The USS Iowa, America's first 45,000-ton battleship, was commissioned in February 1943.

The USS Iowa, America's first 45,000-ton battleship, was commissioned in February 1943. During World War II she helped take the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Marianas, and the Philippines, and was in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender. In the Korean War, she bombarded the eastern coast of North Korea. Congress wants to moor the Iowa, decommissioned in 1990, in California. Just not in San Francisco, whose supervisors, by an 8-3 vote, expressed their unwillingness to take it. Their disapproval of the Iraq War, and the Navy's policies on gays, formed the ostensible grounds of their reluctance, though supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, in an interview on Hannity & Colmes, was more frank: "It's a warship and it's got guns on it. It fires things." He went on to say that the United States "should not have a military." When asked how we might defend ourselves, Sandoval suggested that the cops and the Coast Guard could do the job, though he did not say whether they should be allowed to fire things. Stockton, Calif., is lobbying for the Iowa, and clearly deserves it. Meanwhile, would Tokyo accept San Francisco if we offered it?