Cluster bombs away--for good?
Landmines and cluster bombs came under intense scrutiny during one of today's sessions at the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington. The two forms of munitions have a lot in common: they're deadly, they're completely indiscriminate, their mortal threat will persist for decades after their deployment, and just now they are mostly a threat to farm animals and small children. A final similarity? The Bush administration has firmly positioned itself in opposition to attempts to ban both weapons.
The United States stood alone among all industrialized, advanced powers, and stood with bedfellows as strange as Burma and China, in its resistance to the worldwide ban on landmines. Now as a growing global movement organizes in a parallel "threat" to the future deployment of cluster bombs, the U.S. again is standing, virtually alone, in the way of a world-wide ban.
As it lobbies to begin production of new "improved" landmines after a ten year hiatus on the production of such anti-personnel weapons (APLs), the Bush administration supports the continued use of cluster bombs even as just war types argue that the weapons are just about never morally appropriate for deployment in combat. The Israeli military came under intense criticism for its decision to drop cluster bombs over Hezbollah targets in civilian areas during its 2006 Lebanon incursion.
In use, a cluster bomb opens after it has been deployed releasing hundreds of airborne bomblets which flutter or drift to the ground before detonating, releasing a deadly cloud of shrapnel, napalm or molten metal which can cover three football fields. Indiscriminately deadly in wartime, the cluster bomb also suffers a high dud rate of 5 to 15 percent. That means that more than 1 million unexploded bomblets are now scattered around Southern Lebanon where they are often discovered by curious children or unwary farmers. More than 300 casualties from unexploded cluster bomblets have already been recorded there. Clean up efforts could persist for decades.
Laos, where the U.S. deployed 260 million cluster bomblets in 580,000 bombing missions during its undeclared war there between 1964 and 1973, still endures hundreds of deaths and casualties each year from cluster bombs. As many as 12,000 civilians, 40 percent of them children, have been killed in Laos since the end of the Vietnam War, and the dying will continue until all the bomblets have detonated or been demined.
As one participant at the cluster bomb conference observed: "I think we can call cluster bombs terrorism, let's call it what it is."
With I billion bomblets in out stockpile, the U.S. is largest producer, user, and exporter of these weapons in the world. Legislation currently pending before Congress, the Cluster Munition Civilian Protection Act, would require that no cluster bombs could be deployed in combat without reducing the weapons dud rate to 1 percent. That would essentially prohibit the use of the U.S.'s entire current stockpile.
The legislation also prohibits the use of U.S.-made cluster munitions in civilian-populated areas. It states that cluster munitions can only be used against "clearly defined military targets and will not be used where civilians are known to be present or in areas normally inhabited by civilians." This provision applies equally to use by U.S. armed forces and by any other government that receives U.S.-made cluster munitions, which must sign an agreement to this effect.
The bill finally requires that if cluster munitions are used, the president must submit to Congress within 30 days a plan for cleaning up unexploded submunition duds within 30 days of their deployment. Naturally the Pentagon is using the war on terror to justify its need for this particular weapon.
Not everyone agrees that that argument justifies the continued use of a weapon that so callously inflicts such a persitent threat to noncombatants. "The real threat to the military is that civil society is involved in these discussions," says Lora Lumpe of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines. "They don't want people, they don't want you, they don't want me, to say that the military can't do just anything they want to do in our name. They didn't want us involved with chemical weapons; they didn't want us involved with landmines, and now they don't want us involved with cluster bombs."
Cluster bomb banners hope to sign a global treaty on the anniversary of the Landmine Ban Treaty (still unratified by the U.S.) on December 3, 2008 in Oslo. More than 100 nations are on board already, and there is a chance that a new presidential election in the U.S. will mean the next administration will be willing to one day join them.
Labels: just war
posted by Kevin Clarke @ 5:08 PM
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4 Comments:
I realize I now truly understand how Michelle Obama could say "for the first time in my adult life, I am proud to be an American". (I hope I got that quote right, if not figure I paraphrased her statement). Hope seems gone. Perhaps her husband if elected, really will get it back for us. I sure HOPE so. For how long can we stand alone and above the rest of humanity? Till they are all so sick of us they gather together to destroy us? We, as a "christian nation" certainly do not act like one most of the time.
freebird, more people have been killed by abortion than by these bombs.
That may be anonymous. It doesn't make it less true that cluster bombs and building our arsenal of nukes ever larger is any less of a terrible thing. The difference here is that most americans know abortion happens and with differing opinions about when and if it's okay, a debate is going on. With all our weapons, much of the doings are secret and/or not well publicized for public debate.
Question: Is there any circumstance under which the use of nuclear weapons, or cluster bombs, is moral?
Answer: Yes, though such circumstances are rare.
Question: Should one ever make a promise to not do something which is, under most circumstances, immoral, but which is, under rare but possible circumstances, more moral than any alternative?
Answer: Dishonesty is evil, and to be avoided, but not at the cost of doing an even greater evil. If making the dishonest promise is a lesser evil than not making it, then the dishonest promise may be the correct choice.
Question: How does the above apply to the proposed promise not to use nuclear weapons and cluster munitions?
Answer: Since there are circumstances under which the use of nuclear weapons and/or cluster munitions is more moral than the alternative, the promise to not use them is either (a.) dishonest, or (b.) a decision to go against one's conscience in advance. Either is a sin, in the present. Should a future set of events morally require nukes/cluster bombs, a decision to forgo using them on the basis of the past promise would be a second sin. (b.) Is therefore a compounded evil and can be disregarded as an option for the morally-concerned person. What about (a.)?
There is only one way that the dishonesty of (a.) could be morally superior to the honesty of saying, as we do now, "We have these weapons, we reserve the right to use them, but we will only use them when the situation warrants it and there is no morally superior alternative."
That "one way" is: If dishonestly joining such a treaty would lead to a reduction of evils in other spheres sufficiently large as to outweigh the dishonesty, then (a.) could be a good justification for joining one of these treaties, however dishonest it may be.
Which leads us to the question: Does joining a "we won't use weapon X even if the circumstances call for it" treaty ACTUALLY lead to great benefits?
Answer: No. In fact it leads to harms, one of which is increasing the likelihood of these weapons being used.
Only states which are peaceable anyway are likely to both sign such a treaty, and then actually live up to the obligations of compliance. The U.S., or the U.K., for example. If either signed, it would also take the step of actually destroying their stockpiles of such weapons in pursuit of treaty compliance.
The U.S. and most of the rest of Christendom fall into this category; nations outside Christendom do not, with the sole exception of Japan, whose post-WWII pacifist culture makes it more likely to be an honest signatory than, say, China.
Within historic Christendom there are also nations which would be non-signatories or dishonest signatories. These are the nations where once democratic or Christian governments have been superseded by dictatorial regimes; e.g. Venezuela.
Those regimes, together with the never-Christian nations like Iran, are currently deterred from acquiring large nuclear, chem/bio, or other stockpiles by the knowledge that they cannot hope to achieve parity with states like the U.S.; consequently, no matter what weapons they might secretly obtain, they dare not use them.
They dare not, because the peaceful nations of Christendom, while only rarely initiators of aggression, are famously aggressive against those who "disturb the peace" (e.g. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait prompting the U.S. defeat and eventual overthrow of Iraq's dictator). In the event that, say, Iran nukes Israel, the U.S. will obliterate every bearded Mullah in Persia. So, they reason, why then have nukes you can't use?
This strategic calculus plays out time and again and is the reason why international trade is a stable reliable part of the world's economic infrastructure, lifting millions to better economic circumstances than their parents.
But the calculus changes when the free world's nukes or other weaponry are so curtailed as to make a relatively impressive level of force attainable to a third-world power via a secret program. Under those circumstances, proliferation is rampant.
(This is demonstrated by the nascent nuclear programs in Saudi Arabia and Egypt; awareness of Iran's success and the free world's feckless reaction to it means it is only prudent for their neighbors to do likewise.)
THE CONCLUSION:
It is immoral (because dishonesty and willful unwisdom are offenses against the virtues of justice and prudence) to join some treaty abolishing cluster munitions or nuclear arms.
These things would be immediately abolished in an unfallen world, of course. But that is not the world we live in. Just as we need such necessary evils as laws, governments, courts, and even clothes in such a world, we also need weapons, of various kinds. And while they should only be used in the gravest extreme, it is a fact that, in such a world, the gravest extreme happens.
To reject the use of them in advance is immoral in so far as it is dishonest, it lacks the courage to admit that their use is sometimes necessary, and it knowingly accelerates the development of such systems by less-responsible and peaceable state actors. This in turn magnifies the likelihood of their use, defeating the original intent of the treaty proponents.
This knowledge is distasteful, but being an adult means facing unpleasant facts when needed. The unpleasant fact is: If the free world does not conspicuously bristle with sometimes nasty-looking weaponry, streets are likely to flow with the blood of the innocent.
Deal with it.
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