No US cluster munitions for Ukraine

Editor's note: Whoever it was inside the Biden regime to make the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine touched off a backlash all across the globe. We can see that any moral position the US had in its collapsing support of Ukraine has now been lost. One company that engineered and manufactured cluster munitions is Textron. Textron no longer manufacturers these hideously destructive munitions and so the US would be sending already manufactured cluster munitions from old stocks the US wants to dump off on Ukraine. Other war contractors like Northrup Grumman and Orbital ATX are also involved in these munitions. We are under no delusions the Ukros would not use these cluster bombs on civilian infrastructure. If these cluster bombs are sent and used against Russian forces, Russia will respond in kind with far more destructive cluster munitions of their own.

Rep. Gaetz Says He Will Co-Sponsor Amendment to Block Cluster Bombs to Ukraine
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Source: Global Research

Stop Biden from Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine

By Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd | Global Research | July 11, 2023

President Biden may have crossed a new red line for the Democratic Party when he announced he would send banned cluster munitions to shore up Ukraine's slow counter-offensive against Russian troops.

On Friday, 19 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA-7), signed a letter to Biden warning that his decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine "severely undermines our moral leadership."

This time it's not just left-leaning activists in CODEPINK and the Peace in Ukraine Coalition who recoil in horror at Biden's escalation in Ukraine, but congressional Democrats who previously stood by their President. These are the same Democrats who voted to approve over $100 billion in Ukraine spending, an estimated half for weapons and military assistance for which there is no accountability.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN-4), ranking member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told Politico:

"The decision by the Biden administration to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine is unnecessary and a terrible mistake …The legacy of cluster bombs is misery, death and expensive cleanup generations after their use."

On Sunday other prominent Democrats took to the airwaves, with Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a former Vice Presidential candidate, telling Fox News he had "real qualms" about the President's decision, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA-13), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and US Senate candidate, telling CNN, "Cluster bombs should never be used. That's crossing a line." Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and former Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who visited Vietnam following the US withdrawal, joined the chorus with a Washington Post OpEd explaining how they had witnessed firsthand the "devastating and long-lasting effects these weapons have had on civilians."

Even before the official White House cluster bomb announcement, House Democrats Sara Jacobs (D-San Diego) and Ilhan Omar (D-Mpls) introduced an amendment to the 2024 military budget to ban the issuance of export licenses for cluster munitions.

Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, was one of the first to co-sponsor the bill. McGovern told the New York Times that cluster munitions, "disperse hundreds of bomblets, which can travel far beyond military targets and injure, maim and kill civilians — often long after a conflict is over."

The amendment, however, will need overwhelming bipartisan support to pass–as well as a President who will obey the law should the ayes have it.

In greenlighting cluster munitions, Biden thumbed his nose at 18 NATO partners that joined with over 100 other state parties to sign the 2008 UN Convention on Cluster Munitions. As Biden headed to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the NATO summit this week, Newsweek reported representatives of the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Spain were not on board for cluster bombs.

Biden also chooses to bypass current US law that restricts the use of cluster munitions to only those with a failure to detonate rate of less than one percent. In its last publicly available estimate, the Pentagon estimated a "dud rate" of 6%, meaning that at least four of the 72 submunitions from each shell failed to explode when unleashed.

With a bow to hawkish Republicans, such as Alabama's Tom Cotton on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Biden invokes the exception to the rule embedded in the statute against the use of cluster munitions. This exception allows for shipment of cluster munitions in the interest of vital national security.

Who controls eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, the Russian army or the Ukrainian army, is hardly a US national security interest on par with mitigating the threat of climate catastrophe or providing clean water to those with lead in their pipes or investing in housing for the unsheltered living under freeway overpasses.

Nonetheless, the same President Biden who a year ago warned of the risk of nuclear Armageddon, has reversed himself yet again to up the ante. Biden first said no, then flip flopped on a host of weapons: Stinger missiles, HIMARS rocket launchers, advanced missile defense systems, M1 Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets. Each one of these has been a kind of Russian roulette, testing Putin's "red lines."

With Biden’s latest decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, anti-nuclear activists wonder if the President–whose Nuclear Posture Review approves of "first use"– might also cross the nuclear red line, even though it's Putin who has issued veiled nuclear threats–and Biden and Putin in June of 2021 signed a statement that said, "Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

The impetus for the 2008 landmark UN Convention on Cluster Munitions came precisely from the indiscriminate U.S. use of these weapons in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. In Laos, the U.S. military blanketed the country with almost 300 million bomblets, many that failed to immediately detonate, only to later–after the US withdrew from Southeast Asia– maim adults and children who accidentally stepped on the cluster bombs or picked up the shiny balls thinking they were toys.

Please go to Global Research to continue reading.

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These are hideously destructive weapons leaving one to consider what possibly goes through the mind of the engineers who developed these weapons?

Cluster munitions: What danger do these weapons pose to civilians?

The Ukros are clearly war criminals and they have demonstrated this over and over again. Whoever it is inside the Biden criminal regime who made the decision to send these cluster munitions of Ukraine are intentionally provoking Russia into a far greater conflict:

Russian POWs Used As Human Shields During Ukrainian Demining Operations

Weapons, weapons and more weapons...this US-UK (NATO) proxy war on Russia is proving to be very profitable...

WATCH: Joe Biden broadcasts to the world that the U.S. is low on 155mm shells.

Does President Biden not care that our adversaries in communist China are listening?
pic.twitter.com/SxaI6jHo49

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) July 9, 2023