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It turns out, however, that Bush's version of American remorselessness isn’t quite enough. Bush, then running for president, proclaimed, “I will never apologize for the United States. Navy shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf killing all 290 passengers (including 66 children), Vice President George H.W. The very politicians who criticize other countries for not owning up to their wrong-doing regularly insist that we should never apologize for anything. With rare exceptions, like the 1988 congressional act that apologized to and compensated the Japanese-American victims of World War II internment, when it comes to the brute exercise of power, true patriotism has above all meant never having to say you're sorry. It does, however, apply remarkably well to the way many Americans think about that broader form of love we call patriotism. As I have, an odd fragment of Americana kept coming to mind, a line from the popular 1970 tearjerker Love Story: “Love,” says the female lead when her boyfriend begins to apologize, “means never having to say you're sorry.” It has to be one of the dumbest definitions ever to lodge in American memory, since real love often requires the strength to apologize and make amends. Still, as a historian, I've been trying to dig a little deeper into our lack of national contrition. Given the last seven decades of perpetual militarization and nuclear “modernization” in this country, the answer may seem like an obvious no. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people - slowly and painfully - leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000? Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I'm wondering if we've come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world's only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.