The DPJ makes haste

CRITICS OFTEN CHARGE that the opposition Democratic Party of Japan squanders its energy and political capital to artificially create crises with the intent of weakening the government, rather than presenting itself as a reliable and credible alternative that offers sound judgment and carefully crafted policies.

It’s no surprise that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and some political commentators would lead the chorus of those charges, but the assertions are given added weight when they are echoed by a substantial bloc within the DPJ that points the finger at President Ozawa Ichiro. One of the DPJ disaffected is party Vice-President Maehara Seiji, who spent most of the summer trying to recruit a viable candidate to run against Mr. Ozawa in the September leadership election. He and those of a like mind gave up when it became clear the only thing the party could agree on was that for the party today, it was Ozawa or the abyss.

Those more interested in seeing adults run a government than collegiate spitball artists play politics must have been dismayed this week when Mr. Ozawa and the DPJ further demonstrated their preference for petty maneuvering over statesmanship.

Recall that last autumn, after winning control of the upper house for the first time ever, the DPJ chose as the theme for its coming out party their opposition to the Japanese refueling activities the country had conducted since 2001 in the Indian Ocean to support the NATO coalition’s anti-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan. They blocked a bill to extend those activities by sitting on it for three months before rejecting it. The ruling coalition finally passed the bill with its supermajority in the lower house, but not before the operation was suspended for about a month.

The excuse used by the DPJ was that NATO’s military effort in Afghanistan had not received UN approval. Here was Mr. Ozawa’s excuse at the time:

“The U.S.-led operations in which Japan has been taking part are not directly authorized by the UN Security Council. President Bush said the Afghan war was an American war against terrorism, and the United States unilaterally fought the war without waiting for consensus from the international community.”

He apparently failed to read United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1386, 1413, and 1510, which mandate the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Mr. Ozawa also snubbed a proposed meeting at the Pakistani embassy at which Australia, Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, and New Zealand, in addition to Pakistan and the United States, would have argued their case.

He and the party also ignored the UN Security Council’s renewed authorization for the NATO effort when it voted 14-0 for continuance with a Russian abstention. This resolution added a sentence specifically thanking Japan for its “maritime interdiction component.”

Some hailed the DPJ move as being clever because it “embarrassed the government”, but that sort of second-rate reasoning fails to see what the party really did: Embarrass the nation by backing out of an international commitment and use it as a short-sighted ploy for their own domestic ambitions. The idea was to create a crisis and force an early election, which they expected to win.

None of that happened.

Now the DPJ is at it again. Many people thought that new Prime Minister Aso Taro would dissolve the lower house and call for new elections either sometime this month, or early next month at the latest. But Mr. Aso seems to be in no hurry at all, saying he wants to pass a supplemental budget and another extension to the refueling operations first. Of course he hopes to let the overheated international financial markets cool off first, but he also wants to conduct a serious debate on the extension in the Diet to clarify the positions of both parties in the minds of the voters.

Last year, the DPJ sat on the extension for the longest time allowable under the Constitution before voting because they mistakenly thought it was to their political advantage. What are they saying now?

Forget the debate and forget the policy discussion. Mr. Ozawa told the party this week to grease the skids to get the extension passed. The upper house will still reject the bill, but this time, they’ll vote it down right away with a minimum of discussion (one day) and send it back to the lower house this week. The extension will then be adopted by supermajority again.

His reasoning? If they hurry up and get these bills out of the way, it will deprive Mr. Aso of any excuses for delaying a Diet dissolution, and they can go back to doing what they do best—agitating for an early election.

Clearly, the DPJ would rather indulge in political kabuki than establish its credibility as the potential leaders of a government. The irony is that if they reversed their priorities, they might actually get their wish and take power.

But it doesn’t seem as if they’ll figure that one out anytime soon.