Will U.S. Finally End Cluster Bomb Exports?
WASHINGTON - At the end of June, a few members of the U.S. Congress made a discreet move to limit this country’s exports of cluster bombs, a weapon that has been used around the world since the Second World War to devastating humanitarian consequences.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, included a provision in the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill that would significantly limit the U.S. export of cluster bombs.
Buried amongst funding provisions for the U.S. State Department, military aid programs and economic development initiatives, the cluster bomb provision would effectively ban U.S. exports of the weapon.
The United States has a stockpile of nearly one billion cluster bomblets, the small exploding submunitions that rain down from a cluster bomb. Some of these bomblets, many dating back to the Vietnam era, have a failure rate of up to 23 percent, according to published reports.
The provision included in the funding bill prohibits the sale or transfer of cluster bombs with a failure rate of more than one percent, effectively banning the sale of most of the U.S. arsenal.
The provision also bars the sale or transfer of cluster bombs to countries that don’t agree to use them exclusively against clearly defined military targets and not where civilians live or are known to be present.
But cluster bombs are specifically designed to affect “soft targets” — people. They have limited uses against bridges, railroads or military installations but can wreck havoc on entire battalions and nearby civilians.
About the size of a can of soda or a size D battery, brightly colored and intricately shaped, cluster bomblets can also turn a farmer’s field into terror zone, a neighborhood street into a booby trap. These weapons carve a swath of devastation when they fall, killing plants, animals and people.
But devastation also comes weeks and months later when soldiers and combatants have moved on or the conflict has come to an end and people begin the careful, often painful process of returning to a normal existence. The small submunitions are designed to explode on impact, scattering shrapnel that can slice through four inches of steel and fly up to eight yards from the point of impact. When the duds don’t explode, they lay hidden in a rice paddy, buried amongst the litter on a village street or dangling from a tree, de facto landmines where civilians will return to work, play and live. It is too easy to imagine what such explosive power can do to a child-sized limb or a farmer’s hand.
While the provision in the State Department funding bill avoids the issue of U.S. use of the weapon, it could have a dramatic impact on the world’s stockpiles of cluster munitions. The U.S has sold or transferred cluster munitions to 25 countries around the world including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Israel.
The nearly unanimous approval by the Senate Appropriations Committee could signal a shift in the sentiment toward stronger cluster bomb regulations in Washington. “You have to think that there’s a very good chance of it passing if the Republicans on the committee approved it,” Scott Stedjan told IPS.
Stedjan is a legislative secretary for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a peace lobby in Washington, DC. He worked with both Senator Leahy’s office and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California’s office on this issue.
Last summer, Leahy and Feinstein introduced legislation as an amendment to the 2007 Defense Appropriations bill that severely limited both the use and the sale or transfer of cluster bombs.
But the amendment’s timing, coming in the immediate aftermath of the summer war between Israel and Lebanon, when the use of cluster munitions by both sides became a highly contentious issue, hijacked the agenda. The legislation was rejected by a vote of 30 to 70 in the Senate. The same legislation reintroduced this year so far has 11 senators cosponsoring the bill, none of whom opposed the 2006 legislation.
While the movement in the Senate may seem incremental, another sign of the changing climate in Washington came just weeks before the cluster bomb export provision made it out of the Senate committee. Administration officials stated for the fist time that it is willing to enter into negotiations on a treaty to regulate the use of cluster bombs through the cumbersome U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
This is a shift for an administration that just five months ago declined to take part in an international conference on cluster munitions held in Oslo, during which 46 countries agreed to work toward an international treaty banning the use of cluster bombs. That same month an administration spokesperson told reporters that the United States “takes the position that cluster munitions do have a place and a use in military inventories”.
With a history stretching back to World War Two, cluster bombs in their current form were first used as a part of the anti-guerrilla campaign during the Vietnam War. The United States first used the weapon during the Indochina War, dropping more than 82 million bomblets on Vietnam between 1961 and 1973 in cities including the capital, Hanoi.
The cluster bomb duds from this war more than 30 years ago continue to be found in 43 of the 65 provinces in Vietnam. The U.S. also dropped cluster bombs on Laos and Cambodia to similarly devastating effect.
Since the Vietnam War, the U.S. has used cluster bombs against Iraqi forces in Kuwait in 1991, in the former Yugoslavia during NATO operations in 1999 and in Afghanistan in 2001. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq the U.S. fired rockets, missiles and bombs that scattered more than 2 million cluster submunitions around the country, including major population centers like Baghdad. The original deluge of bomblets killed hundreds of Iraqis and maimed thousands more.
The intersection of military utility of cluster bombs and humanitarian conduct continues to be widely debated even as the U.S. and other countries that have used the weapon claim that they remain within the constraints of international law.
“If humanitarian law was really enforced then these weapons would be illegal,” Stedjan said.
But for now, campaigners say the first step in shifting the U.S. policy on cluster bombs is to limit their export around the world. The Foreign Operations Appropriations bill will likely come to the floor for a vote by the full Senate at the end of July or in September.
In the chance that it passes, the U.S. will incrementally join a growing international movement that recognizes the human, economic and moral toll of these indiscriminate weapons.
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service
“The provision also bars the sale or transfer of cluster bombs to countries that don’t agree to use them exclusively against clearly defined military targets and not where civilians live or are known to be present.”
We all know the first casualty of war is the truth. Once the goods are delivered, we can just absolve ourselves by saying well we made them promise……
Since cluster bombs are of limited use against military targets we should cease the manufacture and show some moral fibre.
Enough military and political gobbledegook!!!
What the hell is wrong with just flat out banning their use or manufacture? Other than that it would slightly reduce the profits of the war manufacturers
They are one hell of a lot safer than Depleted uranium weapons. Those should be banned also. We sell these horribe weapons to everone, even our potential enemies. That’s one of the primary exports for us now, weapons and hundred dollar bills. Can you imagine having one of your loved ones being killed or maimed by a little bomb some day?
amazing, how we talk about killing so easily if they are made they will be sold, libertas has a point, but remember these people are very greedy
The US is morally bankrupt when it comes to weapons. We have steadfastly refused to limit or ban land mines or cluster bombs, both of which are barbaric killers of innocent non-combatants. Some countries, such as Angola, have an incredibly large number of young people hobbling on one leg, or creeping on no legs, from land mines - - many of American origin and planted by US allies in the long Angolan civil war. But Congress and administrations alike have turned a deaf ear to pleas to outlaw them. I hope the notion of Hell is real; we have many legislators, military officers, and administrators destined for it!
In Iraq IED’s are demonically destructive. Wonder where the world got the idea for little bombs that wreak great human havoc? It doesn’t make any difference where the horrific idea came from - it’s sickening that there is such malevolent sadism among us…in each of us.
“The provision included in the funding bill prohibits the sale or transfer of cluster bombs with a failure rate of more than one percent, effectively banning the sale of most of the U.S. arsenal.”
Now we are talking! I’m so pleased, I can hardly stay in my chair. Months ago, I originally wrote critically about the earlier provision that essentially stopped at “…the provision also bars the sale or transfer of cluster bombs to countries that don’t agree to use them exclusively against clearly defined military targets and not where civilians live or are known to be present
My position was something in line with what Stedjan said: “If humanitarian law was really enforced then these weapons would be illegal.”
Although I said something more in the lines of,“Regulation of cluster bombs is a nice idea, but who’s going to regulate what should already be regulated by law in the first place?”
Who knows if the provision will pass and ban cluster bombs with over 1% failure rate, and I know Israel actually makes their own cluster munitions, which, allegedly have a lower percentage than the US bombs imported into their country… but man what a great note to end the week on– potentially no cluster bomb sales.
Well, this could also result in more federal “grants” handed out to improve weapons technology. Maybe it will raise the country’s attention, and cluster bombs will be finally decommissioned for good.
bobh,
It’s my understanding the IEDs used by the Mossad in the false flag operations against the Sunni,s, Shi-it;s and American soldiars are made in Israel.
http://judicial-inc.biz/125_dead_Mossad.htm
http://judicial-inc.biz/Mossad_bombs__sophisticated.htm
More reason to know who is responsible for most of the destruction in Iraq.
http://judicial-inc.biz/Israel_in_Iraq.htm
It seems the truth is hard to post on this site. The good stuff is not allowed to appear. We’ll try again……
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O125hGt9qt4&NR
Hey oldtimer … !
Thanks for the video, good stuff. He’s the former Chief U. N. Weapons Inspector that tried to tell both the Clinton and Bush administrations, as well as the CIA and the FBI that Sadam, (remember him?) didn’t have WMDs. Sadam wanted the world to believe he did, to allow him to keep face, but we/he destroyed them and never regained the ability to produce them. Times were tough in Iraq once the US stopped funding Sadam.
It proved to be a flawed strategy for Iraq, but just what the war machine needed to install an aggressive approach.
Ban (worldwide) all weapons that are designed for the sole purpose of killing people!
I can well imagine some poor Third World person , who might well have been at the receiving end of such ‘tender mercies’, courtesy America’s peerless military might , at the end of his or her tether , blurting out: ” You Americans are so full of yourselves. You make me want to vomit , every time I even think of you.”
The only reassuring thing is that now such sentiments extend to all Westerners - of being so very revoltingly ‘full of themselves’.
One thing to remember, if you bother to bother your congresscritter with your opinion. When the European Great Powers tried in 1856 with the Declaration of Paris, to multilaterally abolish privateering - commissioning private vessels by letters of Marque and Reprisal - to attack enemy shipping, the United States declined, saying that that was all very well for nations with large navies, but for a new power like the United States, it couldn’t afford not to have the right to commission privateers.
The Civil War happened in the meantime; the Union offered to accede to the Declaration of Paris, on account that the Confederates were also using privateers, and the Union wanted to put them in the wrong. Not surprisingly, the British Foreign Office, the depositors of the treaty, were not impressed, and said no - they’d already given the Confederate forces the status of a belligerent nation, and weren’t about to change their mind.
What can we conclude from that? When the US finds itself outmatched by forces routinely using cluster bomblets against the US military, the executive will high-tail it to the relevant treaty depository and with their tails between their legs, slink in and beg for the right to accede to the relevant treaty - just so they can claim some moral rightness in combat.
http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/YPDBooks/Lalor/llCy862.html