What could make Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, and Charles Schumer vote with Republicans like Cornyn, Brownback, Dole, Domenici, Frist, Lieberman, McConnell, Sununu, and Vitter?
I’ve been looking at the results of the vote on Diane Feinstein’s September 6, 2006 Amendment # 4882 ("To protect civilian lives from unexploded cluster munitions") and I just can’t understand what I’m looking at. Well, no, the real problem is that I seem to comprehend it fine - I just can’t imagine why I’m seeing what I’m seeing.
I see my own Oregon senator, Ron Wyden, lined up with Boxer, Kennedy, Kerry, Leahy, Obama, Cantwell and Murray, voting YES - ban the damn things. I’m glad about those latter senators, but with the others that voted with them there were only thirty against the opposition’s seventy and the amendment failed.
But that first group contains senators Biden, Clinton, and Dodd, who are also running for president as Democrats. I’m a Democrat, and for me this is a BIG deal. I’ve tried to find a justification for the use of these incredibly cruel devices, which can have a failure rate of up to 25% (see Forward article below) - each one of the duds is capable of blowing up later and taking out a child, a farm animal, a farmer, or an automobile that runs over it. At 25%, there may be one million duds left from the Israeli war with Lebanon.
There have been at least a couple of diaries on the cluster bomb issue here at Kos: This one http://www.dailykos.com/... , and this one http://www.dailykos.com/... , for example. Alternet has a multi-page article on the US military’s usage and non-reporting of same here: http://www.alternet.org/...
This Jewish news site has questions about these things, calling out AIPAC’s "no-position" position on the issue: http://www.forward.com/... which contains this information:
Dud rates vary widely, as do opinions as to what rate is "acceptable." In 2001, then-defense secretary William Cohen announced that all future American sub-munitions should have a dud rate of less than 1%. Many manufacturers, for their part, claim about 5% dud rate under test conditions.
But the dud rate in last summer’s war in Lebanon, in which Israel dropped enough cluster bombs to scatter as many as 4 million bomblets, is estimated by United Nations sources and by de-miners to be more like 25%.
Why so high a rate? "Most of Israel’s arsenal was (and still is) American supplied, and the American clusters were for the most part older than the Israeli versions, and less reliable," according to Steve Goose, head of the arms division of Human Rights Watch. "But it is not unusual for militaries to use up old stuff before the new."
There is, however some hope. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy introduced the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act of 2007 (S.594) earlier this year. Again, from the Forward site’s article:
If passed, the bill would ban the use, sale and transfer of cluster bombs with a dud rate of 1% or more, as well as ban the use of all cluster munitions in places "where civilians are known to be present or in areas normally inhabited by civilians." And when cluster bombs are used, a clean-up plan would be required within 30 days. The bill also provides for a presidential waiver of the law’s requirements if "vital to protect the security of the United States," a provision that may make the bill more palatable to many of the senators who opposed a similar ban last fall.
That last sentence is worrisome for obvious reasons. This administration has hitched its very existance to Protecting Our Security and it’s hard for me to imagine it would allow any sort of bill to get in the way, even if it made it past Alfred E. Newman’s veto pen and penchant for signing statements.
So far, S.594 is supported by only senators Bingaman, Boxer, Brown, Cantwell, Feingold, Harkin, Leahy, Mikulski, Kennedy, Sanders, and Whitehouse, or about one in ten. ( http://www.opencongress.org/... ) There is a companion bill in the House, HR1755, but it has only thirteen sponsors, a percentage of the total membership that seems pathetic. ( http://www.opencongress.org/... )
Biden, Dodd, and Clinton are running for president; why can’t they support this ban? I don’t think Biden or Dodd has much of a chance in the race but Ms. Clinton does, and I’d really like to know why she has chosen to take this stand on this issue. Any speculation I might have is pointless - there’s simply no justification that I can accept for continuing to use these weapons which continue to kill after they are used.