“The bombing of Hiroshima was a great crime. That the United States of America has yet to confront it as such not only leaves the past with unfinished business, but undercuts the possibility of present moral clarity about the exercise of American power and leaves the earth’s future tied to a fuse that we set burning 57 years ago today.” — James Carroll, Boston Globe op-ed Carroll’s argument is essentially that the debate about the strategic necessity of the atomic bombings to the war effort is far from settled; many consider Japan’s back to have been broken already and the argument about how many American lives were saved by unleashing the Holy Fire to be fatuous and self-serving. Although of course such momentous decisions are not based on a single factor, positioning the US in the postwar struggle with the Soviet Union may have been the more important reason to incinerate two Japanese cities. Having unleashed such a quantum leap in the potential for mass destruction on the world — and relying on terror every day since to prop up our superpower status — what moral standing do we have to make war on Iraq on the basis of its similar attempts to use WMD to jockey for geopolitical power? Unless you deny that there is a thread of moral continuity to US responsibility extending back as far as WWII (which continuity those claiming US moral superiority as the saviors of the free world, the “greatest generation” etc., rely upon), it is a compelling argument…