September 24, 2007 (LPAC)--With a new Prime Minister to take office on Tuesday in Tokyo, the debate over Japan's role in the Cheney-wars is heating up, and could well end the deployment altogether. A U.S. Naval officer, Capt. Ronald Horton, the commander of the amphibious assault ship Juneau in 2005, told Ashahi Shimbun aboard his current command, the aircraft carrier Enterprise, that the Juneau had been fueled by the Japanese for both Afghan and Iraqi missions. The special anti-terror law authorizing the Maritime Self-Defense Forces to refuel warships in the Indian Ocean explicitly restricts the operation to the Afghan theater, and the government has insisted that this restriction has been upheld.

Although incoming Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda supports the deployment, the Socialist Party of Japan, which took over the upper house in the July 29 elections, is committed to ending it entirely. As the authorization of the current bill runs out on November 1, there is no time to renew it, and ships will almost certainly be recalled. It is not clear whether Fukuda, who has opposed Japan's over-dependence on the U.S. at the expense of ties to Asian neighbors, will make any serious effort to overcome the Socialist Party opposition.