Cluster Bombas- are you all for Them?

[stroller]

...and guess who doesn't ban this terrorist weapon designed to kill civilians for many years after a war ends? USA, Israel, Russia, China.
46 of 49 nations OK ban on cluster bombs - Yahoo! News

[lom]

To make that statement a bit more accurate , USA Israel Russia and China did not send any delegates to the conference.

Three countries did not sign the treaty, Poland, Romania and a third which I have forgot. (all according to BBC World News today)

[ChiangMai noon]

^
Australia i think.

[stroller]

Poland, Romania and a third which I have forgot.

Japan.
Oops, Yahoo didn't mention treaties were being signed elsewhere, the report is a bit ambiguous.

What about landmines? According to Yahoo:

The U.S., China and Russia have refused to sign the land mine treaty and oppose the Norwegian initiative on cluster bombs.

[Butterfly]

the usual suspects and mass murderers

[man with no head]

The major arms dealers of the world don't send delegates to a conference to ban cluster bombs?

As many as 60 percent of the victims in Southeast Asia are children, the Cluster Munition Coalition campaign group said. The weapons have recently been used in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Lebanon, it said. The U.N. estimated that Israel dropped as many as 4 million bomblets in southern Lebanon during last year's war with Hezbollah, with as many 40 percent failing to explode on impact.

Mark Regev, spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry said: "During the recent conflict in Lebanon Israel used no munitions that were outlawed by international treaties or international law."

So much for any moral position Israel has on any subject. This position from people who survived the Holocaust? And people wonder why Israel is an international pariah.

[blackgang]

Yes sir fursak, but Israel never does anything except in retaliation, just like Hezbollah came across and killed and kidnapped some soldiers.

As many as 60 percent of the victims in Southeast Asia are children,

Surely the ones that are getting the children are land anti personal mines planted by other SE Asians in Cambodia.

sTroller said

...and guess who doesn't ban this terrorist weapon designed to kill civilians for many years after a war ends?

Which is bullshit because they are supposed to all explode.

[Itchy]

and guess who doesn't ban this terrorist weapon designed to kill civilians for many years after a war ends? USA, Israel, Russia, China.

Focking hell we're off again...

That a weapon may kill civilians years after a war ends is not proof that the weapon was designed for that purpose.

But please feel free to cling to the hyperbole, it is not a compansation for pish thinking, but it will have to do if that is all you have.

[ChiangMai noon]

Which is bullshit because they are supposed to all explode.

except 40% of them don't apparently.

[stroller]

except 40% of them don't apparently.

...which is a very high proportion, given the technical expertise involved in designing and making the thing.
It's done intentionally, so the area will not be accessible in the near future, while the war lasts - 'unpleasant' side-effect - the bombs don't disarm themselves after war.

Barbaric.

[man with no head]

Not only that but the bomblets happen to be very attractive to children.

[keda]

Bombs are gonna be around for a while yet, and assuming of course that they're designed to explode, it might be an idea to install boobytraps to render them harmless if they malfunction or for whatever reason fail to explode within a given time frame.

Either that or start demanding refunds with penalty from the manufacturers for selling defective goods...that'd soon put their house in order.

[bradthai]

dream on.

won't happen. with money to be made.
agree with the sentiment though

[sabang]

The usual suspects won't sign. I think they are the same group that would not agree to a ban on the manufacture of land mines either.
Heavan forbid, next thing you know these namby pamby left leaning Liberal faggots will be wanting a ban on things like white phosphorus and depleted uranium.
Shows how far we have really progressed in spite of our fancy trinkets- all of these weapons are considerably more savage than good old fashioned Burning at the Stake.
You've got to love the nuances of modern weaponry. Cluster bombs and advanced land mines blast out fine jagged non metallic particles, so they cannot be easily detected or removed- it is apparently a horrible way to die. White phosphorus continues to fry you after you jump in the water (primitive stuff that napalm). Depleted uranium, apart from the fact it enters your body at close to white hot temparatures, is truly the gift that keeps giving, as witnessed by the huge rise in cancer in southern Iraq.
The Spanish Inquisition has got nothing on this lot.

[keda]

At least some future generation has WWIV to look forward to; according to Einstein it'll be fought with bows and arrows.

[themook]

So, does this mean those 4 nations are guilty of a clusterfuck?

[Wallace]

urely the ones that are getting the children are land anti personal mines planted by other SE Asians in Cambodia.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Most of the deaths in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam war munitions are the result of unexploded ordnance dropped by the US bombers. A very high percentage didn't explode on impact and it will take another 20 to 50 years to clean up the mess.

Whilst, of course, the Khmer Rouge laid mines as they were retreating, most of these are being or have been cleaned up. The worst situation is still in Laos, where more than 50% of farmable land cannot be farmed due to unexploded bombs. Although most are made of metal, and can be quite easily detected, the biggest problem is that there are very few people who are taking responsibility for the clean up. In the meantime, children and farmers who come across unexploded bombs tend to try to sell them for scrap. It's at this time that most deaths and injuries occur (and there are a lot).

In Cambodia one of the biggest problems is that the unexploded mines are made of plastic (the triggers are metal springs, but so small that detectors don't find them). Again, the biggest problem is finding people willing to invest in the clean up operation. The USA don't come out of this well. One of the biggest charities involved is the one set up by Princess Diana. British army experts train up locals to seek out the mines. They do this by crawling very slowly on their hands and knees, several side by side, and by sticking bits of wood into the soil very carefully.

Volunteers, anyone?

[sabang]

Some more good stuff from George Monbiot, a Dissident but not a Loonie:-

Posted November 7, 2006 </STRONG>
At the talks beginning in Geneva today, the British government will fight attempts to ban cluster bombs.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 7th November 2006
The central mystery of the modern state is this. The necessary resources, both economic and political, will always be found for the purpose of terminating life. The project of preserving it will always struggle. When did you last see a soldier shaking a tin for a new rifle? Or a sponsored marathon raising money for nuclear weapons? But we must beg and cajole each other for funds whenever a hospital wants a new dialysis machine. If the money and determination expended on waging war with Iraq had been used to tackle climate change, our carbon emissions would already be in freefall. If as much money were spent on foreign aid as on fighter planes, no one would ever go hungry.
When the state was run by warrior kings, this was comprehensible: they owed their existence to overwhelming force. Now weapons budgets and foreign wars are, if anything, an electoral liability. But the pattern has never been broken.
In Geneva today, at the new review of the Conventional Weapons Treaty, the British government will be using the full force of its diplomacy to ensure that civilians continue to be killed, by blocking a ban on the use of cluster bombs. Sweden, supported by Austria, Mexico and New Zealand, has proposed a convention making their deployment illegal, like the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines. But the United Kingdom, working with the US, China and Russia, has spent the past month trying to prevent negotiations from being opened(1). Perhaps this is unsurprising. Most of the cluster bombs dropped over the past 40 years have been delivered by its two principal allies in the “war on terror”, the US and Israel. And the UK used hundreds of thousands of them during the two gulf wars.
Cluster munitions are tiny bombs – generally about the size of a drinks can – packed inside bigger bombs or artillery shells. They scatter over several hectares, and they are meant to be used to destroy tanks and planes and to wipe out anti-aircraft positions. There are two particular problems.
The first is that the bombs, being widely dispersed, cannot be accurately targeted. The second is that many of them don’t detonate when they hit the ground. Officially, cluster bombs have a failure rate of between 5 and 7%. In reality it’s much higher. Between 20 and 25% of the cluster munitions NATO forces dropped during the Kosovo conflict failed to go off when they landed(2). The failure rate of the bombs dropped by the US in Indo-China was roughly 30%(3). 40% of the cluster bombs Israel scattered over Lebanon did not detonate(4).
The unexploded bombs then sit and wait to be defused – leg by human leg. They are as devastating to civilian populations as landmines, or possibly worse, because far more of them have been dropped. Even 30 years or more after they land – as the people of Vietnam and Laos know – they can still be detonated by the slightest concussion.
A report published last week by Handicap International estimates that around 100,000 people have been killed or wounded by cluster bombs. 98% of the known casualties are civilians(5). Most of them are hit when farming or walking or clearing the rubble where their homes used to be. Many of the victims are children, partly because the bombs look like toys. Handicap’s report tells terrible and heartbreaking stories of children finding these munitions and playing catch with them, or using them as boules or marbles. Those who survive are often blinded, lose limbs and suffer horrible abdominal injuries.
Among the case histories in the report is that of a family in Kosovo who went to swim in a lake a few kilometres from their village. One of the children, a six-year-old called Adnan, found an odd metal can on the bank and showed it to his family. It exploded. His father and older brother were killed and he was gravely wounded. His sister later returned to the lake to collect the family’s belongings, stepped on another NATO cluster bomb and was killed.
The economic effects of cluster bombs can also be deadly. Like landmines, they put many agricultural areas out of bounds, because of the risk of detonating one while ploughing or harvesting. In some parts of Lebanon the fields have remained unharvested this year. Cluster bombs dropped onto the rubble of Lebanese towns have made reconstruction slow and dangerous.
The numbers deployed are mind-boggling. The US air force released 19 million over Cambodia, 70 million in Vietnam and 208 million in Laos(6). Over much shorter periods, the US and the UK dropped some 54 million cluster bombs on Iraq during the first Gulf war and around 2 million during the second Gulf war(7). Israel scattered 4 million cluster bombs over Lebanon during its latest invasion, almost all of them during the final 72 hours(8). It looked like revenge, or an attempt (like its deliberate bombing of the Jiyeh power plant, causing a massive oil spill which has wrecked the tourism industry) to cripple Lebanon’s economy. Since the invasion, an average of 2.5 Lebanese civilians a day have been blown up by cluster bombs.
The only other nation which has used cluster bombs extensively since the second world war is Russia, which dropped large quantities in Afghanistan, and which scatters them in Chechnya, sometimes deliberately bombing market places and other civilian targets. Apart from that they’ve been deployed in small numbers by Sudan, Libya, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Nigeria, Serb forces, Hezbollah and warring factions in Tajikistan. What good company we keep.
These weapons are arguably already illegal. Protocol 1 to the Geneva conventions prohibits attacks which “are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction” and “which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”(9) I think 98% would be a fair definition of “excessive”.
But their deployment will continue until there is a specific treaty banning them. It’s clear that the US and UK governments know their use is wrong. Handicap International reports that the Coalition Provisional Authority (the US administration set up to govern Iraq in 2003) “strongly discouraged casualty data collection, especially in relation to cluster submunitions.”(10) During a debate in the House of Lords last month, the foreign office minister Lord Triesman made a show of justifying their use so feeble that you can’t help suspecting he was batting for the other side. The only argument he could devise to justify their use was that, unlike landmines, cluster bombs are not intended to lie around undetonated(11). Even this is questionable. How else could you explain the fact that one of their official purposes is “area denial”?
Two days ago a letter sent to the defence minister by the international development secretary, Hillary Benn, was leaked to the press. He argued that “cluster munitions have a very serious humanitarian impact, pushing at the boundaries of international humanitarian law. It is difficult then to see how we can hold so prominent a position against land mines, yet somehow continue to advocate that use of cluster munitions is acceptable.”(12)
But he appears to be alone. The foreign office maintains that “existing humanitarian law is sufficient for the conduct of military operations, including the use of cluster munitions, and no treaty is required.”(13) The government seems unable to break its habit of killing.
www.monbiot.com

[barbaro]

a lot of civilians seem to get hit with these.

MrSq. started a thread about recent usage.

Me don't like them.

[stroller]

There is a related thread here: https://teakdoor.com/issues/11298-46-...n-cluster.html

Unless this evolves differently, I'll merge the threads later.

[mad_dog]

In the last 48 hours of the month long Israel\Lebanon war- after the a deal to stop the fighting had been agreed- the Israelis with the praise of Tony Blair- dropped thousands of tonnes of US manufactured, Vietnam era cluster bombs in population centers across the whole of Southern and Central Lebanon. The fighting had already ended in stalemate and the only purpose was to kill Lebanese civilians and to make their towns and cities unihabitable. The Zionists were very successful with their endevour becuase they purposely used old muntions which would not all explode on impact but litter the countryside for small children and other civiliians to pick up and be killed by (it is still happening today).

No one at the UN or in the US or British governments cares about this. Arabs, other Muslims and many other people realised that the only protection they can rely on is from honourable, legitimate resistance fighters like Sheikh Hassan Nassrallah


Mad_dog's man of the year.

[stroller]

Link?

[DrB0b]

Monbiot.com &#187; Asserting Our Right to Kill and Maim Civilians
US studies Israel's cluster bomb use in Lebanon | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

[Itchy]

Mad Dog, you really ought to change your avtar. Something that looks more like an angst 17 year old struggling with life before his frontal lobes develop moght be more fitting.

Those poor poor Lebanese.

Teach the bastards right for doing other people's fighting is my view.