The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, like so many ill-informed or ill-intentioned commentators, is blind to certain basics surrounding the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: These two bombs, horrific killers though they were, saved not just American lives, but hundreds of thousands of Asian lives.

Right up until the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Asians in China and elsewhere were dying in great numbers under the savagery and misrule of the Japanese. This carnage and the long history behind it tends to be ignored by those like Wright, who automatically and enthusiastically see America as a villain. But the history is readily available in news stories, scholarly articles and books.

Within two minutes of a "Google," for example, I found this perspective on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an Aug. 16, 2005, commentary in the online "Asian Times" written by Yu Bin that summarizes what Japan had done to its Asian neighbors: "... the unprecedented military ascendancy of the Empire of the Sun was finally arrested in 1945, thanks to the combined efforts of three continental powers — America, China and Russia — plus U.S. atomic weapons."

Yes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific. (Read the detail in John Hersey’s vivid and bone-chilling reporting in his thin volume, "Hiroshima.") So were the continuing deaths of 100,000 to 200,000 Chinese and other Asians every month, deaths from slaughters combined with starvation and disease brought on by the Japanese occupations.

Would Wright and his ilk have us believe that Japanese lives were more valuable than Chinese lives? Such moral calculus is beyond my powers, though apparently not beyond his.

For my part, I see the usual tragic tangle of complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties that accompany war and life in general. This tangle includes the number of Japanese and American lives that would have been lost in an invasion — the number would have been huge — as well as the number of Asians who would have died elsewhere.

Some will say the horrors inflicted by the Japanese on the Chinese and other Asians do not excuse our actions. But those horrors and continuing Asian deaths elsewhere provide necessary perspective for judging what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and what would have happened had we not dropped the bombs.

Pearl Harbor also puts it in perspective. Without Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima would not have happened.

Tack Cornelius

Gainesville