Beautiful Things
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Philosopher George Santayana said those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Though he has more on his time plate than most Americans, I don’t believe Joe Biden cannot remember Vietnam and Laos. He was a United States Senator when we pulled the last American soldiers out of there and the unexploded cluster bombs we left behind began a post-war toll on civilians that continues fifty years after. I don’t believe Joe Biden can’t remember that in Laos alone twenty-five thousand human beings, half of them children, have been dismembered or killed in the peacetime we left them.
It wasn’t for lack of memory that he’s now bequeathed the same legacy on the children and caregivers of Ukraine; it’s for lack of something else.
The moral center that caused one hundred twenty-three other nations to join the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, promising “never under any circumstances” to use, develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain, or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, these things, is somehow missing in the United States, Russia, and Ukraine.
I get it about Russia and Ukraine: like our own once and future would-be king, Russia is ruled by a sociopath, Ukraine is fighting for survival, so both have already brought out the cluster bombs.
My disappointment in the U.S. runs a little deeper, back to the Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia both Joe Biden and I remember, and what we did there.
We did the same thing in Iraq in 1991, and again in 2003. The same thing in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan.
Children are the most vulnerable in all those places for decades to come. Maybe for a hundred years.
“Cluster bombs sometimes look like beautiful things,” an Iraqi doctor told Human Rights Watch in 2003. “Children like to play with them.”
We’re enabling the same thing now.
To the child who fifty years from now picks up one of these beautiful things, in the moment before that child is obliterated, it will look like a gift of a toy or pretty bauble.
A gift from Uncle Joe.