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Showing posts from May 30, 2016

FALLING SHORT: BARACK OBAMA’S VISIT TO JAPAN’S GROUND ZERO

In a tweet I posted earlier this year when Washington was still on the fence as to whether or not Barack Obama should be the first sitting president to visit the site of the first of two US nuclear bombings of Japan at the end of World War II, I suggested he should not only go, but that he should also carry a heartfelt American apology with him. In the end, Mr. Obama indeed went, but he did not—and this, unfortunately, comes as no surprise, considering standing US policy on the subject—make any apology for what many, including myself, consider one of the worst war crimes in human history. US President Obama with Japan's Prime Minister Abe at the  Hiroshima Memorial. Last Friday, Obama became the first US president in the seven decades since to end of World War II to pay an official visit to the Hiroshima Memorial, a 30-acre park at the ground-zero epicenter of the nuclear blast that instantaneously laid waste to the Japanese city killing tens of thousands in the blink