If memory of reading Sid Blumenthal’s book serves, Clinton would have supported the treaty had it included an exception for Korea. I usually don’t have sympathy for military arguments, but this one is pretty compelling to me. Landmines there are a significant deterrent, and the idea that they could be cleared out with a bunch of suicide minesweepers is nutty.
Hhhmmm… Bush is not to blame specifically I think. Nor Clinton. Somehow the issue of the Ban is strongly entrenched with the US military or decision makers. The US is pretty strong in artillery delivered mines too. North Korea sure seems the primary reason for not accepting the ban.
As for the importance of the US joining… even if they don’t use many mines… the ban only gets credibility with US participation. Some bigger countries might be reluctant to accept the ban if the US remains outside it too.
Many also point out the lack of teeth of the ban. Still not trying is worse than failing at stopping the spread of mines. If poor countries have to improvise mines… at least it will be more costly and they will be less numerous. Probably easier to detect too.
This all of course reflects pretty badly on the US...My question would be : do the italians, for instance still produce/sell mines since the treaty has been signed? (I know that France stoped its production and destroyed its stockpiles, except for those necessary to train the demining units, and I would tend to assume it’s the same in other european countries).
Hold on a second.
First, this treaty is a sham and that’s that. It actually prohibits only landmines specifically designated as anti-personell. If a signatory wants to use mines and for some nonsensicale reason feel like living up to treaty obligation, they can simply use officially designated anti-meterial mines.
The actual effect of this law would be to make mines more lethal. While I’m sure that Roland Saul doesn’t really care about the Third World, I suspect Joe Peasant would hather lose a foot than his life.
Second, The US keeps maps of its minefields and they all have (I think with the exception of Korean mines, some of which are quite old) auto-defuse timers. We clean up our messes. And we only use them rarely.
However, we have a serious and neccessary demand for them in possible future wars. We can deliver mines by air power, particularly into sea lanes should we feel the need to block them off (actually, mostly harbors). If we get into a war serious enough to require the use of them like that, we can and should use them.
Third, I object to the offense and self-righteous tone of the OP, who obviously put no intelligent though into this anti-American screed.
Any weapon can kill if you use it stupidly and without concern. It doesn’t mean there is no legitimate use for that weapon.
Quote:
The United States has never used a lot of mines (None at all in about forty years) and have never been a major exporter.
Erm Paul, where do you think Israel gets all its mines from. I stayed on a kibbutz on the Golan heights. DMZ everywhere and LOTS of mine fields.
All countries should ban the manufacture of landmines. Period.
Sin
But far fewer. The aim is to reduce the number of casualties. Regardless of whether there is a legitimate use, bandit, the argument here is that these weapons do so much collateral damage that, like WMDs, the world would be a better place without them being deployed in future wars.
The Scientific American article I linked to puts it clearly; the vast majority of the 15,000 casualties every year are civilians. Amend the treaty by all means, but let us not keep minor details from making an earnest attempt to reduce this horrific number.
Your link doesn’t say anything about M14, M16, or M18A1 deployment.
Doesn’t the chemical and biological ban also precludes the use of non-lethal tear gas and pepper spray?
Again, as to military tacticians, have any said that it would be militarily wise to not use mines? It seems that they would be great for security around bases and bivouacs. Especially the M18A1.
Like it or not, the United States is not like most other countries. The US, for example, is the only nation that deploys the majority of its military abroad in defense of allied nations. So American strategic issues are unique.
The United States has been willing to negotiate on land mine control in the areas where it’s producing casualties; the indiscriminant use of cheap land mines in third world combat. But other countries continue to insist on including the Korean DMZ in any land mine treaty. The DMZ is a no man’s land; nobody is plowing fields or having picnics in the minefields there.
So instead of “shame on the United States” let’s include “shame on the rest of the world” for refusing to drop the Korean issue and get a useful land mine treaty signed.
Bill Clinton also refused to sign it.
A little bit of research shows you to be wrong…
"Israel’s policy regarding the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition on the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and their Destruction was stated at the signing conference in Ottawa, by Ambassador David Sultan, attending as an observer. He explained that “Due to our unique situation in the Middle East involving an ongoing threat of hostilities as well as terrorist threats…we are still obliged to maintain antipersonnel landmines as necessary for self-defense…[3]”
Main case-in-point, Israel manufactures their own mines.
]i]"Therefore, Israeli policy is committed to halting irresponsible and indiscriminate use of APL’s.[16] Indeed, in 1994, Israel instituted a three-year unilateral moratorium[17] on the export of antipersonnel landmines. The moratorium was renewed for three years in 1996, and was renewed in 1999, (with the eventual objective of an indefinite extension).[18]
According to various reports, Israel was, in the past, a significant producer and exporter of antipersonnel landmines. These reports note that Israel produced the M12A1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, and No. 6 (a copy of the U.S. Claymore) antipersonnel mines.[19]
Landmine manufacturers have included Israeli Military Industries, (IMI), based in Ramat Hasharon, and Tel Aviv-based Explosive Industries Ltd. (EIL). Nations listed in the trade press as acquiring IMI mines include Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nigeria and Zaire.[20] EIL”s No. 4 plastic antipersonnel mine was found by British deminers in the Falklands/Malvinas.[21]"*
Oh but…
"Israel has also reportedly imported 1.9 million antitank mines from the United States.[22]
So in a sense we do give them Landmines…but the concern is innocents dying to Anti-Personal Mines…a person dying to an Anti-Tank mine deserves to die.
You can’t miss those things…
Here is the link:
http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~steing/arms/minepolicy.htm
Now for my thoughts…
America can do what it wants, and it most likely is not doing what the rest of the world wants it to do, just because it is the rest of the world wanting us to do it.
Remember, we kicked the World’s ass, not the other way around…we call the shots.
Bravo!
bump: Hmm… for one thing, the first time it came up, Bill Clinton didn’t sign it.*
True, but I think what the OP is objecting to is not so much that the Bush administration is continuing Clinton’s policy but that they’re now mostly abandoning, or at best severely retarding, even the slow progress toward a landmine ban that the Clinton policy permitted. As Human Rights Watch noted,
The good news, on the other hand:
But overall, the new policy does look like a step backwards for the goal of eliminating landmines, and I don’t think the Administration has adequately made the case that there’s a good reason we needed to change course here. As HRW also notes,
So the policy reversal seems pretty much gratuitous, because we’re no longer making or using mines anyway, and the Korea issue was taken into account in the previous policy too. Does anybody know of a good reason for the US’s new stance? (No, TBC, “because we’re America and we can do anything we want, even if it’s just to piss everybody else off” doesn’t count as a good reason.)
No, my point was that before you go off on some sort of anti-Bush screed talking about how he’s evil, stupid, etc… because he hasn’t signed the anti-landmine bill, that our last Democratic party president, Bill Clinton, also refused to sign the treaty. I fail to see how this is an “evil Bush Administration” thing, if the Clinton Administration wouldn’t sign it either.
To me, if neither of them will sign it, there must be something suspect about it.
The treaty isn’t a sham, it simply allows the use of anti-tank mines. Simply declaring an anti-personnel mine to be anti-material won’t cut it; it would be an obvious violation of
Article 2 of the treaty which reads in part
The treaty only covers land mines, sea mines aren’t included. Regarding auto-defusing, while it is certainly a good thing it isn’t flawless. High explosives tend not to always perform as desired, take for example the 2-16 percent dud rate in cluster munitions, which results in their own accidental mine fields of a sort. Not all US mines are designed to be mapped, for example
FASCAM (Family of Scatterable Mines) produces a minefield that by definition isn’t properly mapped. While it has an auto-defuse time of between 4 hours and 15 days, a single volley of anti-personnel minelets from one artillery battalion produces 864 minelets, so even a 1% failure rate would leave 8.64 undefused mines.
“While I’m sure that Roland Saul doesn’t really care about the Third World, I suspect Joe Peasant would hather lose a foot than his life.”
Am I to read from this that mines are a good thing for the third world?? Or is it that my digust at the current brutal militaristic mentality of the U.S. makes me less compassionate somehow?
Am I to read from it that children stepping on mines and losing limbs or sight is preferable to killing them outright? Is that the justification?
How about using the incredible and infallible (not to mention legendary) “military intelligence” infrastructure concoct a scheme that targets military personnel and spares civilians ??
Further, YES, the Bush administration IS evil and deceitful IMHO. You just getting that now?? :rolleyes:
Maybe what you should have read was that the US doesn’t really use mines that much in its doctorine, relying on other things? Maybe what you should be doing, instead of ranting at the US, is finding out exactly how often the US’s mines are actually involved in all these autrocities you keep going on about. And maybe, if the US really ISN’T heavily involved, you should shift your ire somewhere else. Naw, I’m sure its more enjoyable to simply rant at the US as the bad guy. Why let the facts cloud a good screed, right?
You continue to show your ignorance at ever step. What the hell do you think the US military HAS been doing they past few decades?? We’ve gone from using carpet bombing to persision munitions. From area of effect artillary or free flight rockets to laser guided rockets. Why? The old stuff worked just fine after all. Maybe it was in a never ending effort (at a high cost btw) to try and limit the destruction and collateral casualties of civilians and non military property? But its never good enough for guys like you…you want perfection right now (oh, and lets cut the military budget too while we are at it). You want the military to have magic weapons who will only kill the bad guys, never an innocent. Its not going to happen no matter how you rant and rave about it. This is the real world where bad things happen.
As for mines, I was never in the Army (I was Navy) so I can’t really speak to this with a lot of first hand experience. Its always been my understanding that US doctorine doesn’t use a lot of fixed minefields, but that they use deliverable scatterable mines via artillary or cruise missile in some cases instead when needed. I know efforts have been made to make the minelets deactivate themselves after a period of time, but nothing is perfect. The US also keeps track of such things via GPS and makes every effort to clean up the battlefield after its engagements. Doesn’t sound like an evil empire to me, but I’m biased obviously. Lets get some real world figures here. Anyone have any figures on Iraqi civilians killed by US minefields (deployed by the US) in the recent war? That should give us a good indication of whether or not the US even uses the things in any meaningful way I’d think.
As evil and deceitful as Clintons administration obviously, as they also didn’t pass this thing, no? To my mind, if both Clinton’s and Bush’s administration agree on something maybe there is a deeper reason for the US not to pass this thing. Maybe you should think on that and look a bit deeper before flying off the handle at how evil we are…
-XT
That seems like a pretty weak reason to ban them. If we banned every weapon that might malfunction through mechanic or operator error then we’d have to get rid of bombs, missiles, rifles, and just about all of our other toys.
I’d probably support a treaty which required mines to have some sort of time delay mechanism. I’m not to keen on banning all of them now. Especially since we’ve got N. Korea to worry about.
Marc
So, Xtisme, if the U.S. doesn’t really use landmines in its’ doctrine, then what reasonable justification remains on the part of the States for not agreeing to adopt a more humane method of killing worldwide??
Seeing as how (according to you) the accuracy and capability of American weapons to destroy military targets and spare divilian targets is so advanced, surely there remains no need for such an outmoded weapon?? You seem to be arguing against yourself here. Further, I remain unconvinced that there has been any significant improvement in humane delivery of munitions to large scale targets.
Cluster bombs , daisy cutters, and remote delivery wide dispersal mines do NOT IMHO fit the definition of accurate killing machines, and the civilian casualties
continue to grow. Granted the ratio of civilian/insurgent/dissident/terrorist/boogeyman death and injury has improved, so what? Are you going to be the one to tell a 5 year old girl whose eyes have been blown out that things are much better because previously her whole family would have died? I thought not.
We remain distant and safe from any harm while atrocities are committed in our names, and we justify the killing of innocents as “necessary” and “because it’s war, and bad things happen”.
The pro-landmine argument continues to state that military strategy should in this case dictate our actions. The reason I posted in the first place was to draw attention to the fact that once again, the U.S. is letting the military determine foreing policy. This is a dangerous thing also IMHO, especially when it boils down to civilian casualties. Do you guys have any clue at all how many millions of enemies you are making? I guess you don’t have to worry anyway, because you are soooooo powerful you can crush any opposition forever…
I make no distinction amongst ANY users of ladmines. I feel that they are ALL guilty of abominations, yes. The U.S. doesn’t get a free pass just because it’s the biggest, moreover one would expect the self-proclaimed champions of peace and democracy to have a more progressive attitude towards outdated and cruel methods of waging war.
So what is it then? Does the U.S. NEED landmines because it is incapable of waging war otherwise? Or does it not wish, in what are certainly troubling financial times, to dispose of the 11 million or so that are bought and paid for that it continues to hold?
Lastly, do landmines actually achieve any significant battlefield advantages for the user?? Ther are some strategists who think otherwise, cites to follow for those who can’t search them out themselves.
Try this one, by the guys that have been there…
Here’s the one I remembered, found it at last.
Food for thought for all of the armchair heroes out there.
The optics are very bad from where I sit in Canada. especially when the U.S. boasts about its use of ‘smart’ weapons that result in ‘low colateral damage’.