[WCUSP] LATimes: Lebanon's War with Cluster Bombs (and we supplied the weapons)

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

_http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi21oct21,0,1230325.story?coll
=la-opinion-center_ 
(http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi21oct21,0,1230325.story?coll=la-opinion-center) 
Lebanon's War With  Cluster Bombs 
 
The 40% of  Israeli-dropped 'bomblets' that didn't explode during this 
summer's war continue  to kill Lebanon's most  vulnerable.
 
By Saree  Makdisi
 
SAREE MAKDISI is a professor of  English and comparative literature at  
UCLA.October 21,  2006 
 
OF ALL THE statistics to emerge from  Israel's recent war on  Lebanon, the 
most shocking  concerns the number of cluster bombs that Israel dropped on or 
fired into  Lebanon. 
 

 
A cluster bomb is made up of a  canister that opens and releases hundreds of 
individual bomblets, which are  dispersed and explode over a wide area, 
showering it with molten metal and  lethal fragments.  
 
About 40% of the bomblets dropped  by Israel (many of  which were 
American-made) did not explode in the air or on impact with the  ground. They now 
detonate when someone disturbs them — a soldier, a farmer, a  shepherd, a child 
attracted by the  lure of a shiny metal object. 
 

 
Cluster bombs are, by definition, inaccurate weapons that are designed  to 
affect a very wide area unpredictably. If they do not discriminate between  
civilian and military targets when they are dropped, they certainly do not  
discriminate in the months and years after the end of hostilities, when they go  on 
killing and maiming anyone who happens upon  them.  
 
When the count of unexploded cluster  bomblets passed 100,000, the United 
Nation's undersecretary-general for  humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, expressed 
his disbelief at the scale of the  problem.
 

 
"What's shocking and, I would say to  me, completely immoral," he said, "is 
that 90% of the cluster-bomb strikes  occurred in the last 72 hours of the 
conflict, when we knew there would be a  resolution, when we really knew there 
would be an end of  this."  
 
That was on Aug. 30, by which time U.N. teams had identified 359 separate  
cluster-bomb sites.
 

 
Since then, the true dimensions of  the problem have become even clearer: 770 
cluster-bomb sites have now been  identified. And the current U.N. estimate 
is that Israel dropped between 2 million and 3 million  bomblets on Lebanon, of 
which up to a million  have yet to explode.  
 
In fact, it is estimated that there  are more unexploded bomblets in southern 
Lebanon than  there are people. They lurk in tobacco fields, olive groves, on 
rooftops, in  farms, mixed in with rubble. They are injuring two or three 
people every day,  according to the United Nations, and have killed 20 people 
since the cease-fire  in August. 
 

 
"What we did was insane and  monstrous," one Israeli commander admitted to 
the newspaper Haaretz. "We covered  entire towns in cluster bombs."  
 
As Egeland noted, the majority of  these bombs were dropped in the last three 
days of the war — a time when the  U.N. resolution to end the fighting had 
been agreed on, when the war was  virtually over, when it was clear that Israel 
had failed to accomplish its  declared objectives in launching this  campaign.
 

 
Dropped so late in the war, it's  hard to imagine what specific military 
objective these bombs could possibly have  been meant to accomplish. Instead, they 
seem to have been dropped as a final,  gratuitous act of violence in a war 
waged against an entire population. The vast  majority of the 1,200 Lebanese 
killed by Israeli bombardments were civilians; one in three  was a child.  
 
With 100,000 innocent people trapped  in the south because they could not, or 
dared not, flee on roads that Israel was  indiscriminately bombing every day, 
Israel's justice minister declared that they  were all — men, women and 
children — "terrorists who are related in some way to  Hezbollah." 
 
Nor was this his view alone. The  Israelis dropped leaflets warning that "any 
vehicle of any kind traveling south  of the Litani  River will be bombed, on  
suspicion of transporting rockets, military equipment and terrorists." The  
Israeli chief of staff was especially clear. "Nothing is safe" in  Lebanon, he 
said. "As simple as  that." 
 

 
Israel  carried out 7,000 air raids and fired 160,000 artillery projectiles 
into  Lebanon, a tiny country. That's about  two air raids and 40 projectiles 
per square  mile.  
 
But the punishment was not evenly  distributed. Israel's war was  aimed 
specifically at Lebanon's Shiite population. Shiite  neighborhoods in Beirut were 
destroyed, but other neighborhoods  remained untouched. Shiite villages in the 
south were obliterated — literally  wiped from the surface of the Earth — 
while nearby Christian villages escaped unscathed, mercifully  able to shelter 
their Shiite  neighbors. 
 

 
Israeli officials said this was a  war against Hezbollah, that Hezbollah was 
hiding in the midst of the population.  But this wasn't a war against 
Hezbollah. It was a war to punish the entire  population for its support of the 
guerrillas.  
 
Not only was Hezbollah not hiding  behind civilians, it ought to be obvious 
that the violence was directed in the  first instance at the civilians 
themselves. To direct such violence at one  community, one religious group, one 
minority — and to deny them the ability to  return safely home — was what this war 
was all  about. 
 

 
To drop two or three bomblets for  every man, woman and child in southern 
Lebanon — after having wiped out  their homes, smashed their communities, 
destroyed their livelihoods — is to wage  war against them all.  
 
And we supplied the  weapons.
 


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