World Leaders Lining Up For Their Apologies

I guess the White House should be renamed "Apologies-R-Us" because since Obama embarked on his World Apology Tour, other world leaders are now lining up for theirs:

Venezuela's President, praising Obama's promise to free the world from nuclear weapons, calls for US apology to Japan over nuking the country.

"It is very encouraging that the president of the United States called for the end of, and the destruction of, nuclear arms in the world," Hugo Chavez told reporters in Tokyo, where he signed an investment deal with Japan.

"Obama launched a missile -- an Obama missile," he added, according to AFP.

Earlier on Sunday at an EU summit in Prague, the US President Barack Obama vowed to lead the quest for a world free from nuclear weapons.

Obama's call to cut stockpiles, restrict testing, cut back on fissile production and to secure loose nuclear material, comes at a time when the US still possesses the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

The US is “the planet's number one nuclear power. It is also the only country in the world that dropped the atomic bomb,” Chavez said.

“At any rate, I think America should apologize to Japan."

Let me refer back to a line from Obama's recent speech in Prague in which he called for a nuke-free world:

And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.

What is wrong with that sentence? Is there some important information missing from that presidential mea culpa? Let me rewrite that sentence with the complete thought that should have been expressed:

And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon to end the most destructive and deadly war in human history, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.

Those two bombs in Japan took a terrible toll, but saved a much larger toll that would have occurred had the war gone on and resulted in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Estimates for an invasion included 1 million Allied casualties, and several times that among Japanese civilians and military.

We don't owe anybody an apology for using nukes to end WWII. That being said, I fully expect Obama to offer one anyway.