Newsletter No. 23
June 24, 2005

 

SAMAWA EXPLOSION SHAKES TOKYO

The Japanese government received a shock yesterday when it was learned that a GSDF convoy was struck by a small explosion that cracked the windshield of a vehicle. None of the passengers were hurt in the blast. This is the first such attack on the GSDF since they’ve been in Samawa.

Although the event is small by the standards of what is happening north of Baghdad, it nevertheless underscores perhaps the biggest flaw in the entire GSDF mission; that is, if the Japanese soldiers should ever be targeted in a serious way by the insurgents, the likely result is that they will scramble out of Iraq post-haste, quite possibly looking ridiculous in the process. Ever since the GSDF have been in Iraq, it has been a major political crisis just waiting to happen.

That Japan has not been targeted is partly the result of careful and intelligent behavior by the Defense Agency, and partly just plain good luck. The GSDF built themselves a high-tech fortress outside of Samawa that makes it difficult for any potential attackers to strike them. This “fortress of solitude” as it has been called, has made a useful retreat whenever the threats seemed to be running high. Also, the GSDF soldiers have gone out of their way to try to respect the customs and sensitivities of the local population, even to the point that many of them grew mustaches to try to blend in. Also, a majority of the population in Samawa has had high hopes for the Japanese reconstruction efforts there. The word “Japan” is almost synonymous with “economic success” in the minds of many Arabs, and the people of Samawa have been dreaming that Japan will help their region become an economic powerhouse in the future.

Nevertheless, the Japanese accomplishments there are still very fragile. One bloody attack on the GSDF may still bring the whole project to an abrupt end. The Japanese government knows that, and this is why a cracked windshield “sent shockwaves through the government” as the Japan Times put it.

At the beginning of the GSDF deployment, one of the arguments that had been used to promote it was that military protection would be necessary for Japanese civilians doing reconstruction work. However, within two weeks of the completion of the GSDF deployment in Samawa, three young Japanese civilians were taken hostage (April 8, 2004). This created a political crisis that quite possibly might have brought down the Koizumi government. However, the government got lucky on that occasion that the hostage-takers were only angry local tribesmen and not a hardcore militant group. The Japanese hostages were released within a few days.

However, in the interval, when matters looked their bleakest, the Koizumi administration really showed its fangs by whipping up rightwing sentiment against the Japanese hostages themselves. Clearly, they judged that the best defense was a strong offense. The young hostages were lambasted for being “anti-Japanese” and failing to show “personal responsibility” in going to Iraq in the first place. The earlier argument that the GSDF might protect civilian workers was quietly jettisoned.

Improbably, however, the Japanese government gained serious political benefits from the April 2004 hostage crisis. The Japanese public focused more criticism on the hostages than on the government. This served to inoculate Tokyo from similar crises in the future. So, for example, when the hapless backpacker Shosei Koda was captured and executed by an Iraqi militant group in late October 2004, the government just washed its hands over the whole affair.

More than that, Tokyo also made it clear that Japanese journalists could expect no protection either. When journalists Shinsuke Hashida and Kotaro Ogawa were killed in late May 2004, the government did not accept any responsibility for that either. A major result of this is that Japanese journalists, who had been covering Samawa intensely, fled out of Iraq en masse, and on-the-spot reports began to disappear from the mainstream press. This made it all the easier for the Defense Agency to “control the story” coming out of Iraq.

On the other hand, Tokyo has never had any political insulation should GSDF members be attacked and killed in Iraq. No one is likely to accept the argument that the Japanese soldiers are there on their own “personal responsibility.” And that is why even a small explosion on a road in Samawa could potentially cause a much greater political explosion in Tokyo.

The only question now is whether Koizumi’s luck will hold out until December when the GSDF is scheduled to withdraw from Iraq, or whether some insurgent group will bring the issue to a head sooner than that.

In other Iraq news, Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura has attended the most recent Iraqi reconstruction conference in Brussels. As earlier reported in Shingetsu Newsletter No. 15, he announced the reopening of yen loans for Iraq for the first time since 1985. On the 22nd, he met with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and extended Koizumi’s invitation for the Iraqi leader to visit Japan some time in the future.