[lit-ideas] Military Option against North Korea
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:10:24 -0700
While we are debating using the military option in order to stop Iran from
building nuclear weapons, is North Korea being ignored? Not by everyone.
Japan with the 4th or 5th largest Military Budget in the world is
considering revising its Article 9 in order to put a more robust military
option on Japan's table for possible use against North Korea.
From the article below: ". . . Shinzo Abe almost certainly will become prime
minister when Junichiro Koizumi retires in September. Abe, 51, who
represents a generation interested in a more assertive international posture
for Japan, has said, for example, that if ``there is no other option to
prevent'' a North Korean attack, a Japanese attack on North Korea's missile
launch sites is ``within the constitutional right of self-defense.'' But he
clearly believes that even with imaginative construing, the elasticity of
Article 9 is insufficient to permit Japan to play a proper role regionally
and elsewhere."
Lawrence
An ally in East Asia
By George Will
Sunday, August 27, 2006
TOKYO -- Ever since Commodore Perry's black ships entered the harbor here in
1853, the Japanese have wondered whether their nation could modernize
without becoming thoroughly Westernized. Today, they wonder whether their
nation can provide for their defense and play a proper role in the
international security system without jettisoning a national identity
imposed in 1947 by the nation that had sent the black ships.
In America, many domestic issues become constitutional controversies but
presidents have negligible constitutional restraints on their conduct of
foreign policy. In Japan, foreign policy often begins -- and almost ends --
by construing Article 9 of the constitution imposed by the American
occupation 60 years ago. That article stipulates that Japan ``forever''
renounces war and ``the threat or use of force'' in settling international
disputes. Therefore ``land, sea, and air forces'' will ``never'' be
maintained.
But they are maintained. And although constitutional pacifism has long been
embraced by the Japanese, before this decade ends the Self-Defense Forces
may be taken off Article 9's leash.
The seeds of this change were sown in the previous decade. Domestically, the
1990s were the ``lost decade'' of economic deflation (a zero interest rate
for 2.5 years). In foreign affairs, the 1990s were a decade of two traumas.
The first was the 1991 Gulf War. Japan hoped that the end of the Cold War
would radically diminish the importance of military power as an ingredient
of a nation's international weight. But as America formed a vast coalition
to expel Iraq from Kuwait, Japan was constitutionally restricted to
``checkbook diplomacy'' -- helping to pay for the war.
Then in 1998, North Korea launched a Taepodong ICBM over Japan's main
island, Honshu. The lunatic regime of an economically anemic and culturally
primitive nation felt free to disdain the interests and lacerate the
sentiments of a vibrant democracy with a muscular economy.
Since then, revision of Article 9 has become probable: A majority of the
governing Liberal Democratic Party favors revision and Shinzo Abe almost
certainly will become prime minister when Junichiro Koizumi retires in
September. Abe, 51, who represents a generation interested in a more
assertive international posture for Japan, has said, for example, that if
``there is no other option to prevent'' a North Korean attack, a Japanese
attack on North Korea's missile launch sites is ``within the constitutional
right of self-defense.'' But he clearly believes that even with imaginative
construing, the elasticity of Article 9 is insufficient to permit Japan to
play a proper role regionally and elsewhere.
The unsatisfactory alternatives to revision are for Japan either to abandon
its determination to become a ``normal'' nation, or to continue concocting
sophistical interpretations of Article 9. Koizumi pushed the limits of
Article 9 by sending five ships to the Indian Ocean to assist forces in
Afghanistan -- two supply ships and three destroyers to guard them. Then in
2004, in the first deployment of Japanese troops to a war zone since 1945,
he sent 600 soldiers to Iraq -- but not for combat.
Last month North Korea, which has many medium-range missiles that can strike
Japan, launched seven missiles into the Sea of Japan. The 800 Chinese
missiles targeting Taiwan could also strike Japan, which in 2005 joined the
United States in saying that a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan dispute is
a crucial security interest. In June of this year, Japan agreed to jointly
produce anti-missile defenses with the United States. Some will be deployed
on five Aegis destroyers belonging to Japan's highly sophisticated navy and
assisted by Japan's spy satellites.
All this while Article 9 says that sea and other forces shall never be
``maintained.'' The Self-Defense Forces are maintained by a $45 billion
defense budget, the world's fourth largest.
In the first three months of this year Japan scrambled fighter jets 107
times in response to what were assumed to be Chinese spy planes
provocatively close to Japan's air space. A Chinese submarine has made an
incursion into Japan's territorial waters, and the two nations are disputing
whose waters cover disputed oil and gas reserves in the East China Sea.
Surely it is time for Japan to end the dissonance between its necessary
behavior and its constitution's text, a contradiction that can complicate
policymaking and produce national paralysis.
This matters to Americans because East Asia -- its share of global GDP, now
more than 20 percent, is projected to be 27 percent by 2020 -- matters. And
because rising China and demented North Korea complicate regional security.
And because the list of economically formidable nations that are without
virulent anti-Americanism and are eager to collaborate with America is
short. The list is: Japan.
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