Cluster Bombs

By Rick Boettger

We’ve jumped the shark.  Our rabid war in Ukraine against Russia has us using bombs outlawed by 120 nations, including 23 NATO countries.  The WH spokesperson Jen Psaki called them a “War Crime” when Russia used them last year.

This is when the NYT has a headline weekly on the front page decrying Russian bombs killing  3, 5, or 8 civilians in Kyiv.  The same NYT that, on Feb 16, 1945, after 37 hours  of our fire-bombing Dresden, killing ~35,000,   called it “an awe-inspiring display … of American air power.” On Page 22.

This led to our firebombing first Tokyo, a month later, killing only women, children, and old men, 100,000 with 1200 B-52’s, sickening the pilots with the smell of burning human flesh and guilt over knowing what they were doing was an atrocity.  This was the greatest single-day loss of human life in human history, purposely targeting civilians to break Japan’s spirit.  We went on to fire-bomb another 60 Japanese cities.

I think we, the U.S, have again sold our souls, again out of visceral hate, not military necessity or any kind of self-defense.  We are giving Ukraine these hideous bombs expressly to kill Russians.  Russians have never done anything like this to us—it would be like their giving nukes to Isis.

And after Russians, Ukrainians will suffer terribly. We have 10,000 cluster bombs ready to go, already over there.  Each disperses 88 bomblets, meaning a total of 880,000 people-killing bombs.  At a 2.5% dud rate, this means 22,000 will be scattered around the countryside.  While we didn’t sign the anti-cluster bomb agreement, just as we still are okay with land mines, we at least demanded a >1% dud rate for our own.  Biden has over-ruled our own meager limitation.

The regular 155mm bombs are produced in a single old factory in Scranton, hard to upgrade because it is on a register of historic places.  We have had over a year to make more regular bombs.  Somehow, in the age of AI and electric trucks, our vaunted military-industrial complex can’t make “humane” artillery shells.  They say they’ll be ready for today’s war in Ukraine by 2028.  Of course, we have  a good supply of the regular bombs, but we are saving them just in case we need them ourselves.  So we give these cluster bombs, which Ukraine will surely use to kill Russians, so we wouldn’t have to use them ourselves, just in case we get in a war over Taiwan with China. Do we think we are somehow more righteous helping Ukraine kill Russians than we would be using these bombs ourselves to kill Chinese?  Is that the Democratic, all-American noble calculus governing our actions?

Meanwhile Zelensky has outlawed elections, despite his prior banning of opposition parties and media, putting his finger strongly on the scale.  They keep begging us to let them into NATO, so we and all of Europe will have to send our men over there to die with them.  Right now, we’re saying NO.  Can you really believe we won’t eventually go?

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