Looking for Friendly Overseas Base, Pentagon Finds It Already Has One

By JAMES BROOKE
Published: April 7, 2004

Washed by a southwesterly Pacific breeze, a line of B-52 Stratofortress bombers stand parked on the hot tarmac here, their tails stenciled with ''MT,'' a reminder that they flew here recently from the snows of Minot, N.D.

Away for more than a decade, the B-52's, the United States' largest bombers, are back in Guam, part of a wide-ranging drive by the Pentagon to make this island, an American territory, a ''power projection hub'' on the edge of Asia.

''We are openly talking about putting a fighter wing there, a tanker squadron there, a Global Hawk group there,'' Gen. William J. Begert, Pacific Air Forces commander, said by telephone from Hawaii, almost 4,000 miles east of here. The Global Hawk is an unmanned surveillance plane.

''Guam, first of all, is U.S. territory,'' General Begert said. ''I don't need overflight rights. I don't need landing rights. I always have permission to go to Guam. It might as well be California or New Jersey.''

Next year, Washington is to decide on a new round of base closings, the first in a decade. Opening the debate, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reported to Congress on March 23 that the military had 24 percent more base capacity than it needed.

Judging by Mr. Rumsfeld's comments after his trip here last November, Guam will be a winner in the base-closing process. This volcanic, 209-square-mile island, with a population of about 160,000, fits the Pentagon's new strategy of creating ''lily pads'' to allow for the rapid deployment of military muscle.

''Rumsfeld keeps saying, 'What about Guam? Let's build up Guam,' '' said an American diplomat in Tokyo, where the defense secretary stopped after visiting here.

The Navy loss its base at Subic Bay, the Philippines, in 1992 after the Philippine Senate refused to extend the lease, and American memories of that remain sharp. The diplomat added, ''We don't want to be somewhere where they don't want us, where they can throw us out.''

At the naval station here, Rear Adm. Arthur J. Johnson, the commander, said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had raised Guam's strategic value as the Pentagon realized the usefulness of an all-American outpost in Asia. ''We invested huge amounts of money in facilities we could not use when we needed them, for example, Saudi Arabia,'' Admiral Johnson said. ''Places where the U.S. is autonomous have come greatly to the fore.''

Military officials here declined to discuss how Guam would fit into an American response to the rapid rise of China. But by moving ships and submarines to Guam, the Pentagon cuts ''the tyranny of distance,'' trimming five days off a Pacific crossing from Hawaii, said Richard Halloran, a military analyst based in Hawaii.

''A lot of these moves are intended to deter China,'' Mr. Halloran, a freelance military writer, said from Honolulu, where the United States Pacific Command is based. ''You are not threatening China, not in any way jeopardizing their security. On the other hand, if China becomes belligerent, you are in position to do something about it, particularly with the submarines and an aircraft carrier.''

Carl Peterson, a businessman on Guam, said of Washington's low-key military buildup here: ''It just sort of happens. Why disclose it? Why tell the Chinese what you are going to do before you do it?''

Later this year, a new nuclear-powered attack submarine is to arrive here, the third to make Guam its home port since 2002. While Washington debates whether a carrier should come here or to Hawaii, Guam's outer harbor is being dredged and World War II-era wharves are to be repaired for more efficient munitions handling.

[''Guam's geo-strategic importance cannot be overstated,'' Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, the senior military officer in the Pacific, with 300,000 soldiers, sailors and marines under his command, said on March 31 in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. ''Both Navy and Air Force facilities will continue to figure prominently in Guam's increasing role as a power projection hub.'']

Across the naval station here, new housing is being built, part of a near- doubling of military spending on the island from levels of a decade ago.

''Guam is no longer the trailer park of the Pacific,'' Admiral Johnson said of the new military investment. ''Guam has emerged from backwater status to the center of the radar screen. This is rapidly becoming a focus for logistics, for strategic planning.''

Washington's investment in Guam is most easily seen from the catwalk of Andersen's 13-story air traffic control tower.

Down below, work is under way on an air-conditioned, typhoon-resistant hangar for B-1 bombers, a huge war reserve material warehouse, a new base exchange shopping center, a new fitness and health center and a new base security center. Out of sight, new underground pipes are delivering aviation fuel directly to parking pads for jets, and the first of 60 munitions storage ''igloos'' are being built. To foil terrorists, workers are drilling water wells on base and burying power lines off base.

''This is by far the largest amount of construction I have seen at any Air Force base in my years in the service,'' said Capt. David Vandenburg, a 29-year-old Oklahoman who is chief of base development.

Captain Vandenburg's commander, Col. Paul K. White, said that when he was assigned here a year ago he was leery of Guam because of its sleepy reputation. ''But this is a very exciting time to be here,'' he continued. ''If bases are closed, the units will have to go somewhere.''

Of the Pentagon's new appreciation for Guam, Mr. Peterson said: ''Rumsfeld is high on Guam; he was heard asking, 'How are we going to do Guam?' They are not showing their hand. But through innuendo and comments that we pick up on, everybody is suggesting there is going to be so much going on here.''

While apartments, fitness centers and military support offices are not glamorous, they are essential for increasing what Capt. David M. Boone, a Navy Seabee, calls Guam's ''surge capacity.'' In a military emergency, the island could quickly swell with planes, submarines, and ships.

''The real trick for me is to figure out how many people are going to be living here 10 years from now,'' said Captain Boone, who has command of military construction on Guam. ''It is a moving target.''

Guam has been a supply base since Spanish galleons from Manila stopped here to pick up fresh water and food before crossing the Pacific to Acapulco, Mexico. In the late 19th century, the island was a Spanish coaling station; the United States gained control in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. In recent decades, Air Force pilots dubbed Guam ''the world's largest gas station.''

But it is increasingly being used for military training. The Marines have rented typhoon-damaged structures for urban warfare exercises. Rural warfare training has been conducted in the southern jungles, forests so thick that one holdout Japanese soldier from World War II was captured only in 1972.

About 150 miles north of here, a small island serves as a bombing range. There is also the wide-open sea and the sky above it, with no one to complain about sonic booms.

''In Minot, the nearest bombing range is in Utah, a two-and-a-half hour flight,'' said Lt. Col. Robert Hyde, a 37-year-old Mississippian who commands the base's new unit of six B-52's. Referring to his training here with the Navy, Colonel Hyde said, ''In North Dakota, obviously, you can't work easily with a carrier battle group.''

During the Christmas 1972 bombing of North Vietnam, more than 150 B-52's flew from here. On a recent morning, bulldozers and pavers were upgrading the acres of tarmac that make Andersen comparable to a major international airport.

In this treeless landscape, even B-52's look small. In the shade of one the planes' huge, drooping wings, Master Sgt. Ralph Gillikan, a mechanic last stationed at the North Dakota base, surveyed the surrounding sea of concrete and said, ''The parking here is good.''

JSDF to have Missile Defence and two "aircraft carriers"

Undercurrent #18: March 9, 2004

JSDF to have Missile Defence and two "aircraft carriers"

Tomohiko Taniguchi (Editor at Large, Nikkei Business Publications, Inc.)

---

Little known thus far is that Japan is no longer debating whether it is right or wrong to equip itself with ballistic missile defence (BMD) capability. Indeed it is about to become an indispensable link of the US-led system.

With the passage through the Diet of the government-proposed budget for the fiscal year of 2004 beginning in April, the Japanese Self Defence Forces (JSDF) will be granted 106.8 billion yen (953 MUSD), specifically earmarked to procure what would eventually constitute a fully-fledged BMD system.

Japan and US "Block 04"

As an initial step the JSDF will procure such systems as follows in the fiscal year:

Sea-Based Midcourse (SMD) element of the BMD capability, with a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) system at its centre, to be added to one aegis-type guided missile destroyer (DDG), costing 34 billion yen;

The ground-based Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile-launch system that is part of the broader Terminal Defence Segment (TDS), 58.2 billion yen;

Upgrade of the Battle Management, Command, Control, and Communications (BMC3) network, plus continued collaboration with the US to develop relevant weapon systems, 14.6 billion yen.

The United States is taking what is called a spiral approach, in which components of the BMD system are developed and deployed in "blocks" with new capabilities fielded on a two-year cycle (starting in 2004). The first increment, called "Block 04", comprises exactly those systems deployments spelt out above.

Japan may be pursuing an independent plan of advancing its defence capability, but in so doing it is also implementing the Block 04 programme of the US per se. In a way, this could enhance the US-Japan security alliance even more than could the deployment of JSDF troops to Iraq, as a far fewer nations have taken real steps to be part of the US-led BMD system. Little wonder that US Ambassador Howard Baker praised Japan's decision in a speech he gave to Nanzan University on 1 March.

Earlier, on 19 December last year, it was announced that the Japanese government had decided "on the introduction of a Ballistic Missile Defence System and other measures" at the Cabinet Council and at the Security Council, a subsidiary council of the former. Nothing has been hidden. And yet throughout the Diet sessions that examined the budget proposed by the government, no opposition was ever voiced as to Japan's introducing a BMD system, thereby carrying out the first increment of the long-running programme of the United States.

Is this not strange? For one thing, China has long made it known that it would never tolerate Japan having BMD capability. One Chinese scholar has gone on to say that once Japan had it, "we should fight against it in exactly the same manner we did against the Japanese invaders during the war". Whether or not this is true, it is plausible that the "cold peace" already prevailing between Beijing and Tokyo will become even colder. Still an otherwise Beijing-friendly group of legislators in both ruling and opposition parties appeared quite uninterested in the issue.

The fact that Japan's BMD programme will be part of the US Block 04 has also been made public knowledge. One can learn about it by reading books such as that by Hideaki Kaneda⁽¹⁾.

The largest destroyer ship

The fiscal 2004 defence budget will also give the JSDF (the Japanese Maritime Defence Force, to be more precise) the largest destroyer Japan has ever had since the disappearance of its Imperial Navy.

Projected to be built this year is a 13,500-ton helicopter destroyer (DDH) code-named 16DDH (16 as in the Heisei year), with another planned from next year. The 16DDH in JSDF classification is by no means an aircraft carrier. Its characteristic shape, however, is nothing but.

It is almost as large as the Japanese Imperial Navy's Tone class heavy cruisers. It also matches in size such active aircraft carriers as Italy's MM Giuseppe Garibaldi (10,100 tons) and Spain's Principe de Asturia (17,188 tons).

Its modern aegis capacity with phased array radars, plus its advanced information link connecting both the Cabinet situation room and other weapon systems, also give it what the JSDF thinks will be the crucial node for the BMC3 network. This could be the flagship for the entire JMDF fleet.

JSDF maintains it carries only four helicopters, but in practice, it can carry as many as ten. Not only that, it is not entirely impossible for it to be refurbished to carry Vertical, Short Take-off and Landing (V/STOL) aircraft such as the UK's Harrier⁽²⁾. It is little wonder the rest of Asia casts a suspicious eye toward the project.

Few Diet legislators have shown interest in discussing either one of these defence programmes, not to mention the ordinary Japanese citizens. Given the JSDF is clearly conducting a historic metamorphosis, it must become all the more accountable first to the nation and also to its allies and neighbours.

⁽¹⁾ Hideaki Kaneda, Dan'do Misairu Bouei Newmon (Introduction on BMD), Tokyo, Kaya Shobo, 2003

⁽²⁾ See Sekai no Kan'sen (Ships of the World), January, 2004, pp. 136-141

Constitutional Revision: No Longer If, But When

Debate: Commentary (February 10, 2004)

Ayako DOI (Editor, Japan Digest)

When former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro ran in the first Lower House election held under the postwar Constitution in 1947, he drove around his Gunma district on a bicycle with a flag stuck up from his back just like a samurai going into battle. The slogan on the flag called for jishu kempo, or rejection of the constitution that had been handed down by the U.S. Occupation a few months earlier. But during a political career that spanned more than five decades, his idea -- the reason he sought office -- never came up in the Diet for discussion, much less for a vote. For half a century, it was an outlandish dream, tucked deep inside the heads of conservative politicians who remembered the days when Japan was a power with which to be reckoned.

Given that history, it is ironic that now, after Nakasone has been forcibly retired by Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro (who is a strong advocate of constitutional revision), the issue is high on the agenda of every major party -- even the pacifist Komeito and Social Democrats. The way things are going, it's likely that 2004 will be the year Japan takes its first real steps down that road.

LDP Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Nakagawa Hidenao opened the gate by promising in his New Year press conference that he would send legislation to the Diet by spring to set up a process to rewrite the constitution. Democratic Party President Kan Naoto followed up by declaring that he would start a discussion on the subject in his party so it could produce its own draft revisions by 2006. Welcoming Kan to his playing field, Koizumi said he looks forward to working with the DPJ to make the revision a reality. "I never thought the DPJ would be so proactive," he exulted.

Koizumi's public overture to the largest opposition party made his coalition partner, Komeito, feel like a wife watching her husband as he was lured away by a mistress. Komeito security expert Akamatsu Masao nagged Koizumi about it in the Diet earlier this month, saying "The prime minister talks about common beliefs between LDP and DPJ... How can you not even mention your coalition partner?" A few days later, the pacifist party dropped its reservations about fiddling with the constitution, and announced it will publish an "opinion" on the subject this fall. "There will be no taboos, including the issue of Article 9," Komeito President Kanzaki Takenori told reporters. Calling Komeito's shift "historic," former Foreign Minister Nakayama Taro, who heads a Lower House panel on the constitution, remarked, "Honestly I never thought this day would come."

The constitution requires approval of two third of each house of the Diet before a revision can be presented to voters, who must give it majority approval in a national referendum. Among them, LDP, DPJ, and Komeito hold 95 percent of the seats in the Lower House, and 200 of the 247 in the upper chamber -- so changing the 1947 basic law handed down by the U.S. Occupation is no longer impossible, if they can agree on what it should say.

Lest it fade into irrelevancy, even the Social Democratic Party, whose raison d'etre has been goken, or protection of the constitution, decided just last week to create a "study group" on the subject. Former President Doi Takako, regarded as the goddess of goken, reluctantly told her colleagues, "We aren't aiming for a revision... but we must study to be able to contribute to the discussions" in the Nakayama panel.

Behind the rush to get on the kaiken (constitutikaikenonal revision) bandwagon is a clear shift in public opinion over the last year or so. Recent polls indicate that a majority of Japanese now support revising the constitution one way or another. That was confirmed in spades when the voters defeated SDP and Communist candidates wholesale in last November's Lower House ballot. Both parties had adamantly opposed changing a single word in the constitution. SDP President Fukushima Mizuho lamented that young voters these days don't even understand the word goken.

Accelerating the shift is the ongoing Diet debate about whether the government is violating the constitution by sending Self Defense Forces troops to Iraq. A lot of Japanese think Koizumi is walking out to the edge of the law when he says the deployment is justified by the mutual security treaty with the U.S. and the preamble to the constitution, which calls for international cooperation. On both sides of the controversy over Iraq, there is a strong sense that Japan has come to the limit of expanding its military roles overseas by simply re-interpreting the constitution each time a conflict arises that requires deployment of its troops. Those who worry about escalating military activism would spell out clearly what the forces can and cannot do, and supporters would rather rewrite the! constitution so it says openly that Japan may maintain a military to defend itself. "The time will come, when we should call our (self defense) forces a military, and give it the honor and place it deserves in the constitution," Koizumi told the Diet.

To be sure, agreeing to revise the constitution is one thing, while agreeing on how to change it is quite another. Komeito and the SDP would keep, or even strengthen, the Article 9 renunciation of military power in resolving international conflicts, and insert guarantees for new kinds of civil liberties such as protection of privacy and the right to live in clean environment. There are still many who would obstinately resist fiddling with Article 9 even in the LDP and the DPJ. But from the way public opinion shifted dramatically in support of the SDF deployment in Iraq once the troops were on the ground, a fait accompli clearly works in favor of advocates for change.

In a recently published analysis on the role of diplomacy in the 1930s, former Foreign Ministry official Ogura Kazuo concluded that antiwar politicians and bureaucrats failed to put a brake on Japan's slide into World War II because they tried to influence the policy of the militarists from within, rather than denouncing it outright at the risk of being cast aside. It seems that Komeito and SDP are about to make the same mistake in the current debate on the constitution. In a society where conformity and harmony are so important as they are in Japan, it's hard to restrain a shift once it starts to happen. As he left the Diet reluctantly last fall, Nakasone said it was particularly painful to be left out at a time when his lifelong dream was about to come true.

(Posted here with the permission of Pacific Forum CSIS)

Japan crosses the Rubicon

Saturday, Feb. 7, 2004
By RICHARD HALLORAN
Special to The Japan Times

HONOLULU -- Japan has crossed the Rubicon, with surprisingly little opposition at home or abroad, by starting to dispatch armed soldiers to Iraq in their first deployment to a combat zone since World War II.

In a departure ceremony in northern Japan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Defense Agency Director General Shigeru Ishiba presented the colors, or flags, to a detachment of 500 soldiers standing rank on rank in black berets, camouflaged battle uniforms and black boots.

Their commanding officer, Col. Yasushi Kiyota, told his troops, their families and the dignitaries: "We shall overcome all obstacles, no matter how difficult, and all return safely." Those listening said he emphasized the last point. The Japanese have been tasked to help reconstruct Iraq's damaged and obsolete roads, power plants, water works, schools and hospitals.

The ceremony was televised and evidently seen all over Japan where it was greeted with complicated feelings. Japanese parents were worried, as are all parents when their sons and, in this case, a few daughters, are sent in harms way. Japan has sent perhaps a dozen peacekeeping and humanitarian missions abroad in as many years but only after most danger has passed.

In addition, say Japanese who watched the ceremony and related events, there was evidence of a quiet pride that Japan has begun to shed the cocoon of pacifism in which it has wrapped itself for nearly 60 years and started to accept responsibilities and risks in the international arena.

A soldier addressing the departure formation spoke of representing "our country of Bushido," the way of the warrior that was honorable in the days of yore but was corrupted by the militarists of prewar Japan. In Hawaii, a citizen of the Saipan, the island occupied by Japan before and during World War II, approved of Japan "paying back for some of the things they did then."

Japanese opposition politicians protested, but without much fervor, the dispatch of armed soldiers, contending that it violated Article IX of the constitution, which prohibits the use of armed force to settle disputes. About 4,000 protesters rallied in Hibiya Park in Tokyo with banners: "We don't need a war." In a land where demonstrations of tens of thousands have been fashioned, kabuki style, into an art form, a protest of 4,000 is not worth the ink it takes to print this.

Abroad, China and South Korea, which nurture historical animosities toward Japan, appear to have taken the deployment calmly; most press reports have been limited to factual accounts of the departure. A Filipino military officer, whose nation was brutally conquered by Japan in 1942, said in Hawaii: "It's OK even though we have not totally forgotten what they did."

In a round-table discussion at the East-West Center, a research and educational institute in Hawaii, six scholars specializing in Asia were unanimous in saying they expected little criticism of Japan over the deployment. "Too many people in Asia," said one, "have too many other things on their minds."

North Korea, which is at odds with Japan on several scores, was among the few to be openly critical: "This is a prelude," said Rodong Sinmun, an official newspaper, "to the overseas aggression of the Japanese militarists, which may bring immeasurable misfortune and disasters to humankind again in the 21st century."

Ever since Julius Caesar led his legions across the Rubicon River in northern Italy in 49 B.C., that passage has come to be an emblem for decisions from which there is no turning back. Japan, which plans to send about 1,000 troops to Iraq in coming weeks, has passed its point of no return.

What of the future? A research study by Colonel William E. Rapp of the U.S. Army War College notes: "Japan is in the midst of a fundamental re-examination of its security policy." He concludes, however, that "Japan remains deeply ambivalent toward security expansion" and suggests that "Japan will continue slowly and incrementally to remove the shackles on its military security policy."

Some years ago, a Japanese whose name is lost in foggy memory, wrote: "Japanese mothers must understand that they are not the only ones who do not wish to send their sons off to die in battle." Since Iraq is a dangerous place for Americans, Australians, British, Koreans, Poles and everyone else, not to say the Iraqi people themselves, the Japanese are likely to suffer casualties there.

Then Japanese mothers, sadly, will experience, for the first time in six decades, the profound sorrow of mothers everywhere who have lost their sons in hostile action.

Richard Halloran, formerly a correspondent for Business Week, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is a freelance journalist.

U.S. plans consolidation of Pacific forces

Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2004
By RICHARD HALLORAN
Special to The Japan Times

HONOLULU -- U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is planning a sweeping revision of the command apparatus through which American military forces are controlled in Asia in an effort to make them more responsive to contingencies from the Korean Peninsula to Australia.

Military officers said the revision would take place primarily in South Korea and Japan, but would affect U.S. deployments throughout the Pacific Command's area of responsibility -- which runs from the U.S. West Coast across the Pacific and Indian oceans to the shores of Africa. This command, from its headquarters overlooking the naval station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, controls 300,000 military people and is the largest unit of the U.S. armed forces.

Among the command elements that will most likely be dismantled in South Korea are the United Nations Command (UNC), United States Forces Korea (USFK), the Combined Forces Command (CFC) and the Eighth U.S. Army.

In Japan, United States Forces Japan will disappear, but a new operational corps headquarters led by a three-star lieutenant general will be set up.

In addition, the position of the four-star general who commands the UNC, USFK, and CFC will be abolished. At the same time, a new billet for an army general will be established at the headquarters of the U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter, Hawaii. He will take control of army forces in the Pacific region now under the command of a three-star lieutenant general.

The officers said this shakeup is part of Rumsfeld's wider plan to "transform" the Pentagon and the armed forces. In this case, they said, the intent is to eliminate crisscrossing chains of command that are legacies of World War II, the occupation of Japan, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam and the Cold War.

"When we get through," said one officer, "it will be seamless." They said many details, including the timing of the moves, remained to be decided but that the process has started. Allied governments in Asia, particularly in Seoul and Tokyo, will be consulted before final decisions are made.

Besides increasing the efficiency of U.S. forces, the revisions are intended to appeal to South Korean nationalism and to tamp down rising anti-Americanism. The U.S. and South Korea have already agreed that the U.S. headquarters will move from a congested area in Seoul to a new site about 120 km south. The 2nd Infantry Division will also move from the heavily populated area north of Seoul to new bases further south.

Disbanding the Combined Forces Command is also intended to lessen South Korean complaints that it diminishes their nation's sovereignty. At present, it controls South Korean and U.S. forces but is led by a U.S. general with a South Korean general as second in command. Many South Koreans have argued that since it is their country and they furnish the bulk of the forces a South Korean should command.

"This would reduce the misperception that the U.S. controls the Korean military," said an officer. It might also blunt the North Korean charge that South Korean forces are lackeys of the Americans.

The corps headquarters in Japan will likely take operational control of the 2nd Division and other army combat formations in South Korea to meld them into one operational force. The U.S. has 37,000 troops in South Korea, about 17,000 of them in the 2nd Division. Its mission will focus less on the defense of South Korea and more on deploying to meet threats elsewhere in Asia.

The corps commander, most likely to be posted at Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo, will be on a level with the navy's 7th Fleet Commander, whose flagship's home port is Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, and with the Air Force's 5th Air Force, with headquarters at Yokota Air Base, west of Tokyo. Thus U.S. forward operational commands will be bunched in Japan.

Having a four-star general leading the Army of the Pacific is intended to enhance the Pacific Command's ability to influence the armies of Asia. In most Asian nations, Japan being an exception, the army as an institution is politically and economically powerful. That gives the American commander in the Pacific region a large political-military portfolio in his job description.

Asian counterparts, many of whom are sensitive to protocol and want to be seen as equals, will more easily receive a visiting American general with four stars on his shoulders than a general with three stars -- or the four-star navy admiral who heads the Pacific Command.

Richard Halloran, formerly a correspondent for Business Week, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is a freelance journalist.

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.