"Be Careful."
- Bush administration official's advice to Israel on how to use their fresh supply of US-made cluster bombs.
In his 1996 declaration of war, Osama bin Laden said, "The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory." He was referring to the 1996 Qana massacre, in which Israel 106 Lebanese civilians were killed while taking refuge in a UN compound. A subsequent UN investigation found that "it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors." An Amnesty International investigation concluded that "the IDF intentionally attacked" the compound. This was 1996.
Ten years later, on July 21 of this year, the New York Times reported that Israel had requested that the US "speed up" its bomb shipments to Israel so they could drop them on Lebanon. The Bush administration agreed to give Israel the bombs "with relatively little debate," according to the New York Times.
Now, when you talk about the Qana massacre, you have to clarify if you're talking about the 1996 massacre or the 2006 massacre. Because nine days after the story appeared in the New York Times, Israel dropped a 2,000 pound US-made Mark 84 bomb on an apartment building in Qana, killing several civilians - death tolls range from 28 to 54.
The Mark 84 is nicknamed "Hammer" for its formidable power. In 2004 the United States agreed to sell Israel 2,500 of these bombs, equipped with precision-guidance systems. These precision-guided "smart" bombs are said to minimize civilian casualties, but looking at the 2006 Qana massacre, one could just as easily conclude that they are intended to maximize civilian casualties.
While even the most indoctrinated observers shrieked at the naked massacre of Lebanese civilians, the US made its priorities clear. While providing bombs to Israel, they criticized Iran for providing bombs to Lebanon. Condoleeza Rice interpreted the desperate shrieking of dying children as "birth pangs of a new Middle East" and refused to push for a cease-fire, implicitly allowing Israel to continue its haphazard and imprecise assault.
Continuing the pattern, Israel politely asked the US to speed shipment of M-26 cluster bombs on August 10. The New York Times reported that the deal "is likely to be approved shortly," despite the reservations of some in the State Department who worry that the rockets "carry hundreds of grenade-like bomblets that scatter and explode over a broad area" and "are fired by the dozen and could be expected to cause civilian casualties if used against targets in populated areas."
"If the shipment is approved, Israel may be told that it must be especially careful about firing the rockets into populated areas," the Times quotes a senior administration official as saying.
David Siegel, spokesman for the Israeli embassy, said, "as a rule, we obviously don't fire into populated areas, with the exception of the use of precision-guided munitions against terrorist targets."
Which terrorist targets is he talking about? The UN compound housing evacuees in Qana in 1996? Or the apartment building in Qana in 2006? As the accidental massacres pile up, we can draw only one of two conclusions: Either these massacres are not accidents, or else the "precision-guided" missiles are not accurate.
And US officials, offering lengthy admonishments of Hezbollah's rockets, have reduced its criticism of Israel's massacres to two words: "Be careful." I try not to reduce complicated foreign affairs into easily digestible sentences, but in this case I think one sentence is enough of a guide: If you have to be told to "be careful" with cluster bombs, you probably shouldn't have cluster bombs.