Lets replace the American president with someone who goes out of his way to humiliate the country and see if anyone notices. Oops, it looks like Japan did notice. One stop on his tour was Prague in August 2009. There he spoke of Americas 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 Japans 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. Yes, thats exactly what the anti-nuclear activists would do. As an old anti-nuclear activist himself, Obama may have known that. Or he may just be an idiot. Presumably, a Japanese government that got an American President to bow to their national sense of victimhood from the consequences of launching a brutal war of conquest in the 1930s .
