If ever there was a time to discuss the constitutional legality of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, it's now. The SDF has done peacekeeping work, but it's never been placed in a country like Iraq, which for all intents and purposes is still at war.
The trouble is that the government doesn't have the luxury of sitting around and discussing the Constitution. They have more pressing problems, the most immediate one being that the SDF isn't up to the task of soldiering in a place where soldiers are targets. Last week on Asahi TV's "Sunday Project," during a grilling of Defense Agency chief Shigeru Ishiba, one reporter compared the dispatch to "sending a student driver into a Formula 1 race." On Nippon TV's evening news show last Monday, an international defense expert said the SDF would be going to Iraq with some sophisticated equipment "that they don't really know how to use."
Commentators are saying the Liberal Democratic Party is worried about the effect dead Japanese soldiers will have on next summer's Upper House elections. That's why Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi continually harps on the "timing" of the dispatch. Last Sunday, during a discussion on NHK, an LDP lawmaker actually became fuzzier while trying to be specific: "We must find a method for judging the situation in order to decide what we should do."