We love watching disaster movies. The sight of destruction brings joy and stress relief for many people, because it's not my house that's being destroyed by the tornado, but the home of a farmer in Kansas. The news on TV is even better, we don't have to sit through one and a half hours to get our dose of disaster. And this might even be true, in some cases, and not here but over there, far away, in another country. We're no longer in Kansas.
Never before has the pro-war part of the international community shed crocodile tears so brazenly as it does over Ukraine. They mourn the death of children and the destruction of the country, while giving the raging warriors more and more tricky explosive devices to see if they can kill and destroy more effectively. Cluster bombs? Yes, we can use them, Zelensky is happy with anything that looks dangerous. And they are, indeed, dangerous, banned in half the world, but because they are relatively cheap and have an impressive effect, why not spice up the broth boiling in Ukraine with them? When exploding, cluster bombs eject many small bomblets, most of which explode, devastating wide areas, but some of them just land on the ground, in the mud or in the woods, where they remain as dangerous duds, waiting for someone to pass by in, say, 30 years' time. Whole countries can turn unlivable in this way, as every step from then on is life-threatening for the local population.
Cluster munitions are not banned by the United States, Russia and Ukraine and given that they are not banned, they will be used.
Yet a war is not a football match, with the referee blowing the whistle to indicate every single foul. Illegal weapons will be used, and in the worst case, in five years from now, their lawyer will sweat a little to prove that there was no other option but to carry out that illegal activity. Japan could say a lot about this. The nuclear strikes by the US were not included in legal texts as a war crime, but as a move that brought the end of the war closer, and far fewer people died in this way than without the bombs. So this is why disaster movie fans – and of course arms manufacturers and construction contractors – see it perfectly justifiable for the US to provide Ukraine with cluster bombs, which pose a mortal death to civilians, and to use them there in defiance of their own military code. Because it is by using great force that a war can be won, and we are getting closer and closer to the end of destruction in this way.
