liam's picture
Fri, 23/05/2008 - 4:18pm — liam

Getup irritate me. I’ll make that clear from the start. As a died-in-the-nylon-wool-blend leftie this admission comes with some difficulty as they do mean well, are organised fairly cleverly, and generally side with the angels. They shit me, despite this, because they habitually simplify and misrepresent.

They’re against cluster bombs and in favour of the international treaty eliminating their use. Fair enough, so am I, so are lots of people. The premise of their campaign, however, is that the Australian Government is stalling on the treaty because wants to protect their own “cluster bombs”, despite the UK having “reversed” their position to protect their “own weapons”. To put it mildly, this is not the situation.

The Cluster Munition Coalition, a group dedicated to demining and prohibition of cluster weapons, define the weapons they oppose this way:

Cluster munitions are large weapons which are deployed from the air and from the ground and release dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions. Submunitions released by air-dropped cluster bombs are most often called “bomblets,” while those delivered from the ground by artillery or rockets are usually referred to as “grenades.”

The United Kingdom has indeed removed its objection to the elimination of its stocks of indiscriminate cluster weapons, and good for them. The Australian Defence Force, and this is the point, has nothing like them.

The ADF munitions to which GetUp object are SMArt 155 artillery rounds. A cursory search of the internet shows that they’re a project similar to the Excalibur shell, a an excruciatingly expensive but very precise artillery round, designed to guide one relatively small bit of explosive to a specific target, and damage as few as possible of the things around that target. Yes, it’s designed to kill people, and I wouldn’t like one dropped on me, but it’s not a cluster bomb, by any reasonable standard. It’s designed specifically to do the opposite of clusterbombing or blind artillery bombardment: it’s designed to discriminate, and is, to be cynical, the perfect weapon for such a limited-imperialist war justified on liberal humanitarian grounds as the ADF is fighting in Afghanistan.

Objection to weapons of war, whatever their nature, is a coherent political position, and I would have more respect for Getup were they to take this pacifist line. To make the implicit campaigning compromise of trying to ban only some weapons, and then muddy the waters about which weapons fit into which category, is simply stupid, dishonest politics.

The worst thing is that it would have been so easy not to have mentioned the shell at all, and simply to have encouraged people to urge the Government to sign the anti-cluster munitions treaty. That’s it. Getup should do themselves a favour and campaign for the right causes with correct information.