The elderly gentleman had a remarkable history. He'd worked in the State Department in Latin America and Afghanistan. And, 60 years ago, he served as a translator in Tokyo in connection with the war crimes trial that resulted in 25 guilty verdicts and seven executions of Japanese war criminals just after World War II. Given his background, I was surprised at his viewpoint.
The rules from the Tokyo Trials about military aggression and crimes against peace will only be applied to small countries," Cecil Uyehara told me at a recent conference. "When Mai Lai occurred in Vietnam, nothing happened. We didn't apply this justice in Iraq, at Abu Ghraib either." Indeed, one of the U.S. lawyers defending the Japanese accused of war crimes in 1948 tried to argue that, because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States was as guilty as Japan in terms of killing civilians during wartime. This legal gambit failed. "Truman was not tried as a war criminal," historian Alexis Dudden writes in her book Troubled Apologies, "and nuclear weapons came to generate their own de facto legitimacy, standing today as the international community's legal weapon of mass destruction."
Crossposted from Foreign Policy In Focus.
To subscribe to FPIF's World Beat, click here.