My main interest is ethics—what does little old me know about cluster bombs? This week many groups and governments, including Canada, have spoken out against the US giving them to Ukraine. I know that many nations—but not Russia, US and Ukraine—have banned them. Because cluster bombs break into a cluster of smaller bombs that do not all go off: The duds remain as a danger to innocent children. Think how hard it is already for Ukrianians to warn their children of the comparable danger of blasting caps, or accepting rides from strangers. Should we allow the “establishment,” the “older generation,” the choice to use a banned bomb on their land?
I am old enough to remember young Vietnam war protestors. On television, once, a moment in a courtroom caused a stir among my brothers and I watching at home: From a court bench, an activist held up a part of an early cluster bomb being used then: a dark ball with sinister cutting blades.
But I am careful, today, not to jump blindly onto the anti-cluster bandwagon, not when I remember what President Barak Obama’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, said about ethics: (italics his) one’s concerns with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of the conflict. Safe in Canada, I don’t have to envision Russian soldiers picking out community leaders to murder and girls to rape. I can easily say from my couch, “Ya, but cluster bombs are banned!”
Last night I watched a Skyway News clip from Australia. A retired senior officer explained that cluster bombs were an “area weapon” that allowed defence against battle tanks. I couldn’t judge for myself how bomblets would be effective agains tanks, but his key word is “were.” He added that with modern precision weapons we don’t need an area defence against tanks, so that now we could refrain from using cluster bombs, now we could see them as “bad,” as something to be “banned.” Or as Alinsky wrote: The fourth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that judgement must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other vantage point.
The fifth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. If Ukraine had ample supplies of many types of artillery shells then I could, from my couch, examine each type with due regard. Such ethical examination could even be fun, like being a “Monday morning quarterback.” But today, as I understand it, Ukrainians have only one other type of shell, the normal type, and it not in ample supply: They are running out!
The eighth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the morality of a means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory. As for the population of Ukraine, I know they have far fewer males than Russia does, so time is not on their side; there is an ever-present danger, which the Russians are counting on, that the west will grow tired and uninterested in supplying Ukraine; (During Vietnam, at one point, tired congress forbade supplying the Republic of South Vietnam with any more ammunition) I know that every male Ukrainian “wasted” in trying to fight past trenches (Harder than D-Day!, more like WWI!) means another missing husband and father, making it more difficult to reconstruct after the end of Russia’s “special military operation.”
As for Canada growing uninterested, we are already deciding not to produce shells for Ukraine. No Rosie the riveter. This while the Russians—tick-tock-tick-tock—are running 24-hour factory shifts. For Ukrainians, their default is defeat. Meanwhile, back in Europe, no munition maker will ramp up production—ramping and retooling is very expensive—not without a long-enough contract from the government, and no such guarantee is forthcoming. Last I heard, only one nation in NATO has increased their production, and their efforts will be slow to pay off. The ramp is long. That nation is the United States. Perhaps US sincerity at trying to supply conventional bombs gives them the moral authority to supply free cluster bombs from dusty warehouses.
My own moral authority for protest has been “increased,” perhaps, by writing to my member of parliament, Jasraj Singh Hallan, to suggest a “special military-munition operation” for Ukraine. Of course, my MP has a birds eye view of his constituents that I lack. It turns out many people have told him they don’t want to support Ukraine because they want Canada’s money to go elsewhere. How strange, when we have the highest number of “Ukrainians” outside of Russia.
I conclude that Canada, like every country, cannot ethically judge Ukrainians for their use of cluster bombs on their own land until we are willing to “put our money where our mouth is.”
The ethical question, for Ukraine using banned weapons as a means to victory, was posed by Saul Alinsky: does this particular end justify this particular means?
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Sean Crawford
Alberta
July 2023
