Earlier this afternoon, on the occasion of both the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and Jon Stewart’s impending departure from TV, I wrote about Stewart calling President Truman a war criminal for bombing Hiroshima back in 2009.
Along that same vein, a few months after the Stewart incident, the Obama Administration evidently wanted to apologize for Hiroshima. According to a Wikileaks cable released in October 2011, then U,S, Ambassador to Japan John Roos told then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in September 2009 that the Japanese government was not amenable to the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to issue an apology for the bombing.
When this story came out, a senior White House official told ABC News there was never any plan for Obama to issue an apology. If that was the case, why would Roos specifically state in his cable to Clinton “the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a ‘non-starter’”?
After all, this is Obama we are talking about here and, if not for the good sense of the Japanese government, President Obama would have apologized for America’s actions yet again.