Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003, page 13

Special Report

 

Why Did the United States Use Cluster Bombs in Iraq?

 

By Delinda C. Hanley

Iraqis will find it hard to forget the second U.S.-led war on their country in little more than a decade. While the debris and scorched wreckage eventually will be cleaned up and rebuilt, the lives lost and national treasures and government records looted are irreplaceable.

It is still too early to count human losses. Many Iraqi villagers buried their dead without obtaining official death certificates because travel to cities was risky. We may never know the exact figures, or the "collateral damage" to civilians who were not targeted but ended up as casualties.

It was inevitable that the U.S., with its weapons and resources, would win a war against a country only twice the size of Idaho—one already weakened and disarmed by a more than a decade of U.N. sanctions. Unless Iraq had used weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons, which it appears it did not even possess, the war was a rout before it even began.

Why, then, did the U.S. use cluster bombs in population centers? These 1,000 pound, 14-foot-long weapons explode and release hundreds of smaller bomblets the size of soda cans, which can then scatter over an area the size of a football field. Each bomblet can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They are designed to saturate a large area with explosives and flying shards of metal. So much for precision.

Sometimes cluster bombs land intact and blow up later. Most of the deaths and injuries Iraqis suffered were caused by cluster bomb shrapnel. "We saw them," Abdul-Illa al-Kaabi, a surgeon at Iraq's Najaf General Hospital, told a Reuters correspondent. "Some were not exploded and children picked them up and they were killed and injured."

When a 7-year-old discovered an unexploded bomblet and gave it to American soldiers, U.S. Army Sergeant Troy Jenkins of Repton, AL, threw himself on the cluster bomb to save his 101st Airborne companions and the Iraqi child.

In the past 12 years, 1,600 Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians have been killed, and 2,500 injured, by leftover bomblets. A year after the war in Kosovo, there were 150 cluster bomb casualties. Human Rights Watch and others have called for a ban on cluster bombs, similar to the ban on antipersonnel land mines. The U.S. has refused to sign the land mine agreement. Will it adopt a different stance with regard to cluster bombs?

The Pentagon did not resort to using the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" bomb, a full-power hydrogen bomb that throws up a cloud of radioactive dust as it destroys weapons or people hidden deep beneath the earth. It did, however, use lethal "bunker-buster" bombs in its March 20 attempt to kill former Iraqi President Saddam Hussain.

"During the war in Iraq, thousands of rounds of munitions made with depleted uranium have been fired from Abrams battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Attack aircraft," according to an April 28 Voice of America report. "The uranium hardens the tips of bullets and artillery shells and greatly improves their ability to penetrate armored targets."

Apparently the Defense Department wasn't worried about the health risk to Iraqis—or to U.S. occupation forces. Pentagon health official Michael Kirkpatrick says depleted uranium is not a major health concern of U.S. military officials right now, although he acknowledges that fragments of depleted uranium penetrators embedded in the ground could pose a threat to soil and water. In postwar Iraq, he says, "proper sewage, sanitation and clean water are far more urgent health issues, and should be addressed first."

When will the U.S. government address its own use of weapons of mass destruction in population centers?

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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