U.S. Nervous Over Israeli Use of Weapons

Israel's decision to use highly lethal "cluster" munitions (big bombs which spray tiny bombs over wide areas) against Lebanese civilians has made some American officials nervous. The State Department has delayed a previously scheduled shipment of cluster bombs to Israel and opened a formal investigation into whether Israel was cluster-bombing "strictly military" targets in its most recent war with Lebanon. Such bombing violates longstanding secret agreements between Israel and the United States that Israel not use cluster bombs and other high-tech weaponry against civilians. The first such agreement with Israel was signed in 1976. The first Israeli violation of the pact that the public is aware of occured in 1982, and prompted President Reagan to halt sales of cluster bombs to Israel for six years.

A few questions were left unanswered by David Cloud's piece in the Times about the most recent investigation into Israel's war ethics. Namely,

1. Does the United States sell these types of cluster munitions to countries other than Israel?
2. If so, does the United States require these countries to sign similar agreements that they will not use them against civilians?
3. If not, what is it about Israel that prompted U.S. officials to require such an agreement?

The New York Times broke this story yesterday, but left untouched the larger question of why the United States has, for the past several decades, harbored special worries about Israel's committment to following the normal rules of war.

Glenn Kessler's story in the Post was the only one to remind readers that not only has the United States used cluster bombs against civilians many times in Iraq, but that the State Department regularly investigates allegations that Israel "misuses" weapons supplied by the United States, including "whether Israel misused U.S.-made Apache helicopters in its assassinations of Palestinian leaders" during the regime of Bush I. "[L]ower-level officials had determined that Israel had violated its agreements with the United States, but, the officials said, the finding was quashed at a more senior level."

UPDATE: Glenn Kessler of the Post tells me via email he thinks that the answer to the first two questions above are yes: "Each country has its own individual secret contract [with the United States] but as a matter of international law you can't intentionally use cluster bombs against civilians." Humans Rights Watch says that "although there is no treaty that specifically regulates cluster munitions," provisions in the Geneva Convention which prohibit targeting civilians are considered by human rights scholars to encompass the use of cluster bombs, and are "legal norms deriving from common state practice that bind all nations regardless of specific legal committments." Human Rights Watch is one of several organizations working to expand international law to address cluster munitions.

Although several different types of cluster bombs exist, the basic principle is the same. A large bomb releases in midair several hundred bomb "packlets," which scatter over a large area and detonate upon ground impact, scattering shrapnel. Because the shrapnel from ground-detonated cluster bombs travel at such high speeds, a single fragment hitting any portion of the body can rupture internal organs. According to some estimates, it's not uncommon for up to one-third of a cluster bomb's subsidiary munitions to hit the ground without exploding. Their lethality does not degrade over time, as children in Afghanistan or Laos, who often stumble upon and accidentally detonate unexploded cluster bomblets, can tell you.

Despite our own Marine Corps' statement that "cluster munitions are not suitable to fighting in an urban environment," Human Rights Watch notes that the U.S. in Iraq "not only targeted populated areas but also employed old models of submunitions, with dud rates of fourteen to sixteen percent or higher." This means that up to one-fifth of these thousands of deadly bomblets are now sitting, unexploded, on the ground in Iraqi cities.

All of which, of course, raises a new and more important question. If the United States has used cluster bombs in every significant armed conflict since Vietnam, as is widely acknowledged, and is using them today against Iraqi civilians, why is it angry when Israel uses them in Lebanon? Is it because the UN officials and non-governmental activists who discovered the hundreds of unexploded, U.S.-made cluster bomblets on the ground in Lebanon are making such hay of it? Is the State Department's investigation of the Israeli army a result of our committment to ethical warfighting, or just another exercise in public relations?