Why bother answering? We all have a pretty good idea what he thinks. Including the lefty hawks at TNR:
But given his longstanding views about nuclear weapons, I’m actually not certain that Obama agrees with the decision. And I can also imagine him thinking that Hiroshima was the right and necessary thing. But also that Nagasaki–which as I understand it was bombed when serious talks about surrender were already underway within Japan–may have been gratuitous. (A view apparently shared by Dwight Eisenhower, if this source is reliable.)
Not that we’d be very likely to hear that from him, either.
Actually, the fact that he ducked the question here and is skipping a visit to Hiroshima on this trip only makes me more confident that he’d never let KSM go, irrespective of the district court verdict. He knows what the public reaction would be if he apologized for the A-bomb; he knows full well how it would bolster the image of him as being soft and less a defender of American actions abroad than some quasi-neutral arbiter who’s trying to be “fair” to all sides. Freeing the mastermind of 9/11 would be orders of magnitude worse. If he’s unwilling to risk the fallout (no pun intended) from apologizing to a country we’ve been closely allied with for decades, he’s not risking the nuclear backlash (again, not intended) that would come with Khaled Sheikh Mohammed being dropped off in Kandahar and promptly organizing a new squad of 747s to hit American office towers. It would be an electoral Jonestown for Democrats. Click the image to watch.
