Let’s open with a joke.
Because it’s all going downhill from there.
Cast your mind back to the 1999 Darwin Awards, when this runner-up got tagged as “Fatal Footsie”:
Decades of armed strife has littered Cambodia with unexploded munitions and ordnance. Authorities warn citizens not to tamper with the devices.
Three friends recently spent an evening sharing drinks and exchanging insults at a local cafe in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng. Their companionable arguing continued for hours, until one man pulled out a 25-year-old unexploded anti-tank mine found in his backyard.
He tossed it under the table, and the three men began playing Russian roulette, each tossing down a drink and then stamping on the mine. The other villagers fled in terror…
Now: scoot forward in time to 1 January 2001, when the world had not yet become A Different Place, and the various signatories to the Ottawa Covention banning the use of landmines had their second meeting, in Geneva, to discuss how things had been going thus far. There was some discussion of the fact that the US hadn’t signed as yet:
In practical terms, campaigners admit that an American signature would make little change to their current use of mines. With the exception of the North Korean border, the U.S. has not manufactured or used banned mines for the last three years. However, few people doubt the symbolic significance of a positive gesture. “It would make a very important difference if America signed. There is some international stigma in being one of the pariah states that hasn’t signed up,” says Rachel Harford, Joint Coordinator of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.
And though we may not have had the best reasons for not signing, we still had good reasons for not using landmines (outside of the North Korean border). After all, a GAO study of the 1991 Gulf War determined that the use of landmines by allied forces impeded us and didn’t necessarily impede the Iraqis. Moreover:
...even with clear-cut rationales for using landmines commanders were fearful of fratricide and decreased battlefield mobility caused by landmines and their usage. These concerns were based on “the obsolescence of conventional U.S. mines and safety issues with both conventional and scatterable landmines…and concern that reporting, recording and, when appropriate, marking the hazard areas created by the placement of self-destruct landmines or dudfields were not always accomplished when needed.”
And yet.
And yet, and yet, and yet.
The Pentagon is preparing to use anti-personnel land mines in a war with Iraq, despite U.S. policy that calls for the military to stop using the mines everywhere in the world except Korea by 2003.
Outrage. Anger. Fury. Channel it all into emails and faxes and letters to your Congresscritter now, people. Then CC it to Senator Patrick Leahy. Give him the mound of mail and the bursting letterbags he needs to go to the White House and the Pentagon and say with all our voices, “No. Way. In. Hell.”
—Of course, I realize I’m merely assuming you’re outraged at this news. It’s presumptive of me, I know. But hey—bygones.
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