Warfare is a savagery that has long inflicted suffering upon the innocence of man. And still, its evil need not be boundless. Because of international action the landmine, which used to kill 20,000 people a year, no longer harms so many. We should look to landmine-regulation as an example while we continue to target other inhumane weapons like cluster bombs.
Four years ago, the International Committee to Ban Landmines succeeded in uniting 131 nations in an effort to eliminate the \Use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines.""
While the United States has not signed the Mine Ban Treaty, the Nobel Prize-winning effort of the ICBL has in fact successfully altered the tactical doctrine of the U.S. military. With the exception of the North Korean border, the United States while reserving the right to stockpile, has not deployed a landmine in years. The ICBL, Human Rights Watch and the Department of Defense report that the United States laid no landmines during the Afghan War--evidence of this doctrinal shift.
And still the landmine, a scourge of the soil in more than 70 nations worldwide, contributes to famine, maims and slaughters civilians and destroys entire communities. Add to this the fact that more than half the civilian casualties of the NATO war over Kosovo were victims of unexploded ordnance, and we can see there is still much that needs to change.
In fact, although the United States has abandoned the use of the traditional landmine it has, as in Kosovo and Afghanistan, embraced a weapon uniquely its own and equally as sinister: cluster bombs.
The cluster bomb is a non-guided explosive the payload of which often falls off target, shattering and dispersing across kilometer swaths approximately 200 bomblets, up to 7 percent of which fail to explode upon impact and in effect become landmines triggered to detonate at the slightest touch.
The cluster bomb is even more odious because it particularly targets children who are more likely to pick up the colorful soda can-sized bomblets. Even when dropped on intended targets, far from civilians, the cluster bomb remains a threat to anyone who seeks to treat the wounded, or even to our own soldiers who may enter an area following a bomb attack.
Bomblets and landmines have, as of today, killed two and wounded six U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. They have killed and maimed hundreds of Afghan civilians. And cluster bombs are responsible for many of these needless casualties.
With war in Iraq a near certainty, the danger is even more real. Preceding the Gulf War, the United States dropped an estimated 1.2 million cluster bomblets. Human Rights Watch estimates that 1,600 Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians were killed by the unexploded bomblets in a human tragedy unparalleled by any other weapon in our arsenal.
Like chemical and biological weapons, weapons of mass dispersion such as the landmine and the cluster bomb needlessly amplify human suffering and leave a legacy felt long after the end of conflict.
That is why four years ago many nations of the world banned the use of landmines for the first time in history. This ban intends to reduce and eventually eliminate the presence of new landmines, but does not rid the world of the equally dangerous threat of cluster bombing. To truly succeed and finally disarm the last of these weapons of mass dispersion, we must either ensure all the bombs we drop are accounted for and destroyed, or we must ban them outright.
When the Mine Ban Treaty was proposed a group of our former generals, including Gulf War commander H. Norman Schwarzkopf, wrote: ""We view such a ban as not only humane, but also militarily responsible."" Writing on the issue of landmines, they might as easily have included the cluster bomb. In light of this, our national conscience, our human conscience, cannot permit these weapons.
