President Barack Obama says he wants to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometime during his presidency but won’t have time during this week’s trip to Japan to go to the cities devastated by U.S. atomic bombs at the end of World War II.If he were to go there and say "yes, it's terrible that so many lives were lost here, but it was necessary to end the war and save potentially millions of Japanese and Allied lives that would have been lost in an invasion", fine, I can live with that. However, if as expected, he goes there and hangs his head in shame and decrys nuclear weapons while apologizing for America, that's a non-starter.
No sitting U.S. president has visited the two cities largely because of the controversy it could raise at home.
In an interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK that ran Tuesday, Obama said he would be unable to visit the cities on his trip to Japan this weekend due to time constraints but would be willing to do so in the future.
“The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are etched in the minds of the world and I would be honored to have the opportunity to visit those cities at some point during my presidency,” Obama said in the interview, done Monday at the White House.
Calls have grown in Japan for Obama to visit the two cities since his April speech in Prague envisioning a nuclear-free world and since he was named Nobel Peace Prize winner last month.
The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have invited Obama to their cities before a U.N. review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty next May. Japanese newspaper editorials and anti-nuclear activist groups have also called for Obama to come, pointing out that previous Nobel Peace Prize winners have visited the cities.
And that's exactly what he would do. Peace Prize winners are expected to go there and deplore violence and nukes because that's what Peace Prize winners do. The fact that millions of Americans, Japanese, Australians, Brits, Canadians, and others are alive today because they or their ancestors were not killed in an invasion of the home islands is usually lost on the peaceniks.
Like it or not, this airplane brought peace and prosperity to Japan.
Posts
1 comment:
This news gives me a creepy feeling. Osama said that Muslims were justified in nuking the US because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- that because the US used nuclear weapons it deserves to be attacked with nuclear weapons. It's the basis of al Queda's "justification" that nuking a US city would be "okay" in Muslim terms.
And Obama is close enough to being a Muslim to make his interest in visiting nuke sites unsettling.
The US let Hasam slip through security. Has an even bigger terrorist also slipped by?
I know. This is pure tin foil hat stuff. But I am so disgusted with this presidency, and frankly the guy has done one weird thing after another. I wonder sometimes if I'm dreaming.
Post a Comment