Why the US must 'respect' Ukraine’s conclusion 'that they need cluster munitions': columnist
11 July 2023
President Joe Biden's decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions that are banned by 123 countries has received mixed reactions from the media and individuals across the American political continuum.
Opponents have argued that endorsing the use of these weapons — given their indiscriminate destructive potential and tendency to injure or kill long after conflicts have ceased — will stain the US' reputation and global moral standing. But Washington Post opinion columnist Max Boot believes that there is another perspective to the debate that is being broadly overlooked.
While critics "have a point about Biden using his executive authority to circumvent congressional restrictions against the use of cluster munitions with a failure rate higher than 1 percent," Boot wrote on Tuesday, those concerns should not be prioritized over what Ukraine seeks to accomplish with them.
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"Ukraine's democratically elected leaders, whose relatives, friends, and neighbors are in the line of fire, are more mindful of minimizing Ukrainian casualties than are self-appointed humanitarians in the West watching the war on television," Boot said. "If President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his generals have concluded that they need cluster munitions — and they have — it's because they have balanced the risks of civilian casualties from unexploded ordnance against the risk of not being able to expel the Russian invaders, and they have decided that the latter is a greater concern than the former."
Therefore, Boot continued, the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies "need to respect their decision. Cluster munitions remain a lawful instrument of warfare for countries that haven't signed the 2008 convention, and Kyiv has shown itself a responsible steward of all the Western weaponry it has received. Zelenskyy and his generals are, in fact, so worried about needless loss of life that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is progressing too slowly for the liking of some observers in the West. Unlike the Putin regime, the Zelenskyy government is not willing to butcher its own men in human-wave attacks. Using cluster munitions has the potential to save the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers."
Furthermore, according to Boot, Zelenskyy's government has proven more effective at "averting civilian casualties than the Kremlin has. Russia has used cluster munitions against Ukrainian cities. Ukraine is planning to use cluster munitions against Russian troops who are unlawfully on its soil. That is a massive moral difference that's worth pointing out to those who suggest a moral equivalency between Ukrainian and Russian use of cluster munitions."
If the defeat of Russian President Vladimir Putin is indeed the objective of Ukraine and its Western backers, Boot concluded that "denying Ukraine all the lawful weapons it needs is misguided. Peace in Ukraine will not come through the work of Western human rights campaigners, important as it is, but through hard fighting by the Ukrainian armed forces. The Ukrainians are in the right, and they deserve all the help we can give them — and that includes cluster munitions."
Boot's editorial is available at this link (subscription required).