Obama Shows Disdain for His Country, Ignorance of History in Planned Apology to Japan

COMMENTARY | The Japan Times has reported, thanks to a Wikileaks-leaked diplomatic cable, that President Barack Obama wanted to apologize to Japan for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II.

The cable, sent in Sept. 2009 in advance of a planned trip to Japan by Obama in Nov. 2009, indicated that the Japanese nixed the planned apology for fear that it would embolden domestic anti-nuclear groups.

That Obama actually contemplated apologizing for the two atomic bombings displays several disturbing aspects of the president’s character. The first aspect is his propensity to apologize for actions taken by the United States that merit no apology. The second is an abysmal ignorance of history, in this case the circumstances surrounding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Obama has made a habit of apologizing for the United States. In Strasbourg, France he accused his own country of showing “arrogance” and being “dismissive, even derisive” to the sentiments of Europeans. This tendency demonstrates a kind of arrogance on the president’s part, that he believes that the country that he governs is flawed in some manner and that he had been elected to correct those flaws.

Obama’s urge to apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not take into account the circumstances around which President Truman made to decision to bomb those two cities. The United States and her allies were contemplating a seaborne invasion of the Japanese home islands to take place in November, 1945. Based on the horrendous casualties suffered by both sides in the Battle of Okinawa, American military planners were looking at deaths in the millions to result from Operation Downfall, the plan to conquer Japan.

Does the president know what the results of such a bloodbath would have been? An entire generation of both Japanese and Americans would have been devastated. Instead of a thriving, industrialized power and ally of the United States, Japan would have become an example of the old adage of making peace by making a desert.

As horrible as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, with the hundreds of thousands of deaths, including many by radiation poisoning, it should be seen as an act of mercy, compared to what an invasion would have cost. The bombings motivated the Japanese Emperor Hirohito to surrender and thus end the greatest bloodletting in the history of the world.

Source: Obama Hiroshima trip discouraged in ’09: Wikileaks cable, Japan Times, Sept 28, 2011

Barack Obama and American “Arrogance”, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, April 5, 2009

Was the Bombing of Hiroshima Necessary? Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, Aug 6, 2009


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