Newsletter No. 872
News-Analysis
January 11, 2008

 

A PYRRHIC VICTORY FOR THE ALLIANCE CONSERVATIVES

Pyrrhus of Epirus was a man who liked to win. But in his battles against the Romans in the early 3rd century BC he found that his victories at Heraclea and Asculum had cost him the cream of his army, which made it all but impossible to win the larger war. When one of his officers praised him upon his victory at Asculum, Pyrrhus, who was certainly no fool, wearily replied: “Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone.”

Whether or not the alliance conservatives in Tokyo and Washington realize it or not, today they have won their own “Pyrrhic Victory” in the long-running battle over the MSDF Indian Ocean mission.

This afternoon the Japanese House of Representatives voted to override the House of Councillors and send the MSDF back to the Indian Ocean. As this Newsletter will demonstrate, nothing that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Bush Administration have gained through this action could possibly justify all the political capital they have spent to secure this “victory.” That they are already the real losers is apparent enough, but it will be for the opposition parties, and especially the Japanese public, to ultimately decide just how high a political price they will ultimately have to pay.

The Late Maneuvers of the Democratic Party of Japan

Before we get the heart of that discussion, however, we should first review the recent maneuvers of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and the smaller opposition parties since our last review.

On December 21st the DPJ belatedly put its own counterproposal on the table. It would have been better had this come a couple of months earlier, but they did at least come up with something at the eleventh hour. Basically, the DPJ proposal would have limited the activities of the SDF in Afghanistan to providing support for humanitarian and reconstruction efforts such as providing medical care and distributing daily necessities. DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa commented: “This is not simply a matter of providing fuel to navy ships. Our bill has a certain level of content to it. We hope discussions are held on it as soon as possible.”

Although the DPJ counterproposal was a step in the right direction, Ozawa’s less than overwhelming characterization that his party’s bill “has a certain level of content” hardly seemed very convincing. Indeed, when Ozawa held his 45-minute face-to-face debate with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on January 9th, he never even mentioned his DPJ bill. It sounded like Ozawa himself was not too impressed with the DPJ bill, which was obviously put forward simply as a tactical measure.

It was also becoming apparent by about mid-December that the DPJ leadership had decided that they were likely to “lose” the immediate battle over MSDF bill in the sense that the government was prepared to use its supermajority in the House of Representatives and would basically try to ignore any censure motion passed by the upper house. Their political calculation was that it would thus be a mistake to make the MSDF bill their main issue of attack against the ruling coalition in light of the fact that the Japanese public seems to be sick and tired of this issue, and much more concerned with purely domestic matters.

A Half-Finished Debate

Most observers who are invested in issues of Japanese foreign policy, myself included, wanted to hear a more substantive debate on this matter. We may be waiting in vain for any Japanese Cicero to walk out onto the floor of the Diet. However, as many others have pointed out, both parties avoided most of the key issues in the past month or two.

In the January issue of the excellent monthly The Oriental Economist, the editors speculated that a combination of three factors led Prime Minister Fukuda and the LDP to strong-arm passage of their MSDF bill:

1) Heavy-handed pressure from the Bush Administration

2) An independent view of Japan’s national interests

3) To save face by not giving ground to the opposition DPJ

In my view, this is a reasonable analysis of the LDP’s motives, although I personally would tend to emphasize the first and last points more than the middle point. It seems to me that the “independent view” of the LDP leaders basically means that they believe that they cannot live without US power, and thus the point is actually tightly intertwined with the first point. But I certainly wouldn’t underestimate the significance of the last point either: I think that the LDP conservatives are simply in a rage not to let Ichiro Ozawa and the opposition parties have a significant role in forcing a change in Japan’s foreign policy -- even when they can secretly agree with some of the things that the DPJ is proposing.

At any rate, the indications at present are that the DPJ wants to force an election in early 2008, but they will make the main thrust of their attack focus on the pension fiasco and other domestic problems closer to the lives of ordinary Japanese. They have become content to just use the MSDF Indian Ocean issue as a secondary matter to embarrass the government. Unlike the early months after the July 2007 elections, the DPJ does not seem to see the MSDF issue as their main priority, which is rather disappointing considering that they have argued that this is a matter that involves Constitutional legality itself.

Tokyo’s Failure to Secure a Public Mandate

The DPJ has shown a certain lack of principle in the way that they have handled the MSDF Indian Ocean issue in the last month or so; but the behavior of the ruling parties have been simply outrageous.

The last polling that I have seen said that 43% of the Japanese public opposed the government’s new MSDF bill against only 37% who supported the plan. This means that the heavy-handed parliamentary maneuver just used was not simply a case of overcoming an obstructionist opposition party (as some like to contend), but rather an act done in defiance of Japanese public opinion itself. As I have outlined earlier, the supermajority that the LDP maintains in the lower house only exists because of a September 2005 election fought on the issue of postal privatization. Many people voted in that election for Junichiro Koizumi personally and actually against the main body of the LDP. That’s certainly the way that those elections were framed at the time. My own conclusion is that this use of the supermajority more than two years later, under a different prime minister and after their massive loss in the recent July 2007 upper house elections, is a terrible abuse of parliamentary procedure against the real substance of democracy.

This was not government, as Lincoln would say, of the people, by the people, for the people. A better description would be that this latest LDP maneuver was something done by the party and for America. The opinions of the Japanese people hardly figured in at all.

We must note that this stands in sharp contrast to the earlier talk that the LDP would need about 60% public support in order to use the supermajority. Remember that Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba himself openly said this in mid-October: “If we can raise support to 60%, I think the electorate will accept our voting the bill through a second time. But that would be difficult under the current circumstances.” Remember too the late November outburst of New Komeito’s Tetsuzo Fuyushiba: “We're absolutely against passing the bill with a second vote in the lower house.”

Well, public support didn’t rise to 60% -- it fell to 37%. A clear plurality of the public was actually against the bill. None of this, however, stopped Shigeru Ishiba or Tetsuzo Fuyushiba or Yasuo Fukuda or any other ruling coalition member from using their supermajority and overriding the will of both the upper house of the Diet and the Japanese public itself.

The US-Japan Alliance

So if the will of the opposition DPJ doesn’t matter and the will of the Japanese public doesn’t matter, then whose will really does matter in Tokyo? All too clearly, it is the views of the Bush Administration that have taken priority over the views of the Japanese public. The LDP has not represented the Japanese people to the world, but rather it has represented Washington to the Japanese people.

This is not too surprising since the same basic pattern occurs throughout much of the Islamic world where unpopular dictators are propped up by Washington because US policymakers are unwilling to let the alienated and sometimes hostile local publics raise up governments that would actually express their true feelings about US interventions in their regions.

At any rate, we have learned something else in this current instance: It is now pretty apparent that US Ambassador Thomas Schieffer is best explained as being “clueless politically.” His final admonition to Tokyo in late December seems to have been totally unconnected with any real need to push the ruling party once again since they were already committed to their course of action by that time. Even today -- when it would be far, far better politically to just keep his mouth shut -- Ambassador Schieffer immediately offered this tribute to Japanese obedience: “Terrorism is the bane of our time. By passing this legislation, Japan has demonstrated its willingness to stand with those who are trying to create a safer, more tolerant world.”

Apparently, those who have a different view about this particular piece of MSDF legislation are pro-terrorism and against safety and tolerance. My disgust is beyond words.

Moving on… Whatever my personal opinion of US policy in this matter, it is also undeniably a fact that Washington’s heavy-handed pressure; including the Ambassador Schieffer’s curious notions of “non-partisanship” and the hysterical threats aimed at Ichiro Ozawa by “alliance managers” such as Michael Green and Kurt Campbell, have deeply annoyed not only the opposition parties, but even the ruling LDP itself.

As for the LDP, their dissatisfaction with Washington is probably not going to amount to much unless they find themselves thrown out of power in the next elections. Should that come to pass, they may actually start seething at Washington and will rightfully look back at this MSDF issue as one of the factors that sank their party.

Even more, the DPJ is likely to be a power in the Diet for some years to come. They may even be able to form their own government in the future. If that happens, they are not going to forget how Washington lined up so openly and enthusiastically with the LDP and bureaucratic mandarins against the interests of their party. What has Washington done here to build bridges with the Japanese opposition parties if they do actually come to power in 2008 or 2009?

And forget about the party politics, even the general Japanese public itself has been telling pollsters that they are growing more and more disenchanted with the US-Japan Alliance. All the heavy political pressure coming out of Washington is sure to have a price, although the actual form that it will take is difficult to predict.

Loyalty Test

And so what is this glorious prize that the LDP and Washington have won through all of their threats and abuse of the Japanese public will? They have won the right to send unneeded ships to the Indian Ocean to give free gasoline service for the grand period of one additional year.

Somebody tell me why this was worth all of the costly political effort?

As I see it, there’s really only one reason: Because Washington, in all of its wisdom, decided to turn this puny and superfluous mission into a giant loyalty test for their Japanese allies. It only matters because Washington made it matter. The Bush Administration unilaterally decided that the MSDF Indian Ocean mission was Japan’s “fair share” for entry into the charmed circle of trusted American allies. It was Tokyo’s ticket to ride -- but in the real world it was pretty pointless.

The Road Ahead

The MSDF will need several weeks to redeploy to the Indian Ocean. Officials say that actual refueling operations will begin by around mid-February. Kyodo News reported about a week ago that the Japanese government wanted Washington to sign a bilateral agreement promising that any fuel taken from the MSDF ships would be used exclusively for terrorist interdiction operations at sea. The American side pointedly refused to give any assurances about how the Japanese fuel would be used. This obviously raises the old question about whether MSDF fuel has been used in Iraq War operations, but for now their denials stand. According to Kyodo, a US official made clear to the Japanese government that “US military operations could not be influenced by Japan’s refueling mission.”

One item on the agenda that we will no doubt be revisiting in the future is the idea of a permanent SDF deployment law. Actually, both the LDP and the DPJ agree in general terms that such a law is “necessary,” but they have some key differences over the role of the United Nations and other matters. The permanent SDF law item probably won’t really come into its own until after the LDP and DPJ have their test of strength in the next lower house elections, which most analysts believe will come sometime this year.

Even before the strong-arm passage of the MSDF bill, approval ratings for the Fukuda Cabinet were standing at about 31%; with 48% of Japanese expressing non-support. The most recent polls have also indicated that a strong plurality of Japanese -- 38% to 23% -- favor a DPJ-led government over the current LDP-led government. This is the first time since the establishment of the 1955-system that an opposition party has maintained such a wide lead over the LDP in public opinion polls.

Now that a lower house supermajority has been used for the first time since 1951, everyone is wondering how the Japanese public will react -- Will they be genuinely outraged or will they just shrug as usual? No one is quite sure yet.

In this connection, DPJ lawmaker Yoshito Sengoku expressed his party’s view this way: "This is a clear abuse of power… The government will now surely lose the trust of the people."

I personally believe that the LDP richly deserves to lose the trust of the people; but that choice is not mine. It is for the Japanese people themselves to send the final verdict.

Sooner or later, public opinion will matter