The US had previously condemned Russia use cluster bombs in the Ukraine. The comments were made by Jen Psaki, then the White House press secretary at the beginning of the Ukraine war. Now, the moral tables have turned, President Joe Biden has moved to provide Ukraine with the kind of cluster munitions Psaki denounced. The idea is to kill Russians who are dug in. This is the sort of moral double standard that characterise the present war, and pushes it closer each day to a direct NATO versus Russia conflict.
https://contra.substack.com/p/the-bomb-business
“Just days after the war in Ukraine began last year, Jen Psaki, then the White House press secretary, was asked by a reporter about Russia’s use of “illegal cluster bombs” on the battlefield. The munitions, which carpet landscapes, are banned in more than 120 countries because they are indiscriminate weapons and due to the danger they pose to civilians even after conflicts have ended. “We have seen the reports,” Psaki said. “If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime.”
Now, President Joe Biden has moved to provide Ukraine with the kind of cluster munitions Psaki denounced. On Friday, his administration announced that a new weapons package for Kiev would include them. It is a decision that threatens to “sharply separate him from many of his closest allies, who have signed an international treaty banning the use, stockpiling or transfer of such weapons,” as The New York Times put it.
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So why now? The official rationale is a species of what’s been said many times before: “this one weapon system will fundamentally change the game in Ukraine.” Just like HIMARS and Bradley Fighting Vehicles were supposed to but didn’t really. The real answer is that the war machine has no brakes, certainly not when the conductors are hawks and decision-makers with defense industry investments, like Laura Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Cooper told Congress last month that the Pentagon had concluded that cluster bombs would give Ukraine an edge, “especially against dug-in Russian positions on the battlefield.”
Her comments were met with pushback from Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association. Kimball told Time magazine that while “cluster munitions may provide additional military value in certain limited situations, this is not some magical winning weapon for Ukraine in its ongoing offensive against Russia.”
That’s a reasonable rebuttal, but Cooper is a hawk. She testified in the impeachment inquiry against former President Donald Trump over his attempts to persuade Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in exchange for the release of U.S. military aid.
Trump first agreed to deliver Ukraine lethal weapons in December 2017, which included Javelin anti-tank missile systems, after aides told him it could be good for U.S. business, Foreign Policy reported. That’s true: the military-industrial complex reaped a windfall under him, with Trump approving more than $55 billion in foreign weapons sales during his first full fiscal year in office, compared to the $33 billion in foreign military sales in the final year of the Obama administration.
The first $47 million Javelin sale was completed in March 2018, marking the first time the U.S. provided lethal military assistance to Ukraine since 2014. The following month, a U.S. State Department official told RFE/RL that the initial batch of Javelins had “already been delivered” to Ukraine. Then, in December 2018, Trump’s State Department announced it would provide an additional $10 million in military financing to bolster Ukraine’s naval capabilities against Russia after a dust-up between the two countries near the Kerch Strait.
All this is to say that, in terms of policy, Trump did not deliver a radical break with the U.S. consensus on Russia that his words or the Ukraine scandal might suggest. But even the slightest hiccup is too much for people like Cooper, who only know how to drive one speed on war. That’s why the caution preached by people like Kimball falls on deaf ears.
Then there’s McCaul, the Republican from Texas and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who agrees with Cooper and calls the delivery of cluster bombs overdue.
“Now is the time for the U.S. and its allies to provide Ukraine with the systems it needs from cluster munitions to F-16s to ATACMS in order to aid their critical counteroffensive,” he said. “Any further delay will cost the lives of countless Ukrainians and prolong this brutal war.”
Through family members, McCaul has a knack for buying and selling stock, bonds or other financial assets that intersect with his congressional work. “His wife or children—who do all the trading Mr. McCaul reports—bought and sold shares of IBM and sold Accenture, both major Department of Homeland Security contractors, while he sat on the Homeland Security Committee,” The Times reported last year. A lawyer for McCaul told the paper that “the trades he files are made on behalf of his wife, using her assets, by an outside adviser to whom she does not provide direction.”
This trend is also apparent in connection to his role as House Foreign Affairs Committee chair.
An analysis by Sludge published in 2021 found McCaul was one of the top congressional investors in the defense industry, “with a total investment of up to $635,000, including up to nearly half a million dollars in Honeywell stock and as much as $150,000 in shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls.” McCaul’s financial disclosures, which include assets or holdings belonging to his wife or dependent children, place him among the wealthiest members of Congress, with a net worth of $125,880,292 in 2021, according to Insider.
To be sure, McCaul is an old-school interventionist. But war is also good money, and it finds no shortage of enablers in people like Cooper.
It’s doubtful cluster munitions will make the critical difference these people insist they will on the ground. But these weapons do guarantee a bloodier, more indiscriminate war that will mar the face of Ukraine for years to come, even after the shooting has stopped.
As the U.S. resorts to increasingly destructive implements, it seems the only thing off the table is diplomacy.”