Thanks to the national deficit and the cost of Iraq, the the figure one billion no longer defies comprehension. Imagine if each individual bomblet achieved its objective of maiming or killing a person, or damaging a piece of infrastructure?
How did this conference come about?
A precedent was set in 1996 when the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) failed to ban land mines. Canada rose to the occasion and successfully challenged the world to impose a ban in a year.
Meanwhile, what gives with the countries that weren't in attendance? After all, if this were a nuclear accord, they'd be called rogue nations.
Let's take a look in the mirror. The Bush administration insists that cluster bombs are weapons too indispensable to surrender. Also, they claim -- if you've heard this before from Republicans, stop me -- existing international law is sufficient to deal with the dangers.
Still, at the UN's CCW meeting in June last year, the US indicated it was open to future negotiations, but only within the confines of the CCW. Turns out we were just trying to avoid the Oslo Process operating outside the CCW.
By the November 2007 CCW meeting, we were reduced to using the tantrum defense: If the use of cluster munitions were banned or limited, certain missions would require our forces to drop many times more non-cluster bombs to achieve the same results.
In other words, if even more civilians are killed and infrastructure damaged, it would be the fault of those who seek to ban cluster bombs.
Can we expect a new president to see the error of our ways and, however late to the party, sign the treaty?
In the autumn of 2006, Diane Feinstein (D-CA) submitted an amendment (No. 4882) to a Pentagon appropriations bill to the Senate. It banned neither the manufacturing, stockpiling nor the use of cluster bombs. It merely forbade their use in "any concentrated population of civilians, whether permanent or temporary, including inhabited parts of cities or villages, camps or columns of refugees or evacuees, or camps or groups of nomads."
Senator Feinstein couldn't have made voting for the bill more pain-free. Senator Obama voted yea, McCain, predictably, nay.
No sense piling on Hillary Clinton at this point. But her nay vote on amendment 4882 might have been the other vote she'll never live down. But we'll never know because Obama failed to call her out on it.
Perhaps, like Hillary, he feared appearing soft on defense. More likely, though, he sensed that it's hard enough for Americans to acknowledge that our government has opened the floodgates to the devastation of Iraq, as well as tortured, in our name. That's quite enough national shame for one era, thank you.
In the interim, all Americans of conscience owe a debt to Norway, New Zealand, and the 80 other countries which signed the Wellington Declaration for helping to keep the torch of humanity burning during America's dark years.
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