Regarding Robert Harte's July 29 letter, "Brazen demand for apology," in response to Kiroku Hanai's article: Whose demand is brazen? Harte's comment is a typical example of American self-righteousness and hubris.
The question is how the warring parties conducted the war. The "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor was a gallant military opening salvo compared with the spiteful slaughter of 200,000 innocent civilians in the closing days of a war already won. The intentional killing of civilians to achieve war goals was then and has remained to this day a war crime. It's as simple as that.
As for which side started the war, war was then and has remained to this day (as the United States has amply demonstrated since 1945) a legitimate means of foreign policy under international law. An extreme war goal such as unconditional surrender (a U.S. obsession since the Civil War) naturally involves higher combat casualties on both sides.
If the U.S. had wanted to avoid such casualties and still win decisively, it should have reduced its ambitious war goals and offered a negotiated, but still victorious, peace settlement (all the Japanese were insisting on was that they be allowed to keep their emperor system, which they did keep in the end).
The U.S. should never have resorted to war crimes, especially if it intended to take the moral high ground over the vanquished and sit in judgment of them after the war. If Harte's self-righteous argumentation is taken to the logical extreme, the U.S. would have been justified in killing the entire Japanese civilian population with atomic (or other) bombs if no offer of surrender had come forward.
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