Last week I listened with growing disgust as Charles Krauthammer berated President Obama for something that struck me as eminently defensible. According to a ranting war monger whose likes have not been seen since the fall of the Third Reich, Obama “dishonored our nation” on a recent visit to Hiroshima, when he “implicitly apologized” for the nuclear destruction of that city in August 1945. By regretting that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated in the course of what was apparently a holy crusade against infidels, the US president, it is claimed, brought shame on the entire country.
But the one who in this case is behaving foolishly is not Obama but Fox News’s resident conservative icon. The dropping of atom bombs on two Japanese cities did not protect our armed force or advance human goodness in the world. By August 1945 Japan was no longer a significant military threat to the advancing US military forces and might have been ready to surrender earlier if the US government had not demanded unconditional surrender. No less a presumed neocon hero than Winston Churchill had warned Truman against this course in July 1945. Even the American Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had boldly challenged Japanese expansionists in 1940 and 1941, may not have been sufficiently belligerent for the likes of Krauthammer. In his memoirs, Stimson explicitly states that by insisting on unconditional surrender, we might have prolonged the war in the Pacific. The Japanese
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by 1945 were afraid they’d be stripped of their emperor; the imperial house would be executed and other humiliations would befall them if they were forced to surrender unconditionally. Many in Truman’s government and among US military leaders advised negotiations and thought that it was at least possible to end the war without further bloodshed. Americans, it was believed by some patriotic leaders in 1945, did not have to make a choice between invading the Japanese mainland and dropping nuclear weapons on a helpless civilian population. As late as 1963 former American president (and Allied Commander in the Second World War) Dwight D. Eisenhower had lamented that “we hit them with that awful thing”—and mind you, he did so in Newsweek.
Perhaps Eisenhower too, according to the exterminationist standards of neocon civilians, was insulting us all by not being sufficiently proud of bombing civilians in a neocon-approved crusade. A few years ago no less a neocon luminary than John Podhoretz got bleary-eyed when he described the bombing of Dresden at the end of World War Two. Although Allied leaders also regretted this destruction of helpless civilians when the war was all but over, Pod, Jr. defended the carnage as a necessary blow for our values. One can never massacre enough people, providing our media-vetted “conservatives” give a war their post facto approval. All of this still puzzles someone like me, who recalls a time when conservatives believed in the restrained use of force and raged against ideologically driven foreign policies. If memory serves, the dropping of atomic weapons in 1945 elicited criticism from the American Right and particularly from that part of it that had been critical of FDR. The Left generally favored the nuclear option, while Soviet-sympathizers were particularly pleased since it would allow Soviet Russia to take advantage of Japan’s weakness to seize Sakhalin and the Curial Islands. But that was before our official Right became a caricature of the extreme Left, a development that I’m reminded of whenever I hear neocons go on and on about killing the enemies of democracy.
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A final point occurred to me in reading Krauthammer’s pompously expressed bilge: Would this guy and his well-financed pals give a damn if Obama had “implicitly apologized” for or lamented another controversial American military act? I mean some action taken outside of those holy wars that the neocons continue to glorify for their own doctrinal and sentimental reasons, namely the Civil War, World War One and World War Two. Would Krauthammer go off the handle if a high-ranking American politician asserted that we misrepresented what happened when we claimed that the Spanish had bombed the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898? Would Kraut care if an American president remarked that the McKinley government used the bombing as a pretext to strip a declining Spanish Empire of its colonies? Or would Kraut care if an American president on a visit to Toronto deplored the behavior of those Americans who invaded and burned Fort York, which stands on the site of what is now the largest Canadian city? Somehow I suspect such acts would elicit from Kraut nothing more ominous than a yawn.
Like other neocons Krauthammer does not object to calling attention to bad things in the American past, providing they have no special meaning for those of his persuasion. He is quite comfortable bringing up America’s history of racism and slavery and in 2002 went after Republican minority leader Trent Lott for showing insufficient appreciation for the civil rights revolution. We may, therefore, conclude that it is permissible from a conservative establishment perspective to talk about white racism in the American past, and this can be done without shaming our country or fueling Krauthammer’s righteous indignation. Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to object if Kraut considers such laments to be appropriate gestures.
