Hillary Clinton Should Have US Sign Cluster Bomb Treaty

More than 100 countries have signed the Convention on Cluster Bombs, and more than fifty have ratified it, but the United States stubbornly refuses to join in.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was confronted by a dramatic legacy of U.S. warmaking during her recent visit to Laos.

“At an artificial-limb center, Mrs. Clinton met a nineteen-year-old who lost his forearms and eyesight when a bomb, dropped by the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War and unexploded for decades, finally blew up three years ago,” the New York Times reported.

Phongsavath Sonilya was yet another casualty of a war that the United States waged in secret as part of its intervention in Indochina—a war clouded in obscurity but almost unimaginable in its ferocity.

“Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped the equivalent of one planeload of bombs every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, on a country the size of Minnesota,” Douglas Hartwick writes for Foreign Policy in Focus. “One ton of bombs was dropped for every man, woman, and child in Laos at the time, making it the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.”

Clinton called the artificial limb center she visited “a painful reminder of the Vietnam War era” and added that “the international community will join us in our efforts to bring this legacy of the Vietnam War to a safe end,” as a prelude to announcing a tepid increase in the appallingly modest U.S. handout ($5 million in 2010) to clean up its mess.

But she has not taken the obvious and urgent moral step: pushing President Obama to sign the cluster bomb treaty.

http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/the-coalition/