USA is Da Bomb!
Sorry for the brief posting hiatus here at IHWYJS. We’re back!
In Dublin, diplomats are meeting to discuss a treaty banning cluster bombs.
Guess who isn’t going to show up? Right. But even though the Bush Administration doesn’t feel the need to join over 100 other nations in discussing this matter of life and death, apparently the United States is still making its presence felt. By “bullying” our allies into gutting the treaty.
Cluster bombs and the effort to eradicate them don’t get much press coverage in the U.S. But because of the way they operate, they are strongly opposed by international human rights and peace activists. Here is the problem, in brief:
Cluster munitions are large weapons which are deployed from the air and from the ground and release dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions. Submunitions released by air-dropped cluster bombs are most often called “bomblets,” while those delivered from the ground by artillery or rockets are usually referred to as “grenades.”
Air-dropped or ground-launched, they cause two major humanitarian problems and risks to civilians. First, their widespread dispersal means they cannot distinguish between military targets and civilians so the humanitarian impact can be extreme, especially when the weapon is used in or near populated areas.
Many submunitions fail to detonate on impact and become de facto antipersonnel mines killing and maiming people long after the conflict has ended. These duds are more lethal than antipersonnel mines; incidents involving submunition duds are much more likely to cause death than injury.
To make matters even more horrific, since the bomblets are small and often brightly-colored, they tend to attract the attention of children. So the use of cluster bombs results in large areas of the earth being covered in small, brightly-colored de facto land mines. As a result, cluster bombs have been a major cause of civilian casualties from Vietnam to Kosovo to Iraq and beyond.
Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Prize for her efforts to ban land mines, weighs in on the Globe opinion page.
Taken by themselves, the administration’s effort to undermine the cluster bomb ban, and its refusal to attend the conference are quite regrettable. (And seriously - they could have at least found one eager, young, low-level D-Bag in the administration, armed with a Pepperdine degree and a brief case, and sent him to Dublin. You know - show up!)
But given how this matter fits into the larger picture, it is difficult to fathom how the United States can have any credibility on the world stage in matters of war and peace and arms control. For instance, when the United States rails against the potential development of nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea, what does the rest of the world see?
The rest of the world sees the country that invented nuclear weapons. It sees the country that spent much of the second half of the twentieth century stockpiling nuclear weapons. It sees the only country (and this seems a significant point, does it not?) that has ever used nuclear weapons.
The rest of the world sees the country that tried to undermine the 1997 land mine treaty. The rest of the world sees the country that can’t even be bothered to worry about the civilian impact of cluster bombs. The rest of the world sees the country that is one of the few nations on earth that has developed and stockpiled chemical weapons.
And while the U.S. has nuclear and chemical weapons*, and has used the former, the rest of the world also sees America as the country that launched a disastrous preemptive war based on false claims about those same kinds of weapons.
And just to make matters worse, the United States decided to use cluster bombs.
*(Thank you to commenter Mr. Hand for pointing this out: it should be said that the United States has been in the process of destroying chemical weapons, according to its treaty obligations).
