It’s Always a ‘Difficult Decision,’ They Tell Us
“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”
Stanley Kunitz observed: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”
In the current murderous time, amid the dim media swirl, acuity arrived for some with the news that President Joe Biden had approved sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. For entrenched elites in Washington, using taxpayer money to shred the bodies of children and other civilians isn’t a big deal when there’s serious geopolitical work to be done.
The same White House that correctly put cluster munitions in the category of a war crime when Russia began using them in Ukraine last year is now saying they’re just fine — when the U.S. supplies them to an ally.
Top administration officials have been quick to emphasize the toughness of the choice. “It was a very difficult decision on my part,” Biden said.
That reminds me of the infamous 60 Minutes interview with Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in May of 1996. CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl brought up impacts of the U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq, saying “we have heard that a half a million children have died,” and then asked: “Is the price worth it?”
Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
Eight months later, acting on the nomination of Albright to be secretary of state, the Senate confirmed her. The vote was 99-0. Maybe it would not have been unanimous if any of the senators’ children had died while she declared their deaths to be “worth it.”
Like Albright’s “very hard choice,” Biden’s “very difficult decision” was based on convenient abstractions and, ultimately, a willingness to sacrifice the lives of countless others, while claiming pristine virtue. Defending the president’s cluster-munitions decision, no one on the Biden team need worry that one of their own children might pick up a U.S.-supplied “bomblet” someday, perhaps mistaking it for a toy, only to be instantly assaulted with shrapnel.
The Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill who’ve been trying for the last week to justify shipping cluster weapons to Ukraine are evading a basic truth that BBC correspondent John Simpson reported long ago, in May 1999, while U.S.-led NATO forces were dropping cluster bombs onto the streets of Nis, Serbia’s third-largest city: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”
At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.”
Today, with political fashion treating “diplomacy” as a dirty word, the resolute militarism of the U.S. government is bipartisan. While we should emphatically condemn Russia’s vicious war on Ukraine, we should be under no illusions about the moral character of U.S. foreign policy.
For example: During three presidencies, beginning with Barack Obama, the U.S. government has aided and abetted the Saudi-led war on Yemen, where the death toll since 2015 is now estimated at close to 400,000. Biden’s high-profile fist bump with Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman a year ago tells us a lot about the extent of the U.S. commitment to basic human decency in foreign affairs.
The murderous time that we live in now, organized as war, is reflexively blamed only on the barbarism of others. But President Biden’s decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine is shocking to many Americans because it has undermined illusions with no more actual solidity than sand castles before the tide of truth comes in.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
Norman Solomon
Cluster Munitions for Ukraine
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
News that the Biden administration is sending cluster munitions to Ukraine highlights the dangerous escalatory nature of wars. These are special bombs and artillery shells with hundreds of “bomblets” that disperse to kill or maim as many people as possible. They persist in the environment; children have been known to pick them up and to be killed or grievously wounded as a result.
The apparent rationale behind this decision is that cluster munitions will help Ukraine in its counteroffensive against Russia. While these munitions will certainly increase the body count, probably on both sides, they are unlikely to be militarily decisive.
There are other issues as well, notes Daniel Larison at Eunomia:
The decision also opens the U.S. up to obvious charges of hypocrisy. US officials have condemned the Russian use of these weapons and said that they have no place on the battlefield, but now the administration is saying that they do have a place. Providing cluster munitions to Ukraine makes a mockery of the administration’s earlier statements and creates more political problems for its effort to rally support for Ukraine. Many states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are parties to the treaty banning the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, and now they will have one more reason to dismiss US appeals to defending the “rules-based order” as so much hot air. The decision will probably embarrass and antagonize some of our allies in Europe, as most members of NATO are also parties to the treaty.
It’s rather amazing to think about the incredible variety of weaponry being sent to Ukraine in the name of “victory.” At first, the Biden administration spoke only of providing defensive weaponry. Biden himself declared that sending main battle tanks, jet fighters, and the like was tantamount to provoking World War III. More than a year later, the US has committed to sending Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets, and offensive weapons of considerable potency like depleted uranium shells and now cluster munitions. And always with the same justification: the new weapons will help break the stalemate and lead to total victory for Ukraine.
This is nothing new, of course, in military history. Think of World War I. Poison gas was introduced in 1915 in an attempt to break the stalemate of trench warfare. It didn’t. But it did stimulate the production of all sorts of dangerous chemical munitions and agents such as chlorine gas, phosgene, and mustard. Tanks were first introduced in 1916. Stalemate persisted. Flamethrowers were introduced. Other ideas to break the stalemate included massive artillery barrages along with “creeping” barrages timed to the advancing troops.
But there was no wonder weapon that broke the stalemate of World War I. After four years of sustained warfare, the German military finally started to falter in the summer of 1918. The Spanish Flu, the contagion of communism from Russia, and an effective allied blockade also served to weaken German resolve. The guns finally fell silent on November 11, 1918, a calm that wasn’t produced by magical weapons.
I wonder which weapon will next be hailed as crucial to Ukrainian victory? Who knows, maybe even tactical nukes might be on the minds of a few of the madmen advising Biden.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views.
Stop Biden From Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine
President Biden may have crossed a new red line for the Democratic Party when he announced he would send banned cluster munitions to shore up Ukraine’s slow counter-offensive against Russian troops.
On Friday, 19 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA-7), signed a letter to Biden warning that his decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine “severely undermines our moral leadership.”
This time it’s not just left-leaning activists in CODEPINK and the Peace in Ukraine Coalition who recoil in horror at Biden’s escalation in Ukraine, but congressional Democrats who previously stood by their President. These are the same Democrats who voted to approve over $100 billion in Ukraine spending, an estimated half for weapons and military assistance for which there is no accountability.
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN-4), ranking member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told Politico: “The decision by the Biden administration to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine is unnecessary and a terrible mistake…The legacy of cluster bombs is misery, death and expensive cleanup generations after their use.”
On Sunday other prominent Democrats took to the airwaves, with Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a former Vice Presidential candidate, telling Fox News he had “real qualms” about the President’s decision, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA-13), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and U.S. Senate candidate, telling CNN, “Cluster bombs should never be used. That’s crossing a line.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and former Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who visited Vietnam following the U.S. withdrawal, joined the chorus with a Washington Post OpEd explaining how they had witnessed firsthand the “devastating and long-lasting effects these weapons have had on civilians.”
Even before the official White House cluster bomb announcement, House Democrats Sara Jacobs (D-San Diego) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minneapolis) introduced an amendment to the 2024 military budget to ban the issuance of export licenses for cluster munitions.
Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, was one of the first to co-sponsor the bill. McGovern told the New York Times that cluster munitions, “disperse hundreds of bomblets, which can travel far beyond military targets and injure, maim and kill civilians — often long after a conflict is over.”
The amendment, however, will need overwhelming bipartisan support to pass – as well as a President who will obey the law should the ayes have it.
In greenlighting cluster munitions, Biden thumbed his nose at 18 NATO partners that joined with over 100 other state parties to sign the 2008 UN Convention on Cluster Munitions. As Biden headed to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the NATO summit this week, Newsweek reported representatives of the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Spain were not on board for cluster bombs.
Biden also chooses to bypass current U.S. law that restricts the use of cluster munitions to only those with a failure to detonate rate of less than one percent. In its last publicly available estimate, the Pentagon estimated a “dud rate” of 6%, meaning that at least four of the 72 submunitions from each shell failed to explode when unleashed.
With a bow to hawkish Republicans, such as Alabama’s Tom Cotton on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Biden invokes the exception to the rule embedded in the statute against the use of cluster munitions. This exception allows for shipment of cluster munitions in the interest of vital national security.
Who controls eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Russian army or the Ukrainian army, is hardly a US national security interest on par with mitigating the threat of climate catastrophe or providing clean water to those with lead in their pipes or investing in housing for the unsheltered living under freeway overpasses.
Nonetheless, the same President Biden who a year ago warned of the risk of nuclear Armageddon, has reversed himself yet again to up the ante. Biden first said no, then flip flopped on a host of weapons: Stinger missiles, HIMARS rocket launchers, advanced missile defense systems, M1 Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets. Each one of these has been a kind of Russian roulette, testing Putin’s “red lines.”
With Biden’s latest decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, anti-nuclear activists wonder if the President – whose Nuclear Posture Review approves of “first use” – might also cross the nuclear red line, even though it’s Putin who has issued veiled nuclear threats – and Biden and Putin in June of 2021 signed a statement that said, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
The impetus for the 2008 landmark UN Convention on Cluster Munitions came precisely from the indiscriminate U.S. use of these weapons in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. In Laos, the U.S. military blanketed the country with almost 300 million bomblets, many that failed to immediately detonate, only to later – after the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia – maim adults and children who accidentally stepped on the cluster bombs or picked up the shiny balls thinking they were toys.
Both Ukraine and Russia have already used cluster bombs in Ukraine, a development roundly condemned by human rights groups documenting the resulting deaths and serious injuries of civilians. The hundreds of thousands of rounds that Biden is planning to send would significantly increase the use of these banned weapons.
Biden’s appalling decision to send cluster bombs can be seen as a sign of desperation in the face of Ukraine’s failing counteroffensive in southern and eastern Ukraine. Biden told CNN it was a “difficult decision” but Ukraine is “running out of ammunition.” The truth is that adding this new indiscriminate weapon will not miraculously break the stalemate to achieve “military victory” but guarantee the unexploded bombs eventually kill and wound Ukrainian civilians for years to come while encouraging other countries to also violate the cluster munitions ban.
In the next week or so, the House may consider Jacobs and Omar’s NDAA amendment as Congress tackles a $920 billion military budget. Now is a critical time for constituents to click on CODEPINK’s action alert requesting House representatives co-sponsor the amendment to ban the export license for cluster munitions. While skeptics may question whether Biden would respect any law limiting his power to wage war, only loud and vigorous opposition can pull the political levers that control our destiny.
Rather than escalating an arms race to risk nuclear war, the Biden administration should promote a ceasefire and negotiations without preconditions. Instead of breaking international law, the U.S. should break the military stalemate by joining the global call for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Peace in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict.
Marcy Winograd serves as the Co-Chair of the Peace in Ukraine Coalition and Coordinator of CODEPINK Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment