So, what would a rational person conclude was the reason Obama went to Hiroshima?
Well, a rational one would have listened to what he said, which was largely that nations should try to avoid the horrors of war in the future.
Clearly the wreath shows he felt bad about what happened there.
Anybody who does not feel bad about what happened there is a monster. And should never be allowed anywhere remotely close to public office.
The call for nuclear weapons never to be used again would have to mean they never should have been used in the first place. A mistake.
No, it would not. That is an interpretation that you have chosen to place on those words. It's also a rather poor one, given that he directly explains the context in which he is calling for it during his speech. To quote :
"Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again. Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of August 6th, 1945 must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.
And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan forged not only an alliance, but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a Union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed peoples and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that worked to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back, and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons. "
What he's saying is that we should work to make war less likely, and ideally to eliminate it, by building relationships between nations - and thus create a world in which nuclear weapons will never be used because there will never be a need to use them.
To try and claim that he therefore meant that the bombs should not have been used in the context of nations who had no such relationship is worse than a poor interpretation - it is factually incorrect and borderline dishonest.
Could he possibly not be sorry for us using weapons that never should have been used in the first place? I don't think so.
Again; only a monster would not be sorry that America had to use those weapons. Being sorry that they were used is not the same thing as believing it was wrong to use them, and not even remotely close to apologising for using them.
Dropping the atomic bombs was a mistake, he felt bad about it, and he made a special trip there to let them know about it. That is an apology.
In your head it is. But your head seems to have little relation to reality in this case.
