Israeli Bomblets Plague Lebanon
     
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: October 6, 2006
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Sept. 29 — Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah ended in August, nearly three people have been wounded or killed each day by cluster bombs Israel dropped in the waning days of the war, and officials now say it will take more than a year to clear the region of them.

.....

Cluster bombs are legal if aimed at military targets and are very effective, military experts say. Nonetheless, Israel has been heavily criticized by United Nations officials, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs, because they are difficult to focus exclusively on military targets. Israel was also criticized because it fired most of its cluster bombs in the last days of the war, when the United Nations Security Council was negotiating a resolution to end the conflict.

[Possible Israeli underhandness?  Why the surprise?  I'm surprised that anyone is still capable of being surprised by the disconnect between Israeli words and Israeli deeds].


Officials calculate that if they are lucky, and money from international donors does not run out, it will take 15 months to clear the area. There are now about 300 Lebanese Army soldiers and 30 other clearance teams, each of up to 30 experts, working on the problem of unexploded bomblets.

[The cost of clearing these unexploded bomblets -- I wonder what's the absolute dollar value, and what percentage does that figure constitue compared to the billions that the US lavishes on Israel?  Just wondering of course.  And I'm really wondering which of our brave Solons in Congress is going to suggest that the US "reprogram" some of the $$$$ from the US to Israel to be used for that bomblet clearance effort.  But again, just wondering].

....

In Lebanon there are two explanations of why Israel unleashed cluster bombs at the end of the war: to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah before withdrawing, or to litter the south with unexploded cluster bombs as a strategy to keep people from returning right away.

[Oooh, i think the latter expalnation might be a violation of int'l law.  But no matter, it's the spoiled child of US foreign policy, so expect no calling to account ever to occur].

The United States has sold cluster bombs to Israel in the past and says it is investigating whether Israel’s use of cluster bombs in its war with Hezbollah violated a secret agreement that restricted when they could be used.

[Yeah, sure, right, OK, gotcha.  And guess what's in the mail?  We said the exactly same thing in 1982 re Israel's use of cluster bombs and concussion bombs in Lebanon during that year's war.  And the results were....?  Please expect the same].

...

Repeated efforts to get Israeli officials to explain the rationale behind the use of the bombs have proved fruitless, with spokesmen referring all queries to short official statements arguing that everything done conformed with international law.

[Hmmm, a telling silence, no?  Since Israel is never called to account for its plentiful and prodigious prevarications, their unwillingness to comment tells you even they realize how deeply in the wrong they are.  I guess that this is as good as it's ever going to get re any attempt to wring out a grudging admission of wrongdoing, let alone guilt, from the men of Zion].

In Lebanon the problem of the unexploded munitions is magnified by the desire to return to villages and lives in a region that is effectively booby-trapped. People want to begin rebuilding and harvest their crops. In some cases they have tried to clear the bomblets themselves, and some people have begun charging a small fee to clear away bombs — a practice that officials have discouraged as dangerous.
....

The bomblets, about the size of a D battery, can be packed into bombs, missiles or artillery shells. When the delivery system detonates, the bomblets spread like buckshot across a large area, making them difficult to aim with precision. A fact sheet issued by the Mine Action Coordination Center says cluster bombs have an official failure rate of 15 percent.

That means that 15 percent of the bomblets remain as hazards. According to the fact sheet, the failure rate in this war is estimated to be around 40 percent. “We estimate there are one million,” said Dalya Farran, the community liaison officer of the mine action center.

Ms. Farran has worked at the center for nearly three years. It was set up in 2000 to help deal with the mines and unexploded ordnance left behind after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and from other wars.

After this war, Ms. Farran said, there are two types of cluster bomb fragments across the south. The most commonly found type is known as M42, a deceptively small device resembling a light socket.

She said a large percentage of the unexploded bomblets were made in America, while some were produced in Israel. Each one has a white tail dangling off the back, like the tail of a kite. As they fall to the ground, the tail spins and unscrews the firing pin.

[Made in the USA?  Glad to see we haven't lost our competative industrial edge in the instruments of death.  We do need to work a bit on being more selective about the parties to whom we export these goodies.  And some made in Israel?  Well, well, well.  I'm guessing zero royalties to the US manufacturer, and I'm also guessing that, if we could bestir and trouble ourselves to look into it, we'd find lots of these munitions in the arsensel of the PRC army.  But you see, we're not.  Asking about that would just mean trouble, ultimate trouble, for the political careers of any representative so bold or so indiscreet or so stupid to broach THAT topic].

When the device hits, the front end fires a huge slug while the casing blasts apart into a spray of deadly metal fragments. When they fail to detonate they cling to the ground, and with their white tails look deceptively like toys, so children are often those who are injured.

“This is what they are living with every day,” said Simon Lovell, a supervisor with one of the clearance teams as he looked at five unexploded bomblets poking out of the soft, rocky soil of the Hussein family farm.

Across the street, Hussein Muhammad, 48, at home with his wife and four children, waited for the clearance team. His olive trees were heavy with fruit, but he could not tend to the harvest.

“I feel that the land has become my enemy,” he said. “It represents a danger to my life and my kids’ lives.”

[No, Husein, it's Israel and it's US enabler who is the enemy and the danger  to your life and that of your precious little whelps.  Ain't that painfully clear after all these decades].

Subheading for this article could have been "Israeli Policies Plague America."  Now, I'm guessing the local Islamic fundamentalist unfriendlies and irresponsibles will be more that happy to argue along lines like this :  These bombs are dropped by Israel on us, and Israel gets these weapons from the US.  The US is the Great Satan to the Lesser Satan of Israel.  Israel's policies are made in the US.  America could stop the Isrelis if it wanted to, but it doesn't, so the US wants to wage war against the Arabs and the Moslems.  Praise Allah, death to America.  

There's some superficial truth here, of course, [hasn't these imaginary fundamentalists ever heard of AIPAC?  Israeli policies made in America?  If only!] but want to bet the angry and aggrieved and frustrated and on the edge of homicidal fury Lebanese buy this line in great numbers?  and guess to whose ultimate disadvantage.  If you said the world's remaining superpower, you have have been opaying attention.  Kudos!

Yep, another great triumph for the US, with the invaluable assistance of Our Most Reliable Ally In The Middle East.


ttp://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/world/middleeast/06cluster.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th

boring shit!

Boring?

Hurry up with some specifics.

must have bwen touph w/o me, but i'm back.

And it's responses like the one from HurryUpYost above which tell me how badly I was missed.

that if you kidnap soldiers whose boss has CBUs, that there might be some floating around.

I don't know that there's a whole lot to complain about if the whole dustup got started by kidnapping Israelis.  May not have been a wise response, but I think it's a perfectly legal and understandable one.

See, this is the deal.  If I have a weapon the other guy foesn't have, it's not fair for me to use it, because I might beat him.  The only fair thing for me to do is kiss his ass.

But wars get started because some people are contrary, and just don't like the taste of ass.  So it's really not very sensible to talk about fair here, they're trying to kill as many of each other as they can, you know?

-- Modified on 10/7/2006 6:16:30 PM

Points well taken, but here's something else to consider.

People condemn suicide bombers, and rightly so, for the deliberate and usually indiscriminate taking of innocent civvie life.  But when Isreal strews these weapons about, which will remain active and undetected for months if not years, to me they're acting not all that much differently forthe angry Pally teenagers toting bomb belts around their midsections.

What's the distinction?  The IDF wears uniformss and is the branch of a legally constituted legitimate gov't [to some at least], while the Pallys are neither?  Or that the Pallys actively ride buses and frequnt discos and pizza parlors in search of targets, while the cluster bomblets rest passively and undetected in fields to be triggered by some poor unfortunate schlub?  I'm just not buying that argument.

Fairnes was the furthest thing from my mind.  I was just being polemical.

If they're intent on killing each other, why don't they get better at it and leave the rest of us in peace?  [This is sarcasm, not to be taken too seriously].

Jack, you said "they're trying to kill as many of each other as they can, you know?".
I beg to differ.
I'd like to point out among the prime reasons given that Israel was not as successful as they might have been in the recent altercation was because Israel did what they could to minimize civilian casualties. They dropped leaflets on the Lebanese WARNING thwem of impending attacks in order to minimize civilian casualties. Hizb'Allah operatives were among the Lebanese civilians, and got the same warning.
2 - Hizb'Allah drove their rocket launchers into the middle of heavily populated civilian areas, fired their rockets, and left. By the time Israeli responded, they were long gone, leaving civilians as the sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered in order to perpetuate the Arab lie that Israel targets civilians.

Golda Meir famously said "We can forgive them for killing our children, but we can not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children".

This as opposed to the Arabs, who use their own children as shields against bullets, and as living weapons of destruction in the form of homicide bombers.

Hey, Doc, how is ut that you, tooling around greater LA county on the monster trike, knows that the Hezzies in Lebanon evacuated the civilian areas to be targeted by Israel, but the much vaunted IDF and mossad remained innocent of any such knowledge, leading to such disastrous PR negatives for the Israelis [not to mention the harm done to the Lebanese civilians, but as the yare Moslen and Xtian, they're no doubt of little concern to you].

I was wondering when you would pull out the Golda quote again.  And here it is.

Go to the dictionary, and please look up the following words :

1. irony ;

2. sarcasm.

Thank you.

1. don't read,

2. don't respond.

Thereby saving us both some bother.

There are a number of contributors to this Board I find dull or uninformitive or interested in topics I am not.  I just don't read their contributions.

Simple enough, no?

Thank you.

to refer to combatants generally here.

IOW, absent a specific agreement, I don't buy the idea that cluster bombs are an unfair weapon, even if they're known to endanger people moving thru later - that's true of any dud; and IMHO, if you don't want CBUs in your backyard, then don't kidnap people whose cousins have them.

of you under the letter "A" - asshole! LOL!

There's a couple concepts in Anglo-American common law that you should consider.

The first is "specific intent", that is, what is the actor intending to do?

The other is the idea of "necessity", that in rare cases, will excuse a small crime on the idea that it was necessary to avoid a much larger harm.

Now, consider the intent in each scenario:  sombody straps on a bomb, making themselves into a delivery system, and goes wandering around looking for a target.   For some reason they don't pick a military person or installation, they don't pick an unmanned industrial site.  No, they go for a pizza joint or disco, precisely because they know they're going to kill non-combatants.  

They wander in, they look around, they see that there are in fact children under the age of 5, and instead of waiting for them to leave, or picking another target, they set off the bomb.

Now, if you buy that this is a war, then that's not murder.  However, it's a war crime, ie, the deliberate killing of an uninvolved person.

OK, so some people may not buy that.   I'm sorry, there's nothing I have in common with those people, and I'll just have to communicate with them in other ways, ie, thru the barrel of a weapon.

The other situation is that, let's assume that you've decided to invade the neighbors, perhaps because they're letting the vandals use their house as a base to kidnap your kids and shoot at you.  You have to help them control their house.

So you invade, and in the course of doing that, you bomb them.  Perhaps the neighbors were taken over by the vandals, perhaps they invited them in, who knows?   But the vandals are shhoting at you, so you bomb back.

And you use these new-fangled bombs that leave 15% duds that could hurt anybody wandering thru, but you use them because only 85% of the bombs still kill twice as many vandals.  more to follow...

The next concept is "necessity", and I will deal with that in the next post.

why are you doing it, and what exactly could you foresee?

Well, you're trying to kill people who are shooting at you, without getting killed yourself.   You could use a GP bomb that has a much lower risk later on, but that involves a much greater risk to you.

You see, you're bombing precisely because there are people shooting at you, and that isn't the case in suicide bombings.  It's just not so.

So you knowingly use weapons that are more dangerous to people later on, but you have no way of knowing that there's going to be a later on.  It's entirely likely that these areas can be marked, and people can avoid them, but you don't know, because you're in the middle of being shot at, and you're only using these weapons to save your life.

That's the idea of necessity.  It's sort of related to self-defense.

I do buy the argument.   I think it's necessary to a couple of issues in civilization, and one is drawing limits on warfare.   If you can't trust an opponent, why should you accept a white flag?  You shouldn't; you have to kill them all.

The other is of course the limit of honesty.   People who sneak around looking for civilians to kill without an express declaration of war, or warning, can only be expected to continue that history.  

Would you accept the surrender of a group which (by declearation and history) routinely considered suicide bombings of civilians to be a legitimate act of civil disobedience, or did not distinguish between war and peace?

Tell me why.  We don't seem to like that here in the US.  Should you treat them as POWs for the rest of their natural lives, or what?

war we could, and am even something of an isolationist compared to some of the chest-beaters (most of whom seem to have NO IDEA of what is involved in killing people).

Of course we all get tired of fucking sometimes, but even sitting out in the weather admiring the countryside is much better than trying to blow up some tribesman.   Blowing up tribesmen is a last resort, it's such a miserable pain in the ass.  About the time I get tired of the weather, I'm ready to go feel up the GF again.  I rarely have the urge to blow up tribesmen any more these days.  

I realize that there's lots of difficulties involved in supporting a state whose entire rationalization is something between religious and ethnic.   And of course there are the usual violations of trust involved in foreign relations generally, and if we couldn't get over it, we wouldn't get a whole lot done.  

But we have to deal with the historical facts, including that Bush seems to have gotten us in well over our head, like the stupid shit he sounds like.  (Yeah, he may turn out to be a fucking genius.  Define what events would prove that, and give me odds.  Anybody?)  

And I don't see that both parties having a dog in the fight allows us to discount what they claim.  Yeah, the IDF pursues far more conventional tactics because they can, and the Pallies, Hezzies, et al don't use bulldozers and CBUs because they can't buy or maintain them (why would that be?) but somehow, my core values do not excuse the use of suicide bombers against civilians.

If they want to blow themselves up, I'm cool with that.

What I'm NOT cool with is their inability to stick with something, anything.   Sure, maybe they don't really mean it when they say, Jews into the sea.
But why do they keep blowing up the Israeli kids, and violating borders?   Is it because they don't see the difference among combatants and non-combatatants, and don't see the difference between peace and war?

So they have beefs against the Israelis.   Are they going to allow them to live?  Why should anybody, Israeli or other, talk to a group or person, who by words and deeds, will only be satisfied by killing all his family?
 
The Israels may be a theocracy, but historically, they don't seem to have the problems with our idea of democracy that most 3rd worlders do.   So it gets down to a question of whether we support people who are closer to our ideals, or people who think that voting and secular education and that sort of stuff should be bombed off the face of the earth.

Yes, I realize my view is very ethnocentric.  I guess they'll just have to deal with it.  Because I'm not asking anybody to bend over to be killed, and I sure won't do it myself.

I'll have a basis to respond.

Until then...

So, Hurry Up Yost.

but hardly to the point.

I think you're channelling some of the more out-of-control posters on the Board.  Especially that portly poster who periodically whines about a lack of "civility" on this board, but is day-to-day one of the most insulting and personally abusive posters on this Board.  Is that what you aspire to?

Can't you do any better?

BTW, still noticed your lack of a substantive rebuttal.  Can it be you relixe that your argument, such as it might be, has no legs to stand upon?

Just wondering?

and at you!

-- Modified on 10/10/2006 2:34:26 PM