and perhaps more) sophisticated than our own.

In Asia, the SOFA is a modern legacy of the nineteenth-century imperialist practice in China of "extraterritoriality"-the "right" of a foreigner charged with a crime to be turned over for trial to his own diplomatic representatives in accordance with his national law, not to a Chinese court in accordance with Chinese law. Extracted from the Chinese at gun point, the practice arose because foreigners claimed that Chinese law was barbaric and "white men" engaged in commerce in China should not be forced to submit to it. Chinese law was indeed concerned more with the social consequences of crime than with establishing the individual guilt or innocence of criminals, particularly those who were uninvited guests in China.

Following the Anglo-Chinese "Opium War" of 1839-42, the United States was the first nation to demand "extrality" for its citizens. All the other European nations then acquired the same rights as the Americans. Except for the Germans, who lost their Chinese colonies in World War I, Americans and Europeans lived an "extraterritorial" life in China until the Japanese ended it in 1941 and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang stopped it in 1943. But men and women serving overseas in the American armed forces still demand that their government obtain as extensive extraterritorial status for them as possible. In this modern version, extrality takes the form of heavy American pressure on countries like Japan to alter their systems of criminal justice to conform with procedures that exist in the United States, regardless of historical and cultural differences.

Rachel Cornwell and Andrew Wells, two authorities on status of forces agreements, conclude, "Most SOFAs are written so that national courts cannot exercise legal jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel who commit crimes against local people, except in special cases where the U.S. military authorities agree to transfer jurisdiction."2 Since service members are also exempt from normal passport and immigration controls, the military has the option of simply flying an accused rapist or murderer out of the country before local authorities can bring him to trial, a contrivance to which commanding officers of Pacific bases have often resorted. At the time of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, the United States had publicly acknowledged SOFAs with ninety-three countries, although some SOFAs are so embarrassing to the host nation that they are kept secret, particularly in the Islamic world.3 Thus, the true number is not publicly known.

U.S. overseas military bases are under the control not of some colonial office or ministry of foreign affairs but the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a plethora of other official, if sometimes secret, organs of state. These agencies build, staff, and supervise the bases-fenced and defended sites on foreign soil, often constructed to mimic life at home. However, not all overseas members of the military have families or want their families to accompany them; therefore, except in Muslim countries, these bases normally attract extensive arrays of bars and brothels, and the criminal elements that operate them. The presence of these bases unavoidably usurps, distorts, or subverts whatever institutions of democratic government may exist within the host society.

Stationing several thousand eighteen-to-twenty-four year-old American youths in cultures that are foreign to them and about which they are utterly ignorant is a recipe for the endless series of "incidents" plaguing nations that have accepted U.S. bases. American ambassadors quickly learn the protocol for visiting the host foreign office in order to apologize for the behavior of our troops. Even in closely allied countries where English is spoken, local residents get very tired of sexual assaults and drunken driving by foreign soldiers. During World War II, the British satirized our troops as "over-paid, over-sexed, and over here." Nothing has changed.