Cluster Bombing International Law

Israelizing American Military Tactics, Technology

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

Within the past two weeks, the Boston Globe has run both an op-ed and also an editorial on cluster bombs.

 

In the op-ed entitled US subverts the cluster bomb ban (May 24), Jody Williams explains:

The United States is making no secret of its pressure on allies to weaken the treaty to serve its own interests. One official recently bragged that the United States had "spoken with" more than 110 countries about this treaty. It has told allies that it will not alter its military doctrine, structure, or deployments. It has also threatened that it will not remove its cluster munitions stockpiled in countries that do join the treaty - even though it did remove land mines stockpiled in countries that are part of the Mine Ban Treaty.

 

[Jody Williams was the founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines for which she and the ICBL received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. She is also the founding chair of the Nobel Women's Initiative.]

Unfortunately, she gives little insight into the logic behind US efforts.

 

The editorial entitled Bombs in bad company (June 1) is more informative:

The cluster munitions that 110 nations agreed to foreswear in Dublin on Wednesday inflict horrific suffering on civilians and have little military utility in today's conflicts. Hundreds or thousands of bomblets are released when containers of cluster munitions burst open in the air. And all too many of those remain unexploded in field, farm, and village - until they are set off by a plowing peasant or a playing child.

Cluster bombs were originally used in World War II, and most of the arsenals existing today were meant for a Cold War battlefield, to kill and maim soldiers in tank and infantry formations over an extended area. The overwhelming international consensus expressed in the Dublin agreement is a recognition that the indiscriminate, unreliable weapons go on killing innocent civilians long after the military combat in which they were used has ended.

If the claim of lack of utility is true, the reason for US opposition to the treaty is rather unclear. The next paragraph from the Globe hints but gives no explicit analysis.

The most recent examples are Israel's scattering of cluster munitions over parts of southern Lebanon during the 2006 war against Hezbollah, and the NATO war to drive Serb forces out of Kosovo in 1999. Civilians living today in those areas are still being crippled and killed by remnant bomblets, as are villagers in Laos who remain vulnerable to unexploded cluster munitions dating back 40 years.

There is no strong evidence in any of the three instances of use that cluster bombs were particularly effective in achieving any tactical goal, but the long and well-documented history of Zionist brutality toward Arabs from the first decade of the twentieth century until the present day suggests Zionist intent and predilection to "inflict horrific suffering on civilians."

Zionist behavior is explainable by the complete lack of respect that Zionism has for Arab or non-Jewish human rights or lives.

As an increasing number of Jewish Zionists and non-Jewish fellow travelers have taken more important positions of power within the US government, Zionist attitudes have begun to influence and in many cases even to determine US foreign and domestic policy, and opposition to the Cluster Bomb Treaty looks like yet another example of the ongoing Israelization and domination that is described in the following passage from Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society.

Judonian Law versus International Law

The Neocons have brought a comparable Israelization of the American legal system since 9/11 in terms of

• the dismissal of the Geneva Conventions,
• the restriction of citizens' rights via the patriot act, and
• the use of torture.

 [See Human Rights Watch Criticizes Israel, Roth at Harvard.[438]]

In public discussion, Ambassador Kiesling has tried to explain the phenomenon as a form of clientitis, which is characterized by a desire to view Israeli behavior as correct, proper, or even admirable.

Yet the Ambassadors's discussion "Bush's public, brutally inept repudiation of the International Criminal Court (ICC)" suggests otherwise. (See Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower,[439] p. 11.)

Kiesling writes on pp. 11-12:

America's position was a disgraceful one: the U.S. Congress had embraced a pressure group of cynical populists with a Goebbelsian lie that UN black helicopters were poised to take away America's freedom. Taking a page form the rhetoric of friends like Slobodan Miloševic, the ex-ruler of Serbia, Congress decided to demonstrate the virility of its concern for "national sovereignty" by passing a law to shield America's future war criminals from legal scrutiny by the international community.

I was diplomatic about it. I reassured the Greeks that America was not endorsing war crimes. The ICC treaty made clear that each country has the right and responsibility for trying its own war criminals, with the ICC acting when the criminal's home state failed to act. America had a track record of punishing war criminals, its own as well as others'. America remained firmly committed to bringing all such criminals to justice. Still, Greece and the EU needed to find a way to accommodate U.S. concerns, or the United States would walk away from its international peacekeeping commitments and cut off military assistance to all but key allies.

Personally, however, I was certain that America's pusillanimity on the ICC was stupid and immoral. Americans benefited handsomely from international law because the United States had written much of it. Now the United States was hacking away at the moral and political foundations of its own creation. Why would anyone else accept international law as a legitimate argument for self-restraint when the United States would not? America's alternative to law and diplomacy was the ugly threat of U.S. military might, but the U.S. military – unlike the president and Congress – at least understood how expensive an alternative it was.

The ICC threat to U.S. citizens was far-fetched. To eliminate that threat, my colleagues and I dutifully squandered diplomatic capital bullying or bribing states to sign symbolic agreements. In Greece, the effect of Congress's American Service Member Protective Act was to make our service members less safe than before. The odds were always remote that any of the hundreds of uniformed Americans at our base in Souda Bay would ever be accused of being international war criminals. It was certain, however, that each year young, frisky American military personnel would be arrested by Greek authorities for brawls, traffic accidents, or misunderstandings with shopkeepers. We had just negotiated a sensible new status-of-forces agreement that waived criminal jurisdiction for such incidents back to the U.S. military justice system except in cases of "major political importance" to Greece. Furious at our ICC stance, the Greek foreign and justice ministries ruled that almost every fistfight by a U.S. service member was a crime of sufficient political importance to require trial by Greek court. Greek jails have improved, but the average American seaman would be better off taking his chances with the ICC.

The Bush administration Neocons that supported the repudiation of the ICC were never concerned about US servicemen, whom they have casually viewed as cannon fodder to make the Middle East safe for Israel. The Neocons were acting as staff members of Judonia to protect Jewish Americans or Israeli Jewish Americans (and of course Jewish Neocons) that had committed international crimes while they served in the IDF.  

Not only does the Israeli military have no hesitation about perpetrating crimes against humanity when the victims are Arabs or non-Jewish Americans defending Palestinians as Rachel Corrie[440] was when the IDF brutally murdered her, but the legal system of the State of Israel is demonstrably dysfunctional in dealing with crimes committed against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and non-Jews in general.

In a show of relative power in the US-Israel alliance, the State of Israel has even refused to extradite Jewish American criminals back to the USA even in cases when the crime took place in the US. (See Sheinbein Can't Be Extradited.[441])

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