Stoopid Stuff

Clusterfuckers

When they were originally deployed, cluster munitions solved a serious problem. It was impossible to use unguided iron bombs from fast - moving ground attack aircraft against small discrete targets like tanks, or to effectively deliver ordinance against larger area targets like airports or massed vehicles. Even the guided missiles of the period lacked the accuracy and power to be effective.

At that time, the primary anti-tank aircraft, the A-10, designed specifically to kill Soviet tanks crossing the Fulda Gap, was designed around a special 30mm cannon as it was well known that no aerial delivery weapon could be delivered with the necessary accuracy and power.

The solution was the Cluster Bomb. A large bomb would be dropped on target, and on it's way down it would split open and distribute hundreds or even thousands of "bomblets" over a given area. Tanks, vehicles, distributed buildings, massed troops, all of these were effectively destroyed by the Cluster Bomb.

Of course, the downside of the Cluster Munitions concept was that after all was said and done, you had thousands of unexploded bomblets just laying around, waiting for someone to disturb them enough to cause them to explode. And they might very well lay there for years, even decades. And who's likely to find these fascinating little lethal bits of half-buried technology in the middle of nowhere a few years after the end of hostilities? Pretty sure you can expect that to be children.

So now over one hundred nations of the world have gotten together in Dublin, Ireland and, at the end of an extended process, adopted a treaty banning the manufacture and use of cluster munitions. The kind of decision that spurs hope, that makes me think that just perhaps the human race might survive it's own bloody-minded cleverness.

Of course, the United States refused to sign the treaty. Along with the Bush/Cheney administration's ideological fellow travelers, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan and India. The stated reason was that Cluster Bombs have a proven "Military Utility". Duh. Gee, you think if they didn't have a military utility anyone would use them? That a ban would be required to curtail their use? That's probably the most stupid example of recursive logic I've ever seen.

The idea here is that maybe the military has to work a little harder to accomplish it's goals. Maybe it even takes some additional casualties. Because the current decision, that the US cannot forgo the use of Cluster Bombs because it puts American soldiers at risk, taken at the proven cost of hundreds or thousands of dead and maimed civilians, mostly children, is as ugly and disgusting a choice any nation could make. What kind of heartless military/police state would make this decision? The world becomes more sane, tries to find a way to edge away from humanity's most base tribal urges, and America becomes more militarized, more inhuman, more inhumane.

Nations ban capital punishment. They find ways to do law enforcement without torture. They make it an important goal that their citizens get health care. When natural disasters strike, they don't see it as nothing beyond a profit opportunity. And now nations begin to try to move to a post-warfare age. But the US won't go. Ban land mines? Nope. Cluster Bombs? Not a chance. We need to continue to build as many fiendishly clever machines of death as we can possibly invent, for there are more wars looming, more nations to invade, more regimes to be changed, more bombs to be dropped in the failed application of nineteenth century coercive diplomacy.

The more America lashes out, the more she isolates herself and declares that she will go her own way under force of arms and bellicose threats, the less sustainable a path we find ourselves on. When finally, economically, politically and morally bankrupt, the US finds herself prostrate at the feet of an angry world, there's going to be a cost required of her. And that cost only gets higher.

posted by mikey @ 4:09 PM