Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  Symbolism matters. If Abe continues Koizumi’s habit of making annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo—which is devoted to the souls of Japan’s millions of war dead, including fourteen leaders who were hanged as war criminals after the country’s defeat in 1945—then many Chinese will conclude that he is a real threat. Koizumi’s official visits to the shrine as prime minister outraged people all over Asia whose countries were occupied by Japan during the war, but the Chinese in particular went ballistic.

  Shinzō Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine privately as recently as last spring. If he visits again as prime minister, Sino-Japanese relations will get even worse, and it will get still harder and harder for sensible people in Beijing to ignore the rhetoric of the American hawks and the warnings and pleas of their own hawks. With a little bad luck, we could be as little as a couple of years away from the start of a new Cold War in Asia.

  We had good luck instead, and Abe was quickly gone from the scene: four of his ministers were forced to resign by scandals and a fifth committed suicide within ten months. His successor, Yasuo Fukuda, the son of a former prime minister, also lasted less than a year. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the Liberal Democrats then chose Taro Aso, the grandson of a former prime minister but a man so prone to blunders and malapropisms that his name “Taro” has become a schoolyard synonym for “stupid.” He lasted as prime minister not quite a year, and by mid-2009 the Liberal Democrats were gone from power.

  August 25, 2009

  JAPAN: NOT AN ELECTION, A REVOLUTION

  Some years ago, a political-science professor at a Japanese university told me that he reckoned you could fit everybody who counted in Japan into one room. There are about four hundred such people, so it would have to be a ballroom. All but a couple would be men, of course—and at least half of them would be there because their fathers and grandfathers were in the same ballroom twenty-five and fifty years ago.

  The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is headed for a landslide victory in the election on August 30, sweeping the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) out after an almost unbroken fifty-four years in power, but that is the system it must break if it is really going to change Japan. It won’t be easy, especially since Yukio Hatoyama, the DPJ leader who will soon be prime minister, is also part of that system. He is the grandson of the prime minister who defeated Taro Aso’s grandfather.

  Recent polls by Japan’s biggest papers predict that the DPJ should end up with between 300 and 320 members in the 480-seat House of Representatives. That should be a majority big enough to crush all opposition, but it’s a bit more complicated than that in Japan. Not everybody in that small ballroom filled with the four hundred people who matter is a politician.

  Most of them are the businessmen who run the giant corporations that used to be called zaibatsu (the pre–Second World War industrial conglomerates) and the top layer of senior civil servants—all of whom have been in bed with the LDP their entire working lives. In Japan they call it the “iron triangle”: LDP faction leaders, senior civil servants and industrial bosses, all working together to stifle change and keep themselves in power. It’s a hard combination to beat.

  The one previous time in living memory when the LDP lost power, to a fragile coalition of opposition parties in 1993, the iron triangle immediately set to work to undermine and discredit the new government, and the LDP was back in power in eleven months. That isn’t going to happen this time.

  The Liberal Democratic Party has presided over fifteen years of economic stagnation since, and people no longer link it with the boom years. Moreover, this time it faces a single opposition party, ready to take over the government. Nevertheless, it will be a miracle if the Democratic Party of Japan can really change the country even with four undisturbed years in power.

  About fifteen years ago, when I was young and foolish, I spent a couple of months in Japan pursuing a single question: why was Japan the only developed country outside the Communist world that didn’t have a “Sixties”? (I had just finished a television series, which is the moral equivalent of living in a cave for two years, so I needed to get out a bit.)

  Was there something unique in Japanese culture that insulated it from social and political trends elsewhere in the industrialized world? Why were Japanese people still so deferential, so hierarchical, so docile in the face of arrogant power and insolent corruption? Why was Japan, to all intents and purposes, a one-party state?

  That was the question I went with, in my ignorance. But everybody in Japan knows the answer: Japan’s equivalent of the Sixties actually began in the 1950s, but it was ruthlessly crushed.

  By the 1950s, the Cold War was going full blast in Asia, and the United States was afraid that the youth revolution getting underway in Japan was the prelude to a Communist takeover. It probably wasn’t anything of the sort, but the U.S. was occupying Japan and so took action to stop it.

  The old zaibatsu were allowed to rebuild because that was the quickest way to get Japan back on its feet economically, and conservative politicians (including some war criminals) were encouraged to form a political party that received full American support, the LDP. The government that emerged from this, with considerable help from its yakuza (gangster) allies, beat the kids’ revolt into the ground.

  By the time the rest of the developed world had its Sixties the battle had been fought and lost in Japan. During the half-century that followed most people just kept their heads down and stayed out of trouble, and it is still rare for ordinary people to discuss politics in Japan, even though the active repression ended a generation ago.

  That is the system and the mindset that the DPJ must start to dismantle if Japan is to become a normal democratic country. The iron triangle will fight until the very last ditch to preserve the present system, however badly it has served the country. So the key question becomes: can the Democratic Party of Japan reach and take the last ditch in only four years?

  31.

  THE INTERNATIONAL RULE OF LAW

  In the past decade, the United Nations has virtually vanished from the public view. The world’s greatest power invaded another country in open defiance of the UN Charter in 2003 (and went unpunished, of course). All efforts to “reform” the UN, mainly by giving emerging great powers like India and Brazil permanent seats on the Security Council, failed miserably. Even the departure of George W. Bush from the White House did little to rebuild the UN’s credibility, although Barack Obama speaks more politely about the institution than his predecessor. Yet this is not just an important international institution; it is the indispensable one. It is our main safeguard against another war between the great powers.

  June 22, 2005

  UNITED NATIONS ANNIVERSARY

  “The great force on which we must rely is the hatred of the cruelty and waste of war which now exists. As soon as the war is over the process of oblivion sets in …,” Lord Robert Cecil wrote as the First World War drew to an end. “It is only, therefore, while the recollection of all we have been through is burning fresh that we can hope to overcome the inevitable opposition and establish … a new and better organization of the nations of the world.”

  The organization that Cecil, a member of Britain’s Imperial War Cabinet, hoped could prevent another such war was the League of Nations. It failed, of course, and so we got the Second World War, which killed five times as many people. By the end of that one, nuclear weapons were being dropped on cities—so the victors had no choice but to clone the League, making some significant improvements, and try again. Sixty years ago this Sunday (June 26), the Charter of the United Nations was signed by fifty nations in San Francisco.

  There was not a single idealist among the men and women who signed the Charter. They were badly frightened people who had lived through the worst war in human history and who feared that an even worse one lay in wait for their children. They were so frightened that they were even willing to give up the most important aspect of national sovereignty: the right to wage war against oth
er countries. Six decades later, how is their organization doing?

  Two things cannot be denied: the UN has already survived three times longer than its ill-starred predecessor, and the great war that it was meant to prevent has not happened. In the various crises that might have ended with the superpowers sliding into a nuclear war—the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Middle East War of 1973, and so on—the UN Security Council was an essential forum for negotiations, and the Charter provided a new kind of international law that the rivals could defer to without losing face when they wanted to back away from a major crisis.

  So, why is the United Nations so widely disdained today? One reason is that Lord Robert Cecil was right: “the process of oblivion sets in” quickly, and later generations cannot remember why it was so supremely important to create an organization to prevent future great-power wars. But actually, the UN isn’t really all that widely disdained.

  It gets a bad press in the United States, but that is mainly because it acts as a brake on the untrammelled exercise of American military power. In fact, it is still quite popular in most of the world, although it continues to annoy nationalists in all the great powers—and at the other extreme, it frustrates and infuriates all the idealists who want it to be about justice and democracy and maybe even brotherly love.

  It’s not. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator and ambassador to the United Nations, said in 1955: “This organization is created to keep you from going to Hell. It isn’t created to take you to Heaven.” For all the fine words of the Charter, the UN is still mainly about preventing another major war between the great powers (and as many other wars as possible).

  Does the UN need to be “reformed”? Certainly. It has acquired some bad habits, and its structures have not kept up with the realities of a rapidly changing world. The current main focus of reformers concerns the Security Council, whose permanent, veto-wielding members are still the five victorious great powers of 1945. Three-quarters of the countries that now comprise the UN were not even independent then, so clearly some adjustment is overdue.

  However, the only imaginable solution is an expansion of the number of permanent members, because demoting any of the existing permanent members is unthinkable (and would simply be vetoed). But then come the questions—how many new members, which ones, and do they get veto powers, too?—so reform will not happen soon.

  The United Nations is an attempt to change the way that inter national politics works because the only alternative is to accept perpetual war, and since 1945 this has no longer been an acceptable option. Not even the optimists imagined that it could succeed in less than a century or so, and, sixty years on, it may not yet be even halfway to its goal. No need to despair. As its most influential secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, said: “None of us are ever going to see the world order we dream of appear in our lifetime. Nevertheless, the effort to build that order is the difference between anarchy and a tolerable degree of chaos.”

  Let us be quite clear about this. The United Nations Charter, signed by (and largely ghost-written by) the United States and the United Kingdom, makes the invasion and occupation of another country a crime, unless for some reason it is authorized by the UN Security Council. The invasion of Iraq was not so authorized, and the heads of government who ordered it are therefore war criminals. That is the law.

  December 15, 2009

  THE TRAVAILS OF THE YOUNG WAR CRIMINAL

  Alan Watkins is my favourite British journalist. Well into his seventies now, each week he still produces an elegant and knowing column, usually about British politics. And with a casual understatement that you might easily mistake for irony, he has for the past six years regularly referred to former prime minister Tony Blair as “the young war criminal.”

  That may seem a bit harsh, for never has an alleged war criminal sounded more sincere, more open, even more innocent. As he said about his 2003 decision to involve Britain in the American invasion of Iraq in his resignation speech four years later: “Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.” But everybody does what they think is right.

  They may mean pragmatically right, or morally right, or even ideologically right, but one way or another people will find ways to justify their actions to themselves: even Pol Pot believed that his actions were justified. When people’s choices lead to the deaths of others, they must eventually be judged by more objective criteria than mere sincerity. That is now happening to Tony Blair.

  On December 13 Blair admitted that he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known at the time that the “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was wrong. “I would still have thought it was right to remove [Saddam Hussein],” he told BBC interviewer Fern Britton. “Obviously, you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.”

  Blair seemed completely unaware that he was throwing away the only plausible defence for his actions that might stand up if he were brought before the International Criminal Court. Since 1945, it has been a crime to invade another country: that was the main charge brought against the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. The new rule was written into the United Nations Charter, principally at the behest of the United States, and there are virtually no exceptions to it.

  You have the right to defend yourself if another country attacks you, but you are not allowed to attack another country on the grounds that it has a wicked ruler, or follows policies you disapprove of, or even because you think it might attack you one of these days. No unilateral military action is permitted, and even joint action against a genuinely threatening country is only permissible with the authorization of the UN Security Council.

  The United States is a very different country now than it was in 1945, and under the junior Bush administration, it announced a “national security” doctrine that directly contradicts this international law, arrogating to the U.S. government the right to attack any country it suspects of harbouring evil intentions towards the United States.

  It’s just the sort of thing that Britain might have declared when it was top dog in the nineteenth century, had there been any international law against aggression back then. But this is the twenty-first century, and Britain is no longer top dog, and there is a law now. There is even an International Criminal Court to enforce the law, although in practice it never takes action against the leaders of rich and powerful countries.

  Tony Blair will never face the International Criminal Court, but he started a war on false pretenses—there were no weapons of mass destruction—and at least one hundred thousand people died as a result. He has now admitted that he would have started the war even if he knew that the weapons didn’t exist (as he probably did). And he started the war without the authorization of the UN Security Council. He is a war criminal. And so is George W. Bush.

  The leaders of the great powers all still have “get out of jail free” cards, but war criminals from less powerful countries do occasionally find themselves facing international tribunals that are empowered to enforce the law. The biggest fish to face such a tribunal so far was the man who led Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Slobodan Milošević.

  March 14, 2006

  WHY TRY WAR CRIMINALS?

  I never met Adolf Hitler before he became famous. (I never met him afterwards, either, due to the accidents of nationality and birth date.) But I did meet the “Butcher of the Balkans” before he became famous—and I promptly forgot him again.

  Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian leader who was found dead in his prison cell in The Hague last Saturday at the age of sixty-four, was famous because the wars he unleashed in former Yugoslavia killed at least a quarter-million people. He was nothing compared to Hitler, who was responsible for over twenty-five million deaths, but you’d think that he would at least leave a lasting impression. He didn’t.

  I first interviewed Milošević during some forgotten conference in Belgrade in 1982, having been refused interviews with all the more important politicians
I had requested. All I really remember is his impressive hairstyle and the fact that he was a total apparatchik. He didn’t come across as a rabid Serbian nationalist, or indeed as a man who truly believed in anything at all; just another run-of-the-mill sociopath. I didn’t write the interview up. I didn’t even save the tape.

  So imagine my surprise when this bland nonentity resurfaced at the end of the 1980s as the charismatic ultra-nationalist leader who was going to carve a Greater Serbia out of Yugoslavia, even if it required “cleansing” this fantasy homeland of its many non-Serb inhabitants. But then, if I had met the young Hitler in Vienna before the First World War, I probably would not have spotted him as a future war criminal either. Sulky would-be artists can be trying but most of them don’t turn into mass murderers.

  Many potential monsters are born for everyone who actually grows up to become a mass murderer: they are creatures of circumstance. And this has some bearing on the controversy that now engulfs the international court that was trying Milošević on sixty-six charges of genocide, of crimes against humanity and of war crimes in connection with the wars he sponsored in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

  I don’t mean the “controversy” about how he died. Chief United Nations prosecutor Carla Del Ponte got it exactly right when she told reporters: “You have the choice between normal, natural death and suicide.”

  Miloševic had long suffered from heart problems and high blood pressure, so a heart attack makes sense. He had been in prison for five years already and faced the certainty of spending the rest of his life behind bars, so suicide would also have made sense. What does not make sense is the allegation that he was poisoned by the international court’s henchmen because otherwise it would soon have had to admit that the charges were false and release him.