Unlike John Hinderaker, I would be very pleased if Obama expressed regret for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t foresee this happening, but I am always amazed by people who just assume that leveling two cities with atomic weaponry wasn’t a morally ambiugous decision.

I have a confession to make.  Despite all my criticisms of waterboarding, American foreign policy interventionism, and a whole host of other aspects of the modern federal government, not to mention my refusal to consider most of Europe to be a socialist hellhole, I am a proud American exceptionalist.  Which is to say that I do believe there is something exemplary about the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and that as a result the United States can and should be a “shining city upon a hill.” 

Don’t get me wrong – I fully understand the roots of those documents in European intellectualism.  But so far as I know the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation were the first attempts to implement all these ideas on a truly wide scale, albeit a scale with an unforgivable oversight, allowance of slavery.  That these ideals have since taken root to varying degrees throughout the world is a tribute to their power. 

The difference between me and other exceptionalists is that I’m serious about it.  If the US of A is to be the “shining city upon a hill” rather than merely a mirage in the desert, it must act that way.  If it wastes precious resources trying to force other cities to be just as shiny, it will find that it has lost some of its own shine in the process; if it tries to, chameleonlike, change its colors to defend against jealous neighbors, it will likewise lose some of the very shine that made those neighbors so jealous; and if it builds its walls too high, no one will see the glow that lies within.

To be sure, at some point that city has to have walls and archers if it is to protect against those jealous neighbors.  Compromises sometimes really must be made if the shining city is to retain any shine whatseover.  But the proud citizen will recognize that this tradeoff is being made and will lament it; he will not pretend that the city’s shine will be unaffected, only argue that the shine will lessen more if the tradeoff is not made.  He will not begrudge his fellow citizens their opposition to the tradeoff but will instead seek to convince them, as friends and neighbors, that the tradeoff is truly necessary.   Perhaps most importantly, the truly proud citizen will not do anything to dull the city’s shine without the approval of his fellow proud citizens.

It is this idealism of mine, this deeply engrained belief in American exceptionalism, that drives me to such anger and sadness over the interrogation and detention programs, amongst many other things, our leaders have implemented – in secret, usually – over the last several decades.  Being a shining city takes a lot of work to keep the shine polished – it is not, as Julian Sanchez explains so magnificently,  cost-free:

If you refrain from savage acts in wartime only when brutality would gain you nothing, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. Vague talk about “saving lives” obscures a vital question: What kinds of costs are you willing to bear, what risks will you accept,  in order to avoid doing evil? If you’re prepared to discard a principle as soon as there’s some significant benefit to be gotten by doing so, then it’s a principle of expediency, not morality. If you’re ready to resort to torture, or to targeting civilians, as soon as there’s some chance it would “save American lives,” then you’re declaring a commitment to abide by moral constraints, so long as observing them is free.

We are required, it seems to me, to choose: We can accept that we’re one more country like any other, guided by pure rational self interest, in which case “if it might save even one American life…” is as much justification as we can ask for any policy, and the only question (though still, of course, a difficult and complex question) is how we go about it.  If, on the other hand, we think there’s something exceptional about the United States—that we’re defined by a particular moral vision beyond the universal desire for comfort and safety—we need to accept that hewing to a moral vision sometimes comes with costs, and then ask how much ours is worth to us.

I couldn’t agree more.  If you think the United States is just another country, or even just another Western country, then the moral issues of whether waterboarding is torture, or whether it was a war crime to drop the atomic bomb, can and perhaps should be either irrelevant or only of minor significance compared to whether those actions saved more lives than they cost.  But if you are a true believer in American exceptionalism, then you must accept that maintaining that exceptionalism comes with costs, perhaps sometimes in human lives. 

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I suspect the debate over torture, atomic weaponry, and morality is rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns, but I did want to say one last thing on the subject before moving on. For the record, I do not think Truman (or Bush) is a Nazi; I do recognize that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was an extremely difficult one, made under incredibly difficult circumstances.

Having said that, moral complexity doesn’t allow us to abdicate our moral responsibility, and one of the striking things about this exchange is how little we argue about a decision that was – at the very least – incredibly controversial. Truman incinerated two Japanese cities whose value as military targets was marginal at best, and yet the chorus of would-be revisionists is not exactly overwhelming. The decision to use the atom bomb simply isn’t discussed in polite company – something that doesn’t bode well for future discussions about torture.

John Stewart’s debate with Cliff May illustrates this point rather neatly. May uses Hiroshima as a reference point not because destroying a city in the midst of a half-century old war somehow illuminates our current dilemma over detainee treatment – he uses it because he knows the example of President Truman will automatically elicit a sympathetic reaction from his audience. After decades of relentlessly mythologizing a president whose tenure was decidedly mixed, one questionable moral decision is used to obscure another, all because we simply aren’t willing to talk about the dark underbelly of American history.

The parallels between the debate over atomic weapons and the debate over torture are ominous, as Bush apologists laud the interrogators as heroes while our political establishment expresses regrets but nonetheless insists it’s time to move on. My response is simple: No. Not here. Not this time.