South by Southwest: Cluster Bombs

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Cluster Bombs

There are good reasons to be anti-war. Women's sons die, and they die in horrible ways. It turns out that I am not alone. I am a Democrat, but Republican women are also more and more turned off by the war, reports an AP story in Yahoo!News. Quoting from the story (their link),

President Bush's once-solid relationship with Southern women is on the rocks. "I think history will show him to be the worst president since Ulysses S. Grant," said Barbara Knight, a self-described Republican since birth and the mother of three. "He's been an embarrassment." . . .
The movement of some Southern women away from the Republican Party tracks with national poll results showing that women have become more disillusioned with the war and were more likely than men to list the conflict as the important issue facing the country.
Nationally, the AP-Ipsos poll found that only 28 percent of women approve of Bush's handling of the war. Bush did better in the South, but only slightly — just 32 percent of women in the region said they approve of his handling of the war.

I knew at some level that I hated war, but I was not sure why my feelings about it were so strong. But Senator Diane Feinstein, D-CA, reminded me again a couple of days age when she introduced an amendment to restrict the indiscriminate military use of cluster bombs. Yesterday the Senate rejected that amendment 70-30. To quote the article,

The Senate on Wednesday rejected a move by Democrats to stop the Pentagon from using cluster bombs near civilian targets and to cut off sales unless purchasers abide by the same rules.
On a 70-30 vote, the Senate defeated an amendment to a Pentagon budget bill to block use of the deadly munitions near populated areas. The vote came after the State Department announced last month that it is investigating whether Israel misused American-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon.

Mine clearing groups in Lebanon will be clearing the unexploded cluster bombs from the recent war for a decade, according to a recent Washington Post story. Quote,

Clearing unexploded cluster bombs used by Israel in Lebanon during the month-long war, many of them U.S.-manufactured, could take 10 years, a British-based demining group said on Friday.
"We will be clearing unexploded cluster munitions from the rubble of the villages of southern Lebanon for another decade," said Simon Conway, director of Land mine Action. "That is the grim reality," he told reporters in Geneva.
Before the recent war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas in the south, demining teams were still clearing unexploded cluster munitions from Israel's 1978 and 1982 incursions into Lebanon, according to the advocacy group which is campaigning for an international ban on their use.