Clusterfuckers

So it now appears that one of Israel's self-defense tactics involved hitting civilian areas with cluster bombs, naturally purchased from us.

The U.S. State Department said Friday it is investigating whether Israel may have used cluster munitions in Lebanon in violation of agreements with the United States restricting their use. A United Nations agency said earlier this week it has found abundant evidence that Israel used the bombs against Hezbollah guerrillas, some in populated areas of southern Lebanon.

The Bush administration defended Israel's overall military campaign against Hezbollah as an act of national self defense. But officials here acknowledge that an inquiry is under way as to whether the Israelis used U.S.-supplied cluster munitions in civilian areas in violation of unpublished agreements with Washington.

Inquiry, shit. ABC News showed UN workers digging unexploded bomblets out of apartment rubble, holding up to the camera to see. Unless that was a far more extreme version of news-faking than the faked smoke in the infamous Reuters photo. But it fits the pattern established by us in Iraq -- indiscriminate cluster-bombing in or near civilian areas, knowing full well that 20-25% of the bomblets don't explode upon impact, and are found later, frequently by hapless civilians, many of them children. Functionally, they're essentially mines.

I suppose this is just another of those "hard decisions" that "serious people" have to make for "freedom". It's always someone else's kid, after all.

The New York Times account said the charges against Israel are not unprecedented and that that Reagan administration imposed a six-year ban on sales of cluster weapons to Israel in the 1980's, after a congressional inquiry found that they had been used improperly in Israel's 1982 Lebanon invasion.

There have also been a number of U.S. inquiries over the years, all of them apparently inconclusive, into charges of Israeli violations of the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, which requires that American-supplied weapons be used in legitimate self defense.

The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center said in a report earlier this week that it had found hundreds of unexploded bomblets of American origin in scores of locations in southern Lebanon since hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas ended earlier this month.

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington said Israel has not been informed of the U.S. investigation, but when and if it is, it would happily respond.

The Israeli military has said it sought to avoid civilian casualties in its drive into Lebanon and that it used all weapons in conformance with international law. Israel officials say that by contrast Hezbollah indiscriminately fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli towns during the 34-day conflict with no other intent but to harm civilians.

Well, then I guess you're even now, aren't you? Southern Lebanon is destroyed, infrastructure (which, you know, enables civilians to do things like go to work and home and school, and lead normal everyday lives) up and down the entire country has been damaged from deliberate targeting, and a quarter of the population was turned into internal refugees.

And now cluster-bombing civilian areas, while smugly denying that civilians are being deliberately targeted, and pointing the finger at Hezbollah for its "indiscriminate" attacks. I dunno, seems like there's some blame to go around on that count.