AFP reports a push by Japanese PM Shinzo Abe (pronounced ahh-bay) to allow the Japanese military to do marginally more -- like help defend co-located allied US forces. What most outsiders dont understand is that announcements such as this really dont mean its about to happen. This is a sort of trial balloon designed to gauge the reaction of all factions and to move consensus (critical in Japan) toward an eventual adjustment of policy. Rogan, do you have anything to add?) To give you an idea, it took some 60 years to build consensus for making the military a full, cabinet-level organization -- the Ministry of Defense. The Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF) is quite small by almost any standard -- by design -- but it highly capable on its own soil and in its airspace and coastal waters. Power projection capability is almost non-existent by design (though the large new destroyers would be suitable for amphibious and helicopter assault on a small scale on the order of seizing and defending contested islands). Missile defense has improved greatly since north Korean missile launches in the late-90s, particularly the one that crossed Japanese airspace, highlighted the need. On a strategic, geopolitical level, the conclusion I draw is that post-war US policy in Japan was fully successful, and its policy we should have drawn on to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade. GEN Douglas MacArthur IMPOSED a Western-style constitution on the defeated Imperial power and enforced it during occupation. Two critical points: In addition to the Article 9 peace clause of the constitution, MacArthur eliminated the deification of the Emperor and deposed Shinto as the religion of the State (though people were still allowed to practice Shinto privately). In other words, MacArthur successfully eliminated both the religious and the legal underpinnings of Japanese Imperial power and replaced them with pro-freedom, pro-peace substitutes -- in a culture as alien at the time to the ideas of Western civilization as you could find. By contrast, the Bush administration chose the Pollyanna path of pretending all people intrinsically want to be free (regardless of the mystical or collectivist ideas they hold) and left both Iraq and Afghanistan to draft their own constitutions without any guidance or restriction. Of COURSE they wrote Sharia-compliant religious constitutions hostile to the very West which had liberated them! What else did most of them know? The ground is laid in both countries now to develop as Islamic enemies of the West. Douglas MacArthur would have known better. defensenews/article/20140515/DEFREG03/305150038
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 22:49:05 +0000