Here are some words that I have never before strung together: Marjorie Taylor Greene is right. Well, the Republican Congressmember from Georgia is (mostly) right, factually and morally, in her opposition to President Joe Biden’s decision to send potentially hundreds of thousands of cluster munitions to Ukraine.
This is what Greene posted on Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform last week:
The Biden Administration sending cluster munitions to Ukraine may be a war crime. These are dangerous weapons banned by Congress. It is an accelerated aggression that will kill many people. Shame on our leaders that are obsessed with funding and fueling war and death in foreign lands instead of actively negotiating peace.
These are, I think, fair points to make, even while allowing that Greene is against everything Biden does. Cluster bombs are uniquely sinister weapons, designed to spew shrapnel from dozens of smaller grenade-like bombs across large areas. The ones headed for Ukraine can fly about twenty miles before scattering seventy-two baby bomblets meant to detonate over an area a bit larger than a football field. Many of these bomblets can remain unexploded, creating a threat that can linger for years.
“Cluster munitions pose an immediate threat to civilians during conflict by randomly scattering submunitions or bomblets over a wide area,” —Human Rights Watch
“Cluster munitions pose an immediate threat to civilians during conflict by randomly scattering submunitions or bomblets over a wide area,” declares Human Rights Watch, the respected international watchdog group. “They continue to pose a threat post-conflict by leaving remnants, including submunitions that fail to explode upon impact becoming de facto landmines.”
These bomblets may be oddly shaped and colorful, making them especially appealing to children. Research by the Landmine and Cluster Munitions monitor counted 141 casualties from cluster bomb remnants in 2021; all but 3 percent of these were civilians, and two-thirds were children.
“It’s appealing to think that these will only be used on Russians, but even this isn’t entirely compelling: They could still fall on areas where Ukrainian civilians live,” staff writer Alex Shephard notes in The New Republic., “In the long-term, they represent a tremendous threat to Ukraine’s own civilian population.” Biden’s move, Shephard writes, puts lives at risk and gives Russia “an excuse to escalate” its own use of these weapons. “This is a foolish decision that undercuts months of progress and it’s one that Biden and his allies will certainly regret after the war ends, if not sooner.”
Biden told CNN that agreeing to send cluster munitions to Ukraine was a “very difficult decision” but said he ultimately concluded, “They either have the weapons to stop the Russians … or they don’t. And I think they needed them.”
Other defenders of the deal embrace the same logic: The Russians have used cluster bombs and so Ukraine ought to be able to use them, too, only more responsibly. It’s a flimsy argument, one that exposes the Biden camp’s reflexive hawkishness and disregard for international norms.
The United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international pact adopted in 2008 that took effect in 2010, has been signed by more than 100 nations, from Afghanistan to Zambia. It “prohibits all use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions” and requires the destruction of existing stockpiles. The United States, Russia, and Ukraine are among the few nations that have refused to sign.
Yet when the issue came up earlier in the war, the Biden team left no doubt that the use of this weapon could be considered a war crime.
In the early morning of February 25, 2022, just one day into Russia’s assault on Ukraine, cluster munitions were used in an attack on a preschool by Russian military forces, as documented by Amnesty International. The attack killed three people, including one child; another child was injured. Drone video footage of the attack shows two bodies lying in pools of blood. Asked about the matter on February 28, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied: “We have seen the reports. If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime.”
“There is no need for cluster bombs. It’s a bad call to be giving any to other countries.” —U.S. Representative Mark Pocan
Opponents of Biden’s decision say the same standard ought to apply to the United States. “When Russia first deployed cluster munitions in February 2022, the [United States] said that it could potentially be a war crime,” U.S. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, recently told John Nichols of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison. “What’s changed? Nothing. There is no need for cluster bombs. It’s a bad call to be giving any to other countries.”
Pocan is among the nineteen members of Congress who signed on to a July 7 statement declaring: “The reality is that there is no such thing as a safe cluster bomb—and using or transferring them for use hurts the global effort to eradicate these dangerous munitions, taking us down the wrong path.”
“We can and will continue to support our Ukrainian allies’ defense against Russia’s aggression,” the statement continues. “However, that support does not require we undermine the United States’ leadership in advocating for human rights around the world, enable indiscriminate harm that will only further endanger Ukrainian civilians, or distance us from European partners in the conflict who are signatories to the U.N. Convention opposing cluster munitions.”
As one of the signatories, Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, tweeted “The Ukrainian people are engaged in a just struggle for their rights, freedom, and humanity. The U.S. and Ukraine don’t need to stoop to Putin’s level.”
Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, offered an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act to undermine the Biden Administration’s move by adding language that reads: “No military assistance shall be furnished for cluster munitions, no defense export license for cluster munitions may be issued, and no cluster munitions or cluster munitions technology shall be sold or transferred.”
A House rules committee blocked action on this amendment but advanced an amendment from Greene that would have only banned the transfer of these weapons to Ukraine, not other countries. On July 13, that amendment failed to pass on a 147-276 floor vote, with nearly fifty Democrats including Representatives Pocan, Lee, Ilhan Omar of Minnesotta, Adam Schiff of California, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, and Katie Porter of California joining Republicans including Representatives Greene, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, and George Santos of New York in voting for it.
National Police of Ukraine, CC BY 4.0
Russian cluster munition in Krasnohorivka city (Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine) after the shelling of private houses from multiple rocket launchers, March 26, 2022.
It’s true, as Human Rights Watch has documented, that Russia has used cluster munitions in its war against Ukraine “in apparent violation of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war.” But the group has also cited new research showing that “Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks on Russian-controlled areas in and around the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine in 2022 caused ‘many casualties among Ukrainian civilians.’ ”
It is for reasons like these that the leaders of at least eleven countries—Austria, Belgium, Cambodia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Laos, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom—have expressed qualms over the U.S. military’s decision to provide these weapons to Ukraine.
Biden’s decision will “contribute to the terrible casualties being suffered by Ukrainian civilians both immediately and for years to come." —Paul Hannon, Cluster Munition Coalition
Paul Hannon, vice chair of the governance board of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Cluster Munition Coalition, has said Biden’s decision will “contribute to the terrible casualties being suffered by Ukrainian civilians both immediately and for years to come. Russia and Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions is adding to Ukraine’s already massive contamination from explosive remnants and landmines.”
The group has called for “an immediate halt to transfers of the internationally banned weapon” and for both the United States and Russia to “guarantee protection of civilians and respect for international humanitarian law.”
Greene, in her Truth Social post, says that cluster munitions have been banned by Congress. That deserves a rating of “Mostly True”—a remarkable achievement, considering the source.
What Congress did was to ban funding for cluster munitions that have failure rates of more than 1 percent. This was a standard that Robert Gates, secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, set in 2008 that was later rescinded by the Trump Administration in 2017, after which Congress acted to reaffirm this constraint.
The cluster bombs the United States is providing to Ukraine have higher dud rates than that. But Biden, according to The Washington Post, is bypassing this rule “under a rarely used provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, which allows the President to provide aid, regardless of appropriations or arms export restrictions, as long as he determines that it is in the vital U.S. national security interest.”
The Pentagon has said the cluster bombs being sent to Ukraine will have a failure rate of 2.35 percent or less, and promised that officials are “carefully selecting” which munitions to send to Ukraine from among those with this dud rate or below. But, according to The New York Times, “the Pentagon’s own statements indicate that the cluster munitions in question contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14 percent or more.”
Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, told the Post, “It’s dismaying to see the long-established 1 percent unexploded ordnance standard for cluster munitions rolled back as this will result in more duds, which means an even greater threat to civilians, including de-miners.”
Meanwhile, defenders of Biden’s decision note that Russian cluster bombs have dud rates as high as 40 percent, and that the Russian military deliberately targets civilians and civilian infrastructure. Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, citing this disparity, has called comparisons between the use of these weapons by the two countries a matter of “false moral equivalence.”
Yet, as Foreign Policy has calculated, “if [the] U.S. provides at least 100,000 cluster bombs, and each one has at least four duds, Ukraine will be littered with at least 400,000 unexploded bomblets.”
The lack of moral equivalence between that outcome and the cluster munitions used by Russia is likely to be lost on the children that they will kill or maim.