But there’s still hope for the global movement to ban these indiscriminate killers.
Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine Is Morally Bankrupt
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Cluster Bombs
It’s Time for the U.S. to Ban Cluster Munitions
With the horror of these weapons is on full display in the Russia-Ukraine war, the U.S. needs to sign the global ban.
If the UN Won’t Stop Saudi Arabia’s War in Yemen, the U.S. Should
It’s time to implement a full ban on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Conn Hallinan’s 2012 “Are You Serious?” Awards
Each year Conn Hallinan’s blog Dispatches From the Edge awards news stories and newsmakers that fall under the category of “Are you serious?” Here are 2012’s winners. Conn Hallinan at the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.
A Bomb-Free Future for Laos
Almost 40 years have passed since the end of the secret U.S. bombing campaign over Laos, and U.S.-Lao relations have made impressive strides. On her trip to Laos, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should reaffirm America’s commitment to cleaning up the deadly mess it left behind.
The Curse of Cluster Bombs
Laos, a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia known as “the most bombed country on earth,” fittingly hosted an international disarmament conference in November 2010. This was a follow-up to an Oslo conference in 2008 when 94 nations signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international treaty to ban all cluster weapons following in the footsteps of the global campaign to ban landmines which came into force in 1999.
A Cluster of Fallacies
Well over half the world’s governments agreed last week to “consign cluster munitions to the trash bin of history,” in the words of the Cluster Munition Coalition, the civil society collective that delivered the treaty. Meeting in Dublin, Ireland, representatives of 110 governments completed negotiations on a new international treaty that bans the production, use, and export of all existing cluster munitions and commits them to destroy their stockpiles within eight years.
America AWOL on Cluster Bombs
More than 100 governments, including all major NATO allies, met on May 19 to begin two weeks of negotiations in Dublin, Ireland to finalize a global treaty banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. The U.S. government will not be there, and is exerting pressure on allies to weaken the treaty. Washington claims that future joint military operations will be undermined if allied governments prohibit the use of these weapons.
A Cluster Bomb Treaty: Again, It’s the U.S. v. the World
On March 6, 2007, the U.S. Department of State released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2006. This annual report to Congress details the human rights practices of foreign governments, from restrictions on free press in Iran, to extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, to spiraling violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. The Country Reports do not, however, “purport to assess any human rights implications of actions by the United States Government or its representatives.” If they did, the reports would expose the grave consequences of U.S. policies in a world where the use and sale of inaccurate and unreliable weapons tends to trump humanitarian concerns.
The Vishnu Strategy
“The Supreme Lord said: I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy.” According to the great Hindu text Bhagavad-Gita, Vishnu delivered that speech to Prince Arjuna before a great battle almost eight millennia ago. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer paraphrased it in 1945 to describe the explosion of the atomic bomb. The latest channeling of the Hindu god can be found in an Israeli commander’s evaluation of last summer’s war with Lebanon: “What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.”