Sign on letter to President Obama, requesting policy review on landmines, cluster bombs
Cc: Clinton, Gates, Jones, Rice, Kerry, Lugar, [Levin, McCain]
To sign on, pls send name, title, organization to Laura [at] fcnl [dot] org by COB on Monday 1/26,
January 27, 2008
Dear President Obama,
In early December, as half of the world’s governments signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions in Oslo, a spokeswoman for your Transition Team said that you would “carefully review the new treaty and work closely [with] our friends and allies to ensure that the United States is doing everything feasible to promote protection of civilians.”
We welcomed this statement. We write now to urge your administration to launch a thorough review within the next six months of past U.S. policy decisions to stand outside the treaty banning cluster munitions, as well as the treaty banning anti-personnel landmines. We hope that such a review will give appropriate weight to humanitarian and diplomatic concerns, as well as to U.S. military interests.
The closest allies of United States negotiated the Convention on Cluster Munitions based on their conclusion that these indiscriminate and unreliable weapons pose an unacceptable threat to civilian populations during and long after combat operations have ceased—in much the same way as do landmines.
U.S. nonparticipation in the decade old Mine Ban Treaty has been a sore spot in NATO relations and has overshadowed the U.S. government’s significant contributions toward global demining.
British Foreign Minister David Miliband, representing the world’s third largest user of cluster munitions in the past decade, asked states at the signing conference to “tell those not here in Oslo that the world has changed … that a new norm has been created.” He went on to say: “Our global community must continually keep challenging itself about the way it behaves. Political leaders must show they are prepared to listen and respond to the voices of victims, of civil society, and of ordinary people.”
As you noted during the campaign, U.S. forces have been moving away from using cluster munitions and anti-personnel landmines. The U.S. military has not deployed antipersonnel landmines since 1992, and it has not used cluster munitions in Iraq since 2003 or Afghanistan since 2002. Indeed, Secretary Gates recognized that cluster munitions are weapons of grave humanitarian concern and issued a policy to begin destroying them in 2018; meanwhile, U.S. policy on landmines, as articulated in 2004, also encompasses phased elimination of most mines from operational planning. The use of weapons that disproportionately take the lives and limbs of civilians is wholly counterproductive in today’s conflicts, where winning over the local population is essential to mission success.
Your election stirred great excitement in this country and abroad in large part because of your clear commitment to restoring U.S. moral leadership in the world. Reconsidering these two treaties—and eliminating the threat that U.S. forces might use weapons that most of the world has condemned—would greatly aid efforts to reassert our nation’s moral leadership.
We look forward to hearing that the policy review is underway.
Sincerely,
