AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
TOKYO: Japan is set to announce its withdrawal from Iraq, ending its first military mission since World War II to a country which is in the midst of conflict.
The pullout will bring closure to one of the signature but domestically unpopular policies of outgoing Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, which was seen as a way to exert Japanese influence beyond that of an economic power.
“I am glad that for more than two years there have been no victims and that the deployment is going to finish soon,” Foreign Minister Taro Aso said, without confirming the schedule of the pullout.
“Including this deployment, the activities of the Self-Defense Forces around the world have helped improve Japan's brand image,” Aso told reporters.
Koizumi, a close US ally who steps down in September, informed ruling party leaders of his decision Tuesday, news reports said.
Officials declined to comment but said Koizumi would hold a news conference at 0400 GMT. The troops would come home by late July, major newspapers said.
The mission, which has helped reconstruct the relatively peaceful southern area around the city of Samawa since early 2004, is the first of its kind since Japan was forced by the United States to renounce war after World War II.
The troops, who arrived in Iraq in January 2004, have suffered no casualties and never even fired their state-of-the-art weapons due to the pacifist 1947 constitution.
But the military mission has been criticized by Japan's neighbors, which are haunted by its past aggression, and opposed by a majority of the Japanese public in opinion polls.
Koizumi's government has since broken more post-war taboos. It has proposed a revision of the constitution to recognize that Japan has a military, not the euphemistically named Self-Defense Forces.
“The withdrawal supports the Koizumi government's insistence that the deployment was not for military activity but for Iraqi reconstruction and that the purpose has been accomplished,” said Takehiko Yamamoto, professor of international politics at Waseda University in Tokyo.
“But it is also important in that it made another case for the troops' activities outside the framework of self-defense,” he said.
Japan has gradually been expanding its role in peacekeeping and disaster relief. Japan deployed nearly 1,000 troops to Indonesia in the wake of the December 2004 tsunami, its largest military mission since World War II.
As the Japanese troops are barred from using force except in the strictest sense of self-defense, they rely on British and Australian forces for protection in Iraq.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced Monday that his fledgling government's troops would take over from the coalition next month in Al-Muthanna province, whose capital is Samawa.
It will be the first such transfer of power since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and Japan is using it as a symbolic point to end its deployment.
The withdrawal also clears an item from the agenda ahead of Koizumi's farewell tour of the United States next week.
Koizumi strongly backed President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq and has bolstered cooperation with the United States since becoming premier in April 2001.
Despite its growing military role, Japan has still used aid as a top instrument of foreign policy.
Japan has pledged up to 3.5 billion dollars in soft loans and 1.5 billion dollars in grants to rebuild
