I'm a huge fan of Jon Stewart. But Harry S Truman is not a war criminal because he dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, and I cannot believe Jon Stewart thinks so. Stewart stated during a debate on torture the other night that he thought Truman's conduct would have only been acceptable had he set off an atomic bomb 15 miles off of Japan's coast as a fair warning.
I'm sorry, but I do not think we owed it to anyone to showcase our arsenal and let them take defensive measures first. Did the Japanese do that at Pearl Harbor? Also, the first atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945. Japan could have surrendered immediately, but it didn't. This is why we dropped the second one on August 9, 1945. It took another six days before Japan surrendered. I have not seen anything yet to suggest that Japan knew we would not hit them again, and yet, they did not surrender for another six days. So, in other words, a warning wouldn't have worked, but it might have hurt our war effort.
The called World War II, the "good" war because it was against a clearly evil enemy, the Nazis, and Japan sided with them. War is not pretty, but we had a just cause, and we ended it early and avoided more American deaths, which (call me crazy) is one of the goals of war, as I see it. It's terrible that so many Japanese civilians died, but we're not talking about a hand grenade. Civilians were going to die no matter where the first bomb went off.
I know one bad act doesn't justify another, but I can't shake that Japan made it's own bed on December 7, 1941, and it stayed in that bed for four years, though it could have gotten out any time prior to August 6, 1945.
