Who can forget Princess Diana’s visit to Angola and Bosnia in 1997 to walk through areas of mines and to engage with the victims of the explosives? Just days after her untimely death, the United Nations Mine Ban Treaty was signed by 164 countries. Today, Lady Diana’s visit is still talked about in Angola. But her legacy, stopping the wanton killing of innocents, seems buried with her today.
U.S. President Joe Biden wants to supply Ukraine’s lunatic in charge, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with highly controversial cluster munitions. Not contented to upend world peace, detente, economies, and killing hundreds of thousands on the battlefield in Ukraine, America’s most dimwitted and soulless leader in history aims to blow off the feet of Ukrainian and Russian kids as his legacy in Eastern Europe. How this guy is still in office and not in jail is a great mystery for many. Just how deep into hellhole policies he’s willing to go is more certain. To the bottom or “bust” is the motto of the Biden White House.
For those unfamiliar, cluster munitions in the form of bombs, missile warheads, or artillery rounds spread shrapnel designed to kill troops or take out armored vehicles such as tanks. The munitions accomplish this by scattering “bomblets” across large battlefield areas. The munitions have many dangers, but the biggest fear is that the bomblets can fail to explode on impact and pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines. Children are often the sad victims of leftover bomblets that can kill or maim.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman, Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, has backed the president’s decision to send cluster bombs to the Zelensky regime. I wonder if McCaul and his paymasters recall a woman named Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales, who died in an unfortunate car crash in August 1997? I don’t think many people in Washington remember anything about Lady Dianna or her work to end the suffering of millions. And given Biden’s recent trip to see King Charles, it seems all her work will be undone by the ruling elites who call the shots these days.
The work I refer to here is the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and that organization’s Cluster Munitions Initiative, which began in 2007. Diana’s foundation, which had raised tens of millions to help the impoverished and forgotten people of the world, ceased operations in 2012, and in 2013 the trust was taken over by the Royal Foundation. Then in 2020, the memorial fund was divided between Princes William and Harry and given to their independent charities. So, it would seem that even her children are good with Biden, making the soil beneath the feet of little Ukrainian or Russian kids deadly for generations. Biden and his Russophobic bosses aren’t satisfied with bleeding out adults in a needless Ukraine war; they want the killing and dismemberment never to end.
The original campaign of her foundation began a global movement to ban cluster bombs, started national campaigns for the same end, and supported those affected by the cluster munitions. Ironically, or sadly, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions to ban the use or stockpiling of these weapons was eventually signed by 111 world nations in 2012. Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States were the most interesting countries that did not sign. On July 7th, the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) said it was “appalled by the United States’ plans to transfer banned cluster munitions to Ukraine.” The U.S. Cluster Munition Coalition (USCMC) sent a letter to the White House, and various organizations aligned with CMC and formerly Princess Diana’s Foundation are doing little more than warning that they will continue to warn about the dangers of these weapons of ongoing destruction. It’s sad.
So, what can we expect in the future? Well, the unexploded bomblets from these munitions can remain dangerous for decades after the end of a conflict. How much carnage will be inflicted on a finally peaceful Russian steppe? To give you an idea, the United States cluster bombing of Laos stopped in 1973 kept on killing 100 Laotians per year as of 2009. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen warned Ukraine of using cluster munitions on Twitter, saying:
“It would be the greatest danger for Ukrainians for many years or up to a hundred years if cluster bombs are used in Russian-occupied areas in the territory of Ukraine.”
Joe Biden, who has escaped incarceration for treason and taking bribes alongside his son Hunter, bypassing U.S. law prohibiting the transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate greater than one percent. The White House is relying on an assurance from the Pentagon that Zelensky will be getting the new and improved munitions. Perhaps those 155 mm shells will only leave a few unexploded bomblets, and only 40 or 50 civilians will die per year on the borders of Russia! We can expect something similar to the first year after the end of the Kosovo War, when more than 100 civilians died from unexploded bombs and mines then. This result would be a little better than the 3-4 Lebanese innocents per day killed after Israel’s cluster bombing campaign of 2006.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
