José R. Oro*, contributor to Prensa Latina
It is notable that major international peace and disarmament agreements (ie the 1954 Geneva Accords on Vietnam, the Minsk Accords on Ukraine and many others of great importance) were not signed by the US.
In yet another Washington-instigated escalation of the Ukraine war, the Joe Biden administration’s decision to send internationally banned cluster bombs to Ukraine reminds us once again that US imperialism accepts zero limits on its heinous and genocidal policies. Cluster bombs can be dropped from land, sea or air, and contain devices that release a large number of small bomblets when opened. These submunitions can cause a variety of damage, such as piercing armored vehicles with their explosive charge, killing or seriously injuring many people. indiscriminate with their fragments of shrapnel or start fires. They are prohibited by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, adopted in Dublin, Ireland, in May 2008. The Convention entered into force and became binding international law on August 1, 2010. As of February 10, 2022, a total of 123 states have acceded to the Convention.
Ukraine is running out of artillery ammunition at the front despite the fact that Washington has sent two million artillery shells with which they have not made any significant progress in the Ukrainian summer (previously called spring, soon to be de) offensive. autumn).
Joe Biden projects that cluster bombs will turn the tide of war
The US-NATO-backed regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has demanded these weapons for months. Zelensky is now pushing for long-range missiles to reach sensitive parts of Russia, as the war has stalled.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken bluntly stated that “the objective of the United States in the Ukrainian War is to weaken Russia” to the point that it is no longer a power in the world. To that end, since the outbreak of the conflict, beginning with the US-backed and orchestrated coup in February 2014 that toppled the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, the US has steadily increased its role in funding, training, weaponry, and leadership. of right-wing jihadist troops from some 28 countries with the goal of eventually transferring Ukraine’s vast fossil fuel and agricultural resources to corporate interests associated with the United States.
According to a recent New York Times editorial questioning the shipment of cluster bombs, “Line after line has crossed Washington with its allies agreeing to provide sophisticated weapons such as the Patriot air defense system, the HIMARS long-range rocket launcher, the Abrams tank and the F-16 fighter.
Washington’s moral standing in much of the world, especially in the Global South, is already in tatters due to the death and maiming of millions of civilians by the United States in its more than 50 conflagrations since the end of World War II. Worldwide, significantly Vietnam, and even more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they used cluster munitions and depleted uranium missiles and presided over the killing of some 8.5 million people, mostly civilians.
We recall that the 2003 Iraq war was persecuted by President George W. Bush as necessary to eliminate the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” from that country. The corporate media dutifully and falsely reported “discoveries” there of deadly containers of sarin and mustard gas.
In fact, President Biden himself later declared the 2003 Iraq war a serious “mistake.” That “mistake” cost the lives of 1.5 million Iraqis!
The United States is no newcomer to banned weapons of mass destruction.
A July 7, 2023, NYT article titled “Toxic Stockpile Nears End, Decades Later” provides more than insight into America’s war crimes, including its systematic engagement and deployment of all types of weapons. of mass destruction.
Here we quote just a few sections of the newspaper article:
• Decades behind its initial schedule, the dangerous task of eliminating the world’s only remaining (US) declared stockpile of lethal chemical munitions will be completed as soon as Friday (?).
• In a sealed room behind a group of armed guards and three rows of barbed wire at the Army’s “Pueblo” Chemical Depot in Colorado, a robotic team was busily disassembling some of the last remaining stocks of US chemical weapons.
• Artillery shells arrived filled with a deadly mustard agent that the Army had been stockpiling for more than 70 years. Bright yellow robots drilled, drained and washed each bin, then baked it to 1,500ºF. Out came a supposedly harmless, inert scrap, tumbling from a conveyor belt into a run-of-the-mill dumpster.
• The US arsenal, accumulated over generations, was staggering in its scale: cluster bombs and nerve agent-filled landmines. Artillery shells that could cover entire forests in a searing mustard mist. Tanks full of poison that could be loaded onto planes and sprayed on targets in “enemy” territory.
• These are classes of weapons considered so inhumane that their use was condemned after World War I, yet the United States continued to develop and accumulate them. They were either far deadlier versions of the chlorine and mustard agents classed as infamous in the trenches of the Western Front, or contained later developed nerve agents such as VX and Sarin, lethal even in small amounts.
The United States tries to publicize the destruction of prohibited weapons, while sending versions of such criminal devices to Ukraine today!
The United States opposes the ban on cluster bombs in 2008
Some of these bomblets do not explode and therefore pose a continuing danger (long after they are deployed, years and decades) to civilians, including children, who come across and handle them, causing them to explode.
To date, 123 countries have signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, including Germany, France, Great Britain and 15 other NATO members. The United States, Russia and Ukraine have not signed. The United States, the central deployer of cluster bombs during its wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, actively opposed the treaty.
Canada, Britain, Germany and Austria have said they will comply with the ban. The representative of Spain said that cluster munitions should not be used by Ukraine under any circumstances.
The Convention not only prohibits the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of ammunition, but also contains a key provision outlawing assistance to third parties in such illicit activities.
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos still littered with unexploded cluster bombs
During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped an immense tonnage of cluster bombs not only on the land of the Annamites, but also on neighboring Laos and Cambodia. More than four million people, mostly civilians, were killed during this genocidal war. “As the world’s biggest victim of cluster munitions,” Laos declared its opposition to Biden providing cluster bombs to Ukraine. Similarly, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen stated: “It would be the greatest danger to Ukrainians for many years or up to a hundred years if cluster bombs are used in Russian-occupied areas on the territory of Ukraine.” Hun leaves out Russian civilians in towns and cities intermingling with Russian troops in the Donbass and southern regions, who will be killed or maimed by such monstrous bombs.
Biden has tried to embellish the decision with the fanciful claim that only three percent of bombs will remain unexploded when they hit the ground. Many authorities, including the Pentagon in previously published reports, put it at 14 percent.
The New York Times condemns Biden’s decision
A recent major editorial in the New York Times to which the entire editorial board subscribes is headlined: “The Faulty Moral Logic of Shipping Cluster Munitions to Ukraine.”
Reviewing the administration’s stated reasons for shipping these weapons, he says, “This is faulty and troubling logic. In the face of widespread global condemnation of cluster munitions and the danger they pose to civilians long after the fighting ends, this is not a weapon a nation with the power and influence of the United States should send.
“This danger prompted the adoption of a Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2008. The United Nations Secretary-General at the time, Ban Ki-Moon, spoke of “not only the world’s collective revulsion at these abhorrent weapons, but also the power of collaboration between governments, civil society and the United Nations to change attitudes and policies about a threat facing all of humanity.”
The United States made four nuclear weapons a day for 40 years!
From 1950 to 1990, the US Department of Energy, according to a June 1, 2023 NYT article titled “A Deleterious Cold War Remnant That Escapes Solution,” reported that “an average of four bombs nuclear power every day,” in hastily built factories with few environmental safeguards that left behind much toxic radioactive waste.
Nowhere were the problems greater than in Hanford, Washington state, where engineers sent to clean up the site after the Cold War discovered 54 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge left over from the production of plutonium for atomic bombs, such as the used in Nagasaki in 1945.
Official figures from the United States indicate that 58,400 nuclear weapons, enough to destroy life on earth thousands of times over, were produced until 1990 by the military-industrial complex to line the pockets of the rich.
Cluster bombs to Ukraine and the periodic electoral farce of the USA.
Contrary to the controlled and monopolized media of capitalism, the decisions to unleash the fury of the American war machine rest with the true ruling class, the big corporate monopolies who preside over all key decisions in the United States. The periodic electoral farce they orchestrate, in which billionaire-funded candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, appear to compete for “control” of the White House and the US Congress, is intended to mask the fact that in USA. the rules are set and enforced by the super elite, less than a tenth of one percent, who are the accepted and effective leadership of the country’s predatory capitalist system. This billionaire elite and their representatives write and approve tax codes and multibillion dollar budgets that further their interests, ruthlessly violate Human Rights and now deliver cluster bombs to Ukraine, to kill more and better.
rmh/jro
*Cuban engineer residing in the United States
(Taken from Select Firms)
2023-08-06 08:12:51
#Cluster #Bombs #Ukraine #Human #Rights #Humanity #Photos #Prensa #Latina
