The Land Mines Obama Won’t Touch (Guest Voice)
The Land Mines Obama Won’t Touch
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Many people are troubled that Barack Obama flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize so soon after escalating the war in Afghanistan. He is now more than doubling the number of troops there when George W. Bush left office.
The irony was not lost on the President, and he tried to address it in his Nobel acceptance speech. “I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land,” he said. “Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict – filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.”
Granted, there’s a gap here between the rhetoric and the reality. But there’s always been something askew about Nobel Peace Prize, in no small part because it’s given in the name of the man who invented dynamite, one of the most powerful and destructive weapons in the human arsenal.
It was rumored that after Alfred Nobel brought his version of Frankenstein into the world, he was torn by guilt over his creation, his shame said to have intensified when a French newspaper prematurely ran his obituary with the headline, “The Merchant of Death is Dead.” The article vilified him as a man “who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.”
What’s more, until the end of his life he corresponded with a woman named Bertha von Suttner, who had briefly worked as his secretary. Many believe that Nobel was moved by a powerful antiwar book she had written titled “Lay Down Your Arms.” Whatever his reasons, when his will created the Nobel Prizes he specifically included among them a prize for peace. Von Suttner became one of its first recipients.
After Nobel’s death, events turned grim, as if to mock him further. The arms race exploded beyond anything he could have imagined. From the coupling of science and the military came ever more ingenious weapons of destruction that would take even more lives in ever more horrible ways. One of the most insidious was the land mine, that small, explosive device filled with shrapnel that burns or blinds, maims or kills. Triggered by the touch of a foot or movement or even sound, more often than not it’s the innocent who are its victims – 75 to 80 percent of the time, in fact.
As a weapon, variations of land mines have been around since perhaps as early as the 13th century, but it was not until World War I that the technology was more or less perfected, if that can be said of weapons that mangle and mutilate the human body, and their use became common. The United States has not actively used land mines since the first Gulf War in 1991, but we still possess some 10-15 million of them, making us the third largest stockpiler in the world, behind China and Russia. Like those two countries, we have refused to sign an international agreement banning the manufacture, stockpiling and use of land mines. Since 1987, 156 other nations have signed it, including every country in NATO. Amongst that 156, more than 40 million mines have been destroyed. Just days before Obama flew to Oslo to make his Nobel Peace Prize speech, an international summit conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, to review the progress of the treaty. The United States sent representatives and the State Department says our government has begun a comprehensive review of its current policy.
Last year 5,000 people were killed or wounded by land mines, often placed in the ground years before, during wars long since over. They kill or blow away the limbs of a farmer or child as indiscriminately as they do a soldier. But still we refuse to sign, citing security commitments to our friends and allies, such as South Korea, where a million mines fill the demilitarized zone between it and North Korea. Twelve years ago, at the time the treaty was first put into place, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Jody Williams, an activist from Vermont who believes that by organizing into a movement, ordinary people can matter. She proved it, despite the stubborn refusal of her own country’s government to do the right thing.
Last week, Jody Williams condemned America’s continuing refusal to sign the treaty as “a slap in the face to land mine survivors, their families, and affected communities everywhere.” The Nobel Committee said that part of the reason it was giving the Peace Prize to President Obama was for his respect of international law and his efforts at disarmament. And twice in his Nobel lecture, the President spoke of how often more civilians than soldiers die in a war. Then he said this: “I believe that all nations, strong and weak alike, must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I, like any head of state, reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards strengthens those who do, and isolates – and weakens – those who don’t.”
And still the land mine treaty goes unsigned by the government he leads.
Go figure.
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
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There are more issues to consider than just landmines as a weapon. For one, our allies that have, “banned”, land mines will readily use our stock pile in time of war, because this is part of our NATO treaty. Considering our enemies, and, the nightly defense of our firebases and field installations in Afghanistan, I find it irresponsible to simply “ban” land mines for humanitarian considerations when humanitarian considerations can be addressed by simply and responsibly removing the land mines when we leave.
The problem is not so much the existence of land mines, its not removing them after the hostilities leaving them to be stumbled upon by the innocent, that are irresponsibly inhumane.
You realize that you are talking about the US Government here, we barely clean shit up at home, what would lead you to believe that we would do it anywhere else?
Munitions and Mines: Peace Education for Laos
It would be really f*cking nice if we cleaned up the unexploded bombs that we threw into a country with which we were not at war.
[You realize that you are talking about the US Government here, we barely clean shit up at home, what would lead you to believe that we would do it anywhere else?]
Answer: Law.
As for the Southeast Asia reference; regarding landmines, anything over about 23 years in the past is irrelevant, since that is about the time the anti landmine movement began. You people keep forgetting that war is not humane and never will be. No one is going to stop using landmines regardless of whatever humanitarian agreement they sign. War simply is uncontrollable. That is why it is war.
I may not say this nearly enough, Father_Time…..
WELL SAID!
That and $3.00 will get you a nice cup of joe at Starbucks… Want to explain to me using simple words why water boarding people is now legal?
Well I am sure that the Laotians would agree with you. I mean how relevant can those little bombs be today? After all they only cripple and kill a few dirt farmers every year, and they are not Americans…
I understand your premise and I am sympathetic to your concern. I have seen the innocent killed and maimed personally because of landmines. The problem is not the weapon, but the irresponsible use of it.
If we can spend millions searching for the remains of dead and missing American military people, we can do the same to remove landmines after a conflict. All it takes is a similar law that provides the money for one, to do then other as well.
Again your reference to Southeast Asia is incomplete. How many millions of Cong/NVA set explosive booby traps, (mines), now kill dirt farmers? I noticed that you didn't reference that. Probably because you don't have the information, and, most probably because the Cong/NVA didn't provide you with the data. Why? Because it does not suit their political purpose. Please note that we did clean-up all landmines laid by air and ground forces after the first Gulf war. Either by ourselves or by proxies that we paid to do so.
Banning all landmines would be like banning all rifles. Sounds good but won’t work.
Mines are not only invaluable for the Korean Peninsula so long as the North is a threat, it's also, as I've written before, what we should be doing to seal the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan currently.
We can't even close to border between the US and Mexico, and compared to the Durand Line its a walk in the park.
How many hundreds of thousand mines do you think we are going to need? And who do you think is going to lay them and who is going to remove them or are you just going to leave them there when the US leaves Afghanistan as ignominiously as it left Vietnam.
“We can't even close [the] border between the US and Mexico, and compared to the Durand Line its a walk in the park.”
Well, that's not much of an effective argument, because we really haven't seriously tried to seal the border with Mexico. (And, having the Dems in office now that we currently have in Washington hints openly at a reduction, not an increase, in such an effort, with or without other immigration “reform.”)
“The Afghanistan-Pakistan Border line was drawn by Sir Mortimer Durand”
I know about the Durand line. As I've written before, in our own imperialist and colonialist times, we had much of the West's states, and notably, state boundaries, created in much the same “abrupt” manner.
“How many hundreds of thousand mines do you think we are going to need?”
Put the mines mainly along the known travel routes, and assign patrols to the rest of the (tougher) terrain.
Map the mine fields and give the maps to the Afghan (and Pakistani) governments when we leave, or remove the mines as they are replaced by Afghan military presence (which may include their own mines).