I see several diaries on my junior Senator, Bernie Sanders, and the hold he placed today on the confirmation of Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chair, but I didn't see anything about the rather blunt rebuke of President Obama on the Senate floor by my senior Senator, Patrick Leahy.
As Lost Left Coaster noted last week:
the Obama administration has announced that the USA will not be signing the international treaty that bans land mines. This news comes in advance of the Cartagena Summit on a Mine Free World, which will take place November 29 through December 4 in Cartagena, Colombia, and will review the international progress against land mines after ten years of the treaty.
Patrick Leahy has been a strong proponent of the landmine treaty. It has become something of a personal priority for him. It was, after all, only 12 years ago that Vermonter Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize (along with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines) for doing the heavy lifting that enabled the treaty to come into existence in the first place. The so-dubbed "Ottawa Treaty" has since been signed by 156 nations, and the US is joined on the list of non-signatories with nations such as China, Russia, Syria, Cuba, North Korea and Iran (Finland's on that list too. Go figure.)
As an early supporter of Barack Obama in the primary, Leahy had every confidence that the new President would finally erase our international shame on the issue and sign on, and he was angered to hear of the rejection. In his floor comments on Tuesday, he lamented the communication (or lack thereof) from the White House and the sorta-backpedaling that followed the initial reports that the treaty was going to be left on the table yet again:
Last Tuesday, the State Department spokesman announced that the Administration had completed a review on its landmine policy and had decided to continue supporting the Bush Administration's policy, which was, in key aspects, a retreat from the policy of President Clinton.
This was a surprise to me and others, as I had encouraged the Administration to conduct such a review and then heard nothing for months. In fact, I had spoken personally with President Obama about it just a few weeks before.
I did not hesitate to express my disappointment, as did many others. Shortly thereafter this wave of criticism, the State Department reversed itself, and announced that a "comprehensive review" is continuing and that it would send a team of observers to the Cartagena review conference this week.
It may well be that the State Department spokesman misspoke. Whatever the truth is, the Administration's approach to this issue up until this past weekend has been cursory, half-hearted, and deeply disappointing to those of us who expected a serious, thorough reexamination of this issue.
Although he reportedly received the backpedaling communications from the White House after his initial statement last week reacting to the reports, Leahy took his frustration to the floor on Tuesday in no uncertain terms.
His tone was uncharacteristically critical of this President (emphasis added):
The United States military is the most powerful in the world. Yet we have seen how civilian casualties in Afghanistan have become one of the most urgent and pressing concerns of our military commanders, where bombs that missed their targets and other mistakes have turned the populace against us.
Despite this, one of the arguments the Pentagon makes for resisting calls to join the Mine Ban Treaty is to preserve its option to use landmines in Afghanistan, even though we have not used these indiscriminate weapons since 1991.
Since the Pentagon has never voluntarily given up any weapon, including poison gas, which President Woodrow Wilson renounced in 1925, perhaps this is to be expected.
But can anyone imagine the Unites States using landmines in Afghanistan, a country where more civilians have been killed or horribly injured from mines than any other in history?
A country which, like our coalition partners, is itself a party to the treaty?
A country where if we used mines and civilians were killed or injured the public outcry in Afghanistan and around the world would be deafening?
Can anyone imagine this President, who has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize which only a few years ago was awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, having to publicly defend such a decision?
I wonder if anyone at the Pentagon has thought of the military and political implications of that.
The tenor of his comments suggest he may feel he's simply being jerked around a bit too much. In any case, its not only a principled statement from Senator Leahy, it's a smart one; it has been Obama's pattern to follow major disappointments to his base with some sort of policy compensation prize, and if Senator Leahy and others push on this, that push may well be uniquely timed to get some traction.
Little Vermont does some roaring today, eh?
The full comments are definitely worth a read. Click here to read them.
UPDATE: Here's the video (YouTubes are allowed here again now, right?):