Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard No Cluster Munitions to Ukraine!

No Moral Standing!

In an escalation of the war, the deliberate and calculated decision by the Biden administration to send cluster munitions to Ukraine indicates the U.S. knows that the war on the front lines is becoming a failure for Ukraine.

Ukraine is running out of artillery ammunition at the front, in spite of the fact that Washington has sent Ukraine two million artillery shells, and these have not meant any meaningful advance in the Ukrainian summer offensive (previously called the spring offensive).

Biden hopes that these cluster munitions will turn the tide.

Zelensky’s regime has demanded these weapons for months, and now wants long range missiles to reach deep into Russia, as the war has stalled.

Representative Barbara Lee, who lives in Oakland, California, and supports the U.S. war, warned that deploying these weapons will harm the U.S.’s moral standing in the world. She was joined by 19 other representatives in congress who signed a letter opposing Biden’s act.

Washington’s moral standing in much of the world, especially in the Global South, is already in tatters, due to the killing and maiming of millions of civilians by the U.S. in its wars since the end of WW II, including most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. used cluster munitions.

But the administration is willing to pay the price of further losing its moral standing by deploying these cluster munitions once again.

2008 treaty ban on these weapons

Cluster munitions explode in the air, and scatter small bomblets to kill people over a wide area including any civilians there. Some of these bomblets do not explode, but present an ongoing danger long after the war — years and decades — to civilians, including children, who come across them, and handle them, setting them off.

This is why a treaty banning their use, the Convention on Cluster Munitions was signed in 2008. To date 123 countries have signed the treaty, including Germany, France, Britain and 15 other members of NATO. The U.S., Russia and Ukraine have not signed, and the U.S. actively opposed the treaty in 2008.     Representative Barbara Lee also said, “In fact, many of us have urged the administration to sign on to this Convention. And so I’m hoping that the administration would reconsider this because these are very dangerous bombs … and this is a line that I don’t believe we should cross.”

Canada, Britain, Germany and Austria have said they will abide by the ban, and Spain said the cluster munitions should not be used by Ukraine under any circumstances.

The Convention just doesn’t prohibit the use, production, stockpiling and transferring the munitions, it has a very strong provision of prohibiting assistance with those banned activities by others. We can hope the NATO countries that have signed the treaty will live up to this provision. Or will they knuckle under to the U.S.?

The recently NATO summit, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, July 11-12 did not mention the cluster munitions, an indication differences remain on this issue. Otherwise Biden would be crowing that NATO supports his decision.

Cambodia and Laos are still cluttered with unexploded cluster bombs the United States dropped on them during the Vietnam War, have also raised alarm. The Laotian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Monday it opposed Biden’s move, “as the world’s largest victim of cluster munitions.” And the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said, “It would be the greatest danger for Ukrainians for many years or up to a hundred years if cluster bombs are used in Russian-occupied areas in the territory of Ukraine.”

Hun leaves out the Russian civilians in towns and cities that are intermingled with Russian troops in the Russian occupied Donbas and southern regions, who will be killed or maimed in the initial bombardment and then by the unexploded bomblets. If Ukraine doesn’t win, and Russia holds on to the present territories it occupies, these civilians will continue to be threatened.

The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that in Laos alone, 11,000 people were killed or maimed during and since the war ended 48 years ago, and seven to 27 million unexposed bomblets remain today.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, plus 36 other human rights organizations, have also condemned the U.S. move.

Biden has sought to pretty up the decision, and among other ridiculous claims says the bomblets won’t kill many civilians, since the Pentagon says less than three percent of the bomblets will remain unexploded when they hit the ground.

But the Pentagon gives no evidence for this claim. Many authorities, including the Pentagon in previously published reports, say the figure is 14 percent. It is higher when the ground is muddy.

Mary Wareham, the advocacy director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch, said on Democracy Now, “This is an appalling decision by the Biden administration to transfer potentially hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds containing potentially millions of unreliable submunitions that have a higher dud rate than the Pentagon has disclosed….”

That means they could release millions of bomblets, like in Iraq.

“Human Rights Watch objected to this transfer due to the likelihood of civilian harm, and we do not say that lightly, after issuing 10 reports detailing the extensive use of cluster munitions rockets and missiles by Russian forces since the very first day of the conflict,” Wareham said.

“Ukrainian forces have also used cluster munitions, in fewer numbers, but what our report released last week shows that they had used cluster munition bomblets, firing them into a city in the east called Ilium over a period of nearly six months during 2022 when it was under Russian occupation.

“And the stories are pretty sad and horrific, [in one strike] people were killed in their homes, a woman cooking outside her garden was killed together with her young daughter and her mother, and neighbors outside their apartment building…. These are all casualties from the time of use [the initial release of the bomblets], which is one reason why cluster munitions are prohibited.”

The other reason, she said, was the long-term casualties due to the unexploded bomblets.     Referring to the cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine, she said that “we do not want to see more” cluster munitions from Biden.

Biden’s message: “Do as we say, not as we do”.   That’s what Norman Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said in the same interview on Democracy Now.

Solomon also said, “Last year the White House said that the use of cluster munitions [by Russia] deserved to be in the category of a war crime. Now they’re saying, ‘Just fine. No Problem.’ And this is symptomatic of a mentality, what Dr. King called the ‘madness of militarism’, that blends with a kind of doublethink, as George Orwell called it. This is a way of saying that ‘We want to run the world. We make the rules. We break the rules’.

“It’s also a way of saying that when civilians are killed and it’s done by an enemy state, that’s terrible. We condemn it, because we have the high moral ground. But when we are accessories to the crime, when we do it, as the U.S. did in the invasion of Iraq, using 1.8 to 2 million bomblets in the first few weeks of the invasion, when we do it, it’s A-OK….

“This is a willingness to engage the world and say, ‘We get to define what lives matter and what lives don’t.’ This is the message coming from the Biden administration, especially in the last few days, that we are supporting the human rights of civilians in Ukraine and elsewhere, except when they don’t matter, because we have a tactical, strategic reason otherwise.

“Part of the messaging is, ‘Oh, if the Ukrainian government kills Ukrainian civilians, that’s OK, because that’s for their own good’….

“That is the same logic that the Biden White House is using to try to justify this horrific decision …. We’ve been hearing for weeks … that Ukraine is running out of weapons, and we have all these cluster munitions in the United States. Why put them to waste? We should send them to Ukraine….

“The reason given is that Ukraine might lose the war. If the so-called conventional war isn’t going so well, we need to use this weapon and it looks like it’s back is up against the wall, we need to use this weapon that before we said was absolutely abhorrent.”

An article in the British Guardian has the headline, “End Justifies the Means for Biden in Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine — decision to approve cluster munitions, lambasted by rights groups, exposes feeling in Washington that war is reaching crunch time”.

The New York Times condemns Biden’s decisionA major editorial in the New York Times by the whole editorial board is titled, “The Flawed Moral Logic of Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine”.

Reviewing the administration’s stated reasons for sending these weapons, the editorial says, “This is a flawed and troubling logic. In the face of the widespread global condemnation of cluster munitions and the danger they pose to civilians long after the fighting is over, this is not a weapon that a nation with the power and influence of the United States should be sending….

“This danger prompted the adoption of a Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2008. The United Nations secretary general at the time, Ban Ki-moon, spoke of ‘not only the world’s collective revulsion at these abhorrent weapons but also the power of collaboration among governments, civil society and the United Nations to change attitudes and policies on a threat faced by all humankind.’ As of today 123 nations — including many of America’s allies — have agreed never to use, transfer, produce or stockpile cluster munitions.

“But not Russia or Ukraine or the United States, which used cluster munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the United States actively opposed the treaty. This editorial board argued at the time: ‘As the main holdout, the United States gives cover to countries like Russia and China, which also rejected the ban. The treaty is weaker for it: together these three nations have more than a billion cluster munitions stockpiled, far more than the number of weapons expected to be destroyed [by the countries which did sign it].’ ’’

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken stated that the “aim of the United States in the war in Ukraine is to weaken Russia” to the point it would no longer be a power in the world.

To that end, since the conflict began, the U.S. has steadily increased its participation in the war. “Line after line has been crossed”, the Times editorial says, “with Washington and its allies agreeing to provide sophisticated weapons like the Patriot air defense system, the HIMARS long-range rocket launcher, the Abrams tank and soon the F-16 jet fighter.

“There is legitimate debate about whether this amounts to the sort of mission creep that occurred in conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Sending cluster munitions to Ukraine amounts to a clear escalation of a conflict that has already become far too brutal and destructive.”

The editorial concluded, “The rain of bomblets may give Ukraine a military advantage in the short term, but it would not be decisive, and it would not outweigh the damage in suffering to civilians in Ukraine, now and most likely for generations.”

Washington’s war is clarified

Writing in Counterpunch about this latest escalation of the war, Ron Jacobs says, “When certain lines are crossed, the nature of things becomes clearer. Providing cluster bombs to the Ukrainian military is such a rubicon.

The pretense that the NATO sponsored forces have some kind of moral high ground in their conflict with Moscow is fading quickly. Even retired Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy together with current senator Jeff Berkley acknowledged as much in a recent opinion piece in the newspaper of the warfare state, the Washington Post (7/8/2023).

“Neither of these men oppose the U.S. involvement in the conflict, but providing a bomb banned by most governments in the world is too much for these humanitarian warmongers….

“As if the introduction of cluster bombs wasn’t bad enough, Zelensky was quoted in the Wall Street Journal earlier in the week as demanding long range missies from Washington.

“His reasoning goes like this: ‘Without long range weapons, it is difficult not only fulfill an offensive mission, but also to conduct a defensive operation,’ Zelensky said after talks with Czech officials in Prague. ‘This means that you are defending your country and cannot reach the appropriate distance to destroy your enemy. That is, the enemy has a distance advantage.’

“In other words, the defense of the Ukrainian nation from Russian invaders now requires attacks deep into Russia. Beyond the obvious sophistry of Kyiv’s argument for the missiles, their delivery would make it even clearer that that war is about Washington’s rivalry with Moscow much more than it means defending Ukraine’s borders no matter where one places them.

“I cannot help but wonder what those liberals, progressives and leftists who have supported Ukraine’s military since the Russian 2022 invasion are now thinking. As this war drags on I wonder if those who consider Ukraine’s nationalist war to be one of national liberation and therefore deserve to get any kind of weapons are okay with this addition [cluster munitions] to Ukraine’s arsenal. I truly hope this latest escalation is causing them to reconsider their position.”