The reaction among both the public and the foreign policy blob underscored how too many Americans remain unwilling to confront the ugly realities of Washington’s behavior. Yet there is compelling evidence that U.S. leaders committed horrifying war crimes. President Harry Truman’s decision to approve the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has attracted considerable attention over the decades. Far less attention has been paid to the massive US bombing campaign against North Korea during the Korean "police action." Both cases, however, involved gratuitous assaults that killed or maimed huge numbers of innocent civilians.

A two-part excuse for the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki emerged promptly, and it has remained largely unchanged over the decades. Part one of the justification is that Japan initiated the war with its unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tokyo therefore was to blame for all of the resulting wartime tragedies. It was a cynical rationale that should have been uncompelling to any objective observer. The attack was hardly "unprovoked," given the prewar conduct of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, especially the imposition of steel and oil embargoes that were strangling Japan’s economy. But even if the Pearl Harbor attack had been cowardly and unprovoked, that episode did not justify the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Pearl Harbor was a military target; the two Japanese cities were civilian population centers of little military value. Japan’s attack was an act of war; the US assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes.