IBD Editorials

In November 2009, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to bow to Japan’s emperor. View Enlarged Image

Leadership: Leaked cables show Japan nixed a presidential apology to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for using nukes to end the overseas contingency operation known as World War II. Will the next president apologize for the current one?

The obsessive need of this president to apologize for American exceptionalism and our defense of freedom continued recently when Barack Obama’s State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) contacted the family of al-Qaida propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to “express its condolences” to his family.

Khan, a right-hand man to Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed along with Awlaki in an airstrike in Yemen on Sept. 30. We apologized for killing a terrorist before he could help kill any more of us.

It’s yet another part of the world apology tour that began with Obama taking the oath of office to protect and defend the United States and its Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, something he immediately felt sorry for.

One stop on his tour was Prague in August 2009. There he spoke of “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” ignoring that before 1945 we lived in such a world and it was neither peaceful nor secure.

Another stop on the tour was in Japan, where Obama in November 2009 bowed to the emperor, something no American president had ever done. It could have been worse if plans to visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima to apologize for winning the war with the atom bombs had come to pass.

A heretofore secret cable dated Sept. 3, 2009, was recently released by WikiLeaks. Sent to Secretary of State Clinton, it reported Japan’s Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka telling U.S. Ambassador John Roos that “the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a ‘nonstarter.'”

The Japanese feared the apology would be exploited by anti-nuclear groups and those opposed to the defensive alliance between Japan and the U.S.

Listen to the Podcast
Subscribe through iTunes

Whatever Tokyo’s motive, Obama’s motive was to once again apologize for defending freedom, this time for winning with devastating finality the war Japan started.

While Obama envisions a world without nuclear weapons, and moves steadily toward unilateral disarmament of our nuclear arsenal, we envision a world without tyrants and thugs willing to use them against us. We do not fear nuclear weapons in the hands of Britain or France, countries that share our love of freedom and democracy.

It was not all that clear in August 1945 that Japan was ready to surrender. Okinawa, where 101,000 Japanese and 24,000 Americans died, was a clear indication of the fanatical resistance to come in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. That resistance ended only when Tokyo became convinced there would soon be nothing to defend.

Nuclear weapons in the right hands ended the violence of World War II. In the right hands, they kept Western Europe free and helped win the Cold War. And the fact that they’d been used made it less likely they would ever be used again.

The world that Imperial Japan envisioned was quite different than the one we now enjoy. That regime’s dream was of an imperial rising sun blistering the globe. Good thing they saw a rising sun of a quite different sort, the fulfillment of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamato’s prophecy after Dec. 7, 1941: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

President Obama fails to realize that being the leader of the Free World, the last best hope for mankind, means never having to say you’re sorry.