By Andre DAMON
On Friday, the Biden administration stated it would send cluster munitions– weapons that spread unexploded bomblets across a large location, killing and maiming civilians for years– to Ukraine.
Facing the failure of Kiev’s military offensive, the United States is frantically seeking to use the provision of ever more destructive and indiscriminate weapons to reverse its setbacks on the battlefield.
Seriously, the announcement precedes next week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, at which the United States and NATO are planning to massively broaden their participation in the war. Driven into a corner by its miscalculations, the Biden administration is obliged to take ever more extreme steps.
The objective of the choice to utilize cluster bombs– despite its long-term impact on civilians– is to eliminate as numerous Russian soldiers as possible. The thinking that led in the past to making use of Representative Orange and Napalm– and which will be utilized to sanction using tactical nuclear weapons– is currently at work.
The United States, on the eve of Vilnius, is plainly sending out a message to Russian president Vladimir Putin. NATO will stop at absolutely nothing.
In an instruction Friday revealing the move, US National Security Consultant Jake Sullivan validated the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine as a way of warding off military catastrophe.
“There is also an enormous risk of civilian damage if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians since Ukraine does not have sufficient artillery,” he said.
Sullivan made this declaration a little over one month after Ukraine released its spring offensive, which the American press had touted as an “Endgame for Ukraine,” leading, in the words of retired Gen. David Patraeus, to “significant developments.”
Instead, the offensive has actually produced a bloody fiasco. Far from causing a crushing defeat on Russia, the Biden administration has been driven to one escalatory move after another in an effort to fortify the Ukrainian military.
“We recognize the cluster munitions developing danger of civilian damage from unexploded ordnance,” Sullivan stated. “But we needed to stabilize that versus the threat” that Ukraine might “not have enough weapons ammo.”
In other words, the Biden administration weighed the cost of killing and incapacitating generations of Ukrainian civilians against the benefits of killing more Russian soldiers. It chose that the deaths of Ukrainian kids from unexploded ordnance was a sacrifice America’s oligarchy was willing to make.
Managing to outdo himself in total callousness, Sullivan included that Ukraine would need to be “de-mined regardless.”
Every line used by the White House to justify sending out these weapons of horror to Ukraine might be utilized to justify the release, and even utilize, of tactical nuclear weapons in the dispute. Yes, the White Home would argue, nuclear fallout presents a danger to civilians, however this threat must be “well balanced” versus the danger of Russian military advances.
The stationing of United States tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has already been directly raised by an American think tank. Furthermore, the implementation and possible use of nuclear weapons in the dispute will no doubt be on the agenda at the upcoming top in Vilnius.
Every authorities statement by the United States about its involvement in the war is validated on the basis that it is once again “conserving” a country through military violence– this time Ukraine. But in sending cluster bombs and diminished uranium weapons to Ukraine, the United States has actually made clear that this is nothing however a hollow pretext for pursuing its aim of prevailing over Russia and China in “great power competition.”
The very words used by the United States and its allies to condemn Russia’s alleged usage of cluster bombs in Ukraine now totally apply to the US choice to send this weapon to Ukraine.
In February 2022, the United States envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, implicated Russia of using “cluster munitions” in Ukraine, “which are banned under the Geneva Convention” and have “no put on the battleground.”
In March 2022, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, “We have seen the use of cluster bombs … which will be in infraction of worldwide law.” He included, “We likewise need to make certain the International Crook Court truly checks out this.”
In fact, all of these denunciations of Russian actions on the part of the United States and NATO were simply hypocritical pretexts for intensifying US involvement in the war.
The choice by the United States to send out cluster bombs to Ukraine exposes all of the pseudo-left protectors of United States involvement in the war in Ukraine, including those in the Democratic Socialists of America who condemn “preemptive hostility to United States imperialism,” as shameless apologists for the US armed force’s war criminal offenses.
In truth, the US-led war against Russia in Ukraine is a war for American worldwide hegemony, in which Ukrainians are simple cannon fodder. This is totally in line with the series of criminal wars of hostility waged by the United States over the previous half-century.
During the Vietnam War, the US dropped around 413,130 lots of cluster bombs in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. A lot of these submunitions failed to blow up on effect and continue to present a considerable risk to civilian populations, causing many injuries and deaths years after the end of the war.
During the US-led intrusion of Iraq in 2003, the United States regularly used cluster munitions to attack civilian areas, in what Amnesty International called “an indiscriminate attack and a severe offense of worldwide humanitarian law.”
In Iraq, the devastation of cluster bombs was compounded by the use of diminished uranium munitions, which, according to one research study, led the people of Fallujah to experience greater rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality and sexual anomalies than those tape-recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bombs in 1945.
During the 2001 intrusion of Afghanistan, cluster bombs eliminated and injured hundreds of civilians and littered the countryside with lethal unexploded ordnance. The United States has been linked in the use of cluster munitions via its assistance for Saudi-led forces in the Yemen conflict.
Over 110 countries have actually validated the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which forbids the usage, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions. The United States, which has actually killed more people with cluster munitions than any other country, is not a signatory.
A 2008 report by the United Nations discusses the devastating impact cluster munitions have on the populations where they are utilized by the United States and its allies:
Over three decades after cluster munitions were utilized in Laos and Vietnam, they continue to trigger death and injury, interrupt the financial activities of common individuals, and obstruct the execution of development jobs there. Even fast large-scale clearance efforts, such as those that have actually been carried out in Kosovo and Lebanon, can not avoid cluster munition contamination from having an impact. In Kosovo, civilian casualties from cluster munitions are still being reported, and in Lebanon, in spite of clearance beginning immediately after the 2006 dispute, it might not prevent casualties amongst the population as they went back to their houses and incomes.
The report continues:
Submunitions can avoid or impede the safe return of refugees and internally displaced individuals (IDPs) and obstruct humanitarian, peace-building, and development efforts. Unexploded cluster munitions likewise posture a physical danger to humanitarian employees and peacekeepers.
The White House claims to have actually discussed and deliberated the relocation with the utmost care. The decision-makers would have been fully informed on these understood effects of cluster munitions, and continued with them regardless.
Reporting on the decision by Biden to send the weapons, the New York City Times wrote, “Mr. Biden has actually come under constant pressure from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who argues that the munitions– which distribute tiny, fatal bomblets– are the best way to kill Russians who are gone into trenches and blocking Ukraine’s counteroffensive to retake area.”
The function of Zelensky in promoting a choice to send weapons that will maim Ukrainian kids for generations sums up the function of his government, which serves as an instrument in implementing the will of the NATO powers over the Ukrainian population.
This most current escalation by the United States must be viewed as a caution. Washington will stop at absolutely nothing to avoid more military problems for its proxy force in Kiev and achieve its military goal of causing a tactical defeat on Russia. The very same homicidal reasoning that justifies the release of diminished uranium rounds and cluster bombs will be used to validate even greater and more careless criminal offenses, from the direct entry of NATO into the war to the implementation and use of nuclear weapons.