By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 11, 2024
On August 10, Military Times published an article demanding that NATO support the use of cluster bombs, bombs that litter the ground with colorful little bomblets that are very attractive to children during the last moments of those children’s lives or of their possession of various limbs or body parts.
The article was written by two folksy guys referred to in the credits as “John and Dan.” John Nagl is employed by the U.S. Army War College and is former president of the weapons-funded Center for a New American Security. Dan Rice is co-president of Thayer Leadership, an at least somewhat private company on the grounds of West Point Military Academy that is hired by corporations, including military contractors, to teach them so-called leadership.
According to John and Dan, NATO should ignore the wishes of the war ministers it supposedly consists of, much less their governments, never mind the people those governments pretend to represent, and renounce the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a treaty to which Canada, every nation in Western Europe, half the nations in Eastern Europe, and the majority of the nations of the world are party to.
John and Dan make no mention of who has funded their careers, no mention of the mythical Rules Based Order, and no mention of the fact that the United States has been shipping these evil weapons to Ukraine and Gaza after having indignantly denounced Russia for using the very same evil weapons in Ukraine.
Already whatever supposed benefit cluster bombs provide to each side in an endless slaughter is being had by both Ukraine and Russia. Already any children left alive in Palestine or Ukraine will be at risk for their entire lifetimes.
So why demand that NATO proclaim its lawlessness? Well, recently, some have complained that the U.S. is shipping cluster bombs to Ukraine through vassal states like Germany that pretend to abide by the treaty banning them. Such a conflict puts the lawless war-mad United States at odds with some of its leading weapons buyers and sidekicks in the “international community.”
But with John and Dan, and no doubt their downhome families and cute puppies, this is clearly also a matter of the general principle that disarmament treaties should never exist. For those who believe that agreements to rid the world of such horrors as nuclear weapons are necessary for human survival, this is a position of sociocidal significance — or it would be if anyone more sinister than John and Dan held it.