Dear Progressive Reader,

The Biden Administration announced on Friday that it would provide cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military for use against Russian troops in the nearly seventeen-month-long war. This decision marks a shocking escalation and a potentially deadly legacy for the civilian population. Biden defended the decision telling CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that it was “‘difficult decision,’ but ‘they needed them.’ ” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan further defended the decision, telling White House media, “Russia has been using cluster munitions since the start of this war to attack Ukraine. Russia has been using cluster munitions with high dud or failure rates of between 30 and 40 percent. In this environment, Ukraine has been requesting cluster munitions in order to defend its own sovereign territory. The cluster munitions that we would provide have dud rates far below what Russia is doing.” Oh, well, at least they are not as bad as the Russian ones???? Is that really a justification?

When Russia first deployed cluster munitions in February 2022, then Press Secretary Jen Psaki had a different tone, stating, “We have seen the reports [of Russian use of cluster bombs]. If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime. Obviously, there are a range of international fora that would assess that. So, certainly, we would look to that to be a part of that conversation.” But what part would the United States have in these “international fora”? Well, there is a treaty—the Convention on Cluster Munitions—calling on all signatories to cease the use of cluster bombs and eliminate their stockpiles. The treaty was adopted May 30, 2008, there are 123 nations that have so far joined the Convention (thirteen of those still need to ratify it). But the United States is not among these. In fact, as recently as April 2022, a group of U.S. Representatives sent a letter to the Biden Administration begging it to sign on to the Convention. “U.S. policy on cluster munitions as it stands is wholly unacceptable, given what we know about the immediate and long-term damage done to societies on which they are deployed,” they wrote.

Much of the mainstream media, on the other hand, seems to be accepting the justification that these brutal weapons are needed by Ukraine to counter Russian aggression. David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times, told PBS Newshour last night, “if Zelenskyy thinks he needs them, and if there's no other way to mount the campaign, then the U.S. is in the unfortunate position of being the responsible superpower, and so we have to make the tough calls.” His fellow commentator, associate editor of The Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart, concurred. The Progressive disagrees. What would they say if Zelenskyy said he needed nerve gas to defeat the Russians? Or nuclear weapons?

Writing in The Progressive twenty years ago, in August 2003, historian Howard Zinn noted, “The only weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been the bombs and missiles raining down by the thousands, the cluster bombs spewing out their deadly pellets, the arsenal of the greatest military power on Earth visiting destruction on [that country].” And thirty years before that, in an article titled “Binary Weapons: Death in Two Parts,” Colin Norman, writer for the British science journal Nature, in our December 1973 issue, described “cluster bombs which were made with virtually no thought given to how they would be demilitarized.” And two years before that, in December 1971, Richard J. Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies wrote about, “terror weapons [such] as cluster bombs, which are much less effective weapons against soldiers than against unprotected people.”

As the Cluster Munition Coalition of the United States clearly explains on their website, “Cluster munitions pose an immediate threat to civilians during conflict by randomly scattering submunitions or bomblets over an area the size of a football field and continue to pose a threat post-conflict by leaving remnants, including submunitions, which fail to explode upon impact, becoming de facto landmines.” Cluster bombs, first invented more than a century ago during World War I, have no place in the modern world. They are not a way to settle conflict, and the long-lasting effects they cause to civilian populations and the countries in which they are used is not excusable by any justification.

This week on our website, we look at a number of important cultural and literary works. David Shih writes about the relevance today of James Baldwin’s sixty-year-old classic work, The Fire Next Time (a portion of which first appeared in the pages of The Progressive a year earlier). Harvey Wasserman reviews a moving new memoir by poet and activist Rose Styron. And Ed Rampell previews a new film on the important history of Black baseball players, The League, which opens next week.

Plus, Starbucks barista and union organizer Alisha Humphrey takes on the coffee giant’s apparent “pridewashing” last month, noting, “If the company truly cares about queer and trans people, then it would sit with us at the bargaining table and negotiate a contract.” Glenn Daigon looks at bipartisan efforts to protect funding for public schools—even in “red states.” And Anthony Pahnke pens an op-ed calling for farmers to gain and maintain control over their own seeds—rather than giving this right to a shrinking number of consolidated major corporations.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. - The 2023 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now on sale for half price. You can still order one online.

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