SHOULD GOD DAMN AMERICA FOR WAR CRIMES?

Howard Kurz takes a shot at both Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright in his column today in The Washington Post. Kurz objects to Wright's, "God Damn America," notwithstanding the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to Japan's unconditional surrender at the end of WWII.

Here's Kurz:

"As for context, Moyers played a long clip from the post-9/11 "America's chickens are coming home to roost" sermon. Wright said that America had taken its land by terror from the Indians; had enslaved Africans; had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (weren't we in a death struggle with Japan, which had attacked Pearl Harbor?); had bombed Iraq, Sudan and Panama; and had backed state-supported terrorism against the Palestinians.

"Moyers's question after this diatribe: "When people saw the sound bites from it this year, they thought you were blaming America. Did you somehow fail to communicate?"

"Thought he was blaming America? Where did anyone get that idea? "

I guess Howard Kurz thinks that America should never be blamed. Not even for Hiroshima and Nakasaki, where, in each city, over 100,000 innocent men, women and children were either incinerated or poisoned with lethal nuclear radioactive materials. Kurz seems to believe the destruction of the two Japanese cities was justified:

" . . . (weren't we in a death struggle with Japan, which had attacked Pearl Harbor?)"

Should God bless America for this, or should as Wright says, should God damn America? Let's admit it. What the United States did to Japanese people when it dropped the nuclear devices was a WAR CRIME. Nothing less. It will do no good morally or ethically for Howard Kurz or other defenders of "American exceptionalism" to claim that the bombing saved the lives of American troops. President Harry S. Truman was a war criminal. So were the crew of the Enola Gay that dropped the bombs. The rules of war make that perfectly clear. The end does not justify the means, not in Hiroshima, not in Hamburg or Dresden, not in the "War on Terror.