The U.S. and Cluster Munitions: Lessons Disregarded

Introduction

The decision by the United States government to use cluster munitions in the war in Iraq has not gone entirely unnoticed by the American media. A study by USA Today, for instance, acknowledged that civilian deaths—“collateral damage” in Pentagon parlance—from the use of cluster munitions were an “unintended but predictable” result of the decision by the U.S. government—which, the author adds, is “determined to minimize civilian casualties”—to go to war “with stockpiles of weapons known to endanger civilians and its own soldiers.”[1] Little attempt was made to reconcile the contradiction, which seems to have passed unnoticed by the author.

Indeed, with the original pretext now universally known to have been fraudulent (being only slightly less well known well prior to the invasion), apologists for the war, in their revisions, have tried to portray the invasion as a sort of humanitarian intervention exercised for the benefit of the Iraqi people. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions was largely ignored, on account of the significant challenge it might otherwise present to that hypothesis.

Cluster munitions are weapons that can be delivered either from the air or from the ground, consisting of a bomb or projectile that opens in mid-air, dispersing large numbers of smaller munitions, or submunitions. Models vary, with some delivery systems having a capacity to carry hundreds of submunitions designed to saturate areas as large as the size of several football fields with deadly shrapnel.[2] This design capability makes the weapons particularly indiscriminate when used in areas where civilians may be present.

But what makes cluster weapons even more controversial is the fact that a number of submunitions with each weapon used will be destined to “fail”, which means that they will not explode, as intended, in mid-air or upon impact, but which will lay dormant on or in the ground as de facto landmines, posing a serious threat to civilians long after the initial strike is ended. “The indiscriminate nature of cluster weapons,” a report by the Mennonite Central Committee notes, “is not only present in their method of delivery but, like landmines, in their continued threat over time.”[3]

The legality of cluster weapons under International Humanitarian Law is questionable at best. Apologists for the use of these weapons rely upon legalistic interpretations that demonstrate their contempt for the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties which seek to outlaw the use of indiscriminate weapons that inevitably cause undue harm to civilians. Groups which seek to ban the use of cluster weapons point out that unexploded submunitions are no different in nature than anti-personnel landmines. “The rationale that led the international community to stand with the survivors of landmine injuries and enact a ban on anti-personnel landmines,” the Mennonite Central Committee report observes, “also applies to cluster weapons.”[4] According to Human Rights Watch, “Submunition duds are more lethal than antipersonnel mines; incidents involving submunition duds are much more likely to cause death than injury.”[5]

The 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Landmines and on their Destruction, otherwise known as the Mine Ban Treaty, prohibits the use of antipersonnel landmines. The United States, notably, has refused to sign the treaty. Moreover, “While cluster bomblet duds undeniably function like antipersonnel mines,” a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) states, “they are not covered under the…Mine Ban Treaty”, which defines antipersonnel mines as munitions “designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person”. Cluster bombs, the report adds, are not designed to be “victim-activated”; they merely “become so” after they “fail to function as designed”[6]—a distinction that the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers, who use built-in dud rates in computer models of the impact of cluster weapons,[7] have not failed to perceive.

Similarly, when U.S. legislation was proposed in 1997 to ban landmines, defined as those munitions, “designed, constructed, or adapted to be detonated or exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person and that will incapacitate, injure or kill one or more persons”, the Pentagon insisted that the word “primarily” be inserted at the beginning of the definition lest the ban also be interpreted to cover cluster munitions.[8]

The use of cluster munitions is not a new development in warfare. The U.S. has a long history of using such weapons.