THE BUSH administration's refusal to join a landmark international treaty banning the production, stockpiling, transfer, and use of cluster bombs is inexcusable. This is not a time when military necessity overrides humanitarian imperatives.
The cluster munitions that 110 nations agreed to foreswear in Dublin on Wednesday inflict horrific suffering on civilians and have little military utility in today's conflicts. Hundreds or thousands of bomblets are released when containers of cluster munitions burst open in the air. And all too many of those remain unexploded in field, farm, and village - until they are set off by a plowing peasant or a playing child.
Cluster bombs were originally used in World War II, and most of the arsenals existing today were meant for a Cold War battlefield, to kill and maim soldiers in tank and infantry formations over an extended area. The overwhelming international consensus expressed in the Dublin agreement is a recognition that the indiscriminate, unreliable weapons go on killing innocent civilians long after the military combat in which they were used has ended.
The most recent examples are Israel's scattering of cluster munitions over parts of southern Lebanon during the 2006 war against Hezbollah, and the NATO war to drive Serb forces out of Kosovo in 1999. Civilians living today in those areas are still being crippled and killed by remnant bomblets, as are villagers in Laos who remain vulnerable to unexploded cluster munitions dating back 40 years.
The Pentagon does not like being told what weapons it can keep, and President Bush does not like being bound by international treaties. But the new cluster bomb treaty can, and should, embarrass all the treaty's major holdouts - China, Russia, Israel, India, and Pakistan as well as the United States - to stop making, using, and peddling these inhumane weapons.
