Cluster Bomblets Become Another Self-inflicted Injury

The clock is ticking: 231 days, 13 hours, and 53 minutes as of the moment I post these reflections. That's the precise time that advocates worldwide for banning weapons that gratuitously kill children in war are counting down till the final death rattle of the Bush administration at noon on January 20, 2009. What has them lighting candles in anticipation of the hearse was the knee-jerk rejection by the President's men of yet another international effort to limit the barbarity of modern war -- the treaty conference hosted by the government of Ireland last week at which 111 countries negotiated and endorsed a new treaty to prohibit cluster munitions.

And Washington's conservatives, in the late autumn of their long reign, have shown once again their incapacity to provide global leadership. All but alone in the NATO alliance, the United States sharply opposed the emerging treaty, exasperating America's allies and appalling human rights advocates around the world.

Cluster munitions, of course, are the shells and bombs that spray over a wide radius dozens or even hundreds of smaller bomblets packed inside them, killing and injuring anyone within range when they detonate--which is often long after the actual shelling or bombing occurs. Huamnitarian campaigners have long decried the high casualty rates among civilians, and especially children at play, long after the battle has ended.

As a wartime president, George Bush has been resolute in ensuring that every lethal weapon option is available to the world's military forces. His military planners insist that cluster munitions must remain an integral part of U.S. power projection capability. At his instruction, American diplomats battled the limp-wristed Europeans and global do-gooders in Dublin.

"Cluster munitions have demontrated military utility," his spokesman at the State Department insisted after the treaty vote. The same could be said of poison gas--and in fact the former Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein made precisely that point. But leaders with a larger moral vision led the world to ban chemical weapons--with the elder George Bush out front in the negotiations for a toughly verified regime to abolish them.  And like poison gas, the crystallizing global proscription of cluster bombs will subject out-lier governments that use them to the charge of war crimes.

The Bush-Cheney administration has reflexively applied to the arsenals of nations its unflagging fealty to National Rifle Association principles for individuals: No category of weaponry should be restricted. His administration insists we should retain the right to bear landmines, which most countries banned in the Ottawa landmine convention of 1997. It blocked global negotiations to control the flow of light weapons to conflict zones. It derailed a monitoring system against biological weapons. It torpedoed talks to ban space weapons. And it famously overturned a long-legislated ban on anti-ballistic missiles.

To be the world's anti-leader has become an ever lonelier battle. Even America's reliably dependent ally, Great Britain, deserted Mr. Bush and subscribed to the cluster treaty--another sign, on top of its new campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, that Gordon Brown's new Labour government has learned from the Iraq invasion not to follow Bush bromides blindly.

To compensate for Britain's defection, Mr. Bush finds himself in league with Russia and China in opposing the cluster bomb ban. This is itself a tantalizing hint of the speciousness of the supposed democratic solidarity that would bind the "League of Democracies" espoused by Washington neoconservatives.

But this may be yet another of Mr. Bush's lines in the sand that his successor will erase. Vermont's senator Patrick Leahy showed up at the Dublin treaty conference to assure the delegates that "among the first tasks of our next president will be to reintroduce America to the world." Leahy's choice for president, of course, is Barack Obama--who, alone among the extant presidential candidates, voted two years ago in support of a cluster ban.

"We need to reject the ‘us versus them’ unilateralist approach that has so diminished our image and our leadership," Leahy told the delegates.

And the world, counting the minutes and the hours, can't wait for the day.

Comments

[Jim Sutterlin]

This article well expresses the shame that I feel, as surely many other Americans do, over the refusal of our government to agree to the treaty banning the use of cluster bombs. The use of these weapons constitutes in my opinion, a crime against humanity since they inlict hideous suffering largely on non-combatants. Moreover, it has never been shown that they offer any advantage on the battlefield. It is to be hoped, and worked for, that one of the first actions of the next Administration will be to reverse this self-destructive policy of the Bush Administration

[Dmitri]

This article is very eloquently and convincingly written, and brings sad thoughts to mind. The US has sided with other large producers of cluster bombs and, together with Russia, China, Israel, Turkey, India and Pakistan, has undermined the significance of the treaty by their absence. Some of these countries may have more reasons than others to justify their position by heightened concern for their security against indiscriminate use of conventional force by neighbors. But the US is surely not one of those. It's good news that the UK supported the treaty, at the last moment - in spite of the apparent grumbling from its military. In Russia, the Ministry of Defense went on record opposing the treaty, with no comment whatsoever from diplomats or government officials - a silence that would be unthinkable in other times and is quite telling in itself.