Earlier this week outgoing UN Sec'y General Kofi Annan traveled to Independence, Mo. to pay tribute to Harry Truman at the same time that he criticized Bush in his farewell address. Here's how the International Herald Tribune reported Annan's speech:
"In a clear reference to the lack of international support for the American action in Iraq, he said, 'No state can make its own actions legitimate in the eyes of others. When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when convinced that it is being used for the right purpose - for broadly shared aims - in accordance with broadly accepted norms.'" [My emphasis]
"Annan also cited Truman's statement that 'the responsibility of great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world,' and noted approvingly how Truman had used American power to face down a threat to international order during his administration.
"'He believed strongly that henceforth security must be collective and indivisible,' Annan said. 'That was why, for instance, that he insisted, when faced with aggression by North Korea against the South in 1950, on bringing the issue to the United Nations and placing U.S. troops under the UN flag, at the head of a multinational force.'"
I understand how Truman's role in the founding of the UN in 1945 and the contrast between Truman's actions in Korea and Bush's invasion of Iraq may have influenced Annan's choice of a location for the speech, but I think he must have forgotten those two horrible days in August 1945 when following Truman's orders the first atomic bombs ever used rained down on the innocent people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nothing Truman did as president trumps giving those orders. That is the true Truman legacy.
This is from Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Ralph Raiko:
"The most spectacular episode of TrumanÂ’s presidency will never be forgotten, but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve U.S. Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead."
"Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives [possibly]lost The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll - nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War - is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb 'spared millions of American lives.'"
"...Truman's multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public. Otherwise, Americans - and the rest of the world - might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps."
For all the good Annan may have done in his UN years and even in the farewell speech the choice of location will forever be a stain on his record.
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