Unending War
Catholic Online America (www.americamagazine.org)
Armies inevitably refight the last war, and generals are often unprepared for the new war their enemy brings them. The law and ethics of war follow the same pattern. Years go by before lawmakers and ethicists recognize the worrisome changes that have overtaken warfare.
It took decades for the human costs of antipersonnel land mines to lead to a prohibition on their use in the Ottawa Convention of 1997, a treaty to which the United States is still not a signatory. The postwar poisoning of land and people in Iraq by depleted uranium munitions has still to be regarded by the military or policymakers as an inhumane extension of war that needs to be ended.
The recent fighting in Lebanon underscores the need to put another weapon, namely cluster bombs, on the list of prohibited weapons. Cluster bombs are capsules that open up to distribute bomblets over a wide field. Like land mines, they remain long after the battle is over. Children are often their victims, because their small size and often colorful appearance easily draw a child’s attention. Supposedly designed for close combat situations, they can be used as antipersonnel weapons to clear wide areas of civilian population. That appears to be how the Israel Defense Force employed them in the last days of the Lebanon assault.
More than 400 bomb sites have been identified in southern Lebanon with an estimated 100,000 bomblets on the ground. Given the evident desire of families to return to their homes, the dispersion of bomblets across the region can only be regarded as an attempt to effect ethnic cleansing by preventing the largely Shiite population from returning to the bombed zone. [more]