« Pakistan: Islamist Crisis Deepens - Part 1 (of 2) |
| UK: Taxes Fund Muslim Polygamy »
May 29, 2007
Opinion: Please, Keep Building Cluster Munitions
The good, wonderful people are at it again: Stop world cluster bombs, urge six Nobel Prize winners
Jody Williams and five other female Nobel prize laureates on Tuesday urged civilians to press for the elimination of cluster bombs, which cripple children and others long after the fighting has stopped."While so many of the worlds arms cause so much human misery, cluster munitions deserve to be singled out as an especially pernicious weapon of ill repute," Williams said.
"They have become synonymous with civilian casualties," the US Nobel laureate read from the statement signed by her and five women Nobel Peace Prize winners: Rigoberta Menchu (Guatemala-1992); Shirin Ebadi (Iran-2003); Wangari Maathai (Kenya-2004); Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Ireland-1976).
Oh, how the heart bleeds. Has any of these women thought about the consequences of their well-intentioned (one assumes) proposal? The article notices that the main manufacturers of cluster munitions are the United States, Russia, and China. Of these countries the only one that may fall to pressure to ban the munitions is the United States. If they succeed, it will be the United States and Israel that get militarily weaker, while our enemies get stronger.
The landmines campaign provides a clear example. Yielding to pressure, the United States removed its minefields from Guantanamo Bay Naval Station from 1996 to 1999. They were replaced by other, less effective, more expensive, defensive measures. The landmines on the Cuban side still stand there. American wealth was wasted and our soldiers are less protected. All because some people allegedly had some good intentions.
Ms. Williams goes wrong with her beliefs about causation: "While so many of the world's arms cause so much human misery...." This is philosophical hogwash. It is humans who cause human misery. Arms help the process along. Something as humble as the machete "caused" more deaths last century than cluster munitions could hope to do this one.
So far, the United States is resisting the pressure to participate in the "dialogue" to ban cluster munitions. One hopes our government will stand firm. The lives of our soldiers should not be risked to satisfy the ego of petty political activists. Even is they are all Nobel Prize winners. Because so was Yasser Arafat.
Posted by Ruy Diaz at May 29, 2007 11:13 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)