Praise the Lord and Pass the Cluster Munitions

W.J. Astore

Let the Freedom Bomblets Ring!

A popular song of defiance that came soon after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” Today, that song title must be amended: Praise the Lord and pass the cluster munitions.

From its stockpiles, the U.S. is providing cluster munitions to Ukraine, munitions that have been banned by more than 100 countries. It appears that Russia has already used cluster munitions in the war, which Biden administration spokesperson Jen Psaki denounced as a potential war crime. Ukraine, of course, will only use cluster munitions in a godly way, so no worries there. It’s a crime when Russia does it but they are freedom munitions when Ukraine uses them.

They’ll free you of your legs, your arms, and maybe your life

Naturally, Putin and the Russians have promised to respond with more of their own cluster munitions, assuming Ukraine uses its American-made bombs and bomblets. Basically, the Biden administration is sending cluster munitions as a stopgap since the U.S./NATO is running short of conventional high explosive (HE) artillery shells. HE shells are more effective against fixed fortifications and trenches than cluster shells (the latter is a higher-tech variant of shrapnel shells). But in the absence of HE shells, cluster munitions will have to do, even though the “dud” bomblets will persist in the environment for years, if not decades, killing and maiming anyone unlucky enough to come across them.

Supporters of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, including most members of Congress, are essentially saying that just about any weapon of any brutality is OK if it theoretically helps Ukraine.  Short of poison gas and nuclear weapons, I’m not sure there are any weapons they wouldn’t send to Ukraine in the name of “democracy.”

With respect to progress in this war, I’ve read conflicting reports that say that Russia is winning by grinding up Ukrainian forces and vice-versa. I’ve read where Ukraine will soon reach a “tipping point” and breakthrough Russian defense lines, driving toward Crimea, but such optimism isn’t shared by some U.S. experts. For example, John Kirchhofer of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency recently said the war is “at a bit of a stalemate” and that “magical” weapons like Leopard and Challenger tanks are not “the holy grail that Ukraine is looking for” and that a breakthrough in the near-term is unlikely.

So, “praise the Lord and pass the cluster munitions” is likely to be a very long funereal dirge rather than an exultant victory anthem.

7 thoughts on “Praise the Lord and Pass the Cluster Munitions”

  1. As the (presumably lucid for the moment) President Biden of the United States recently let slip: the United States “will” supply (meaning it already has supplied) this particular artillery “cluster” ammunition to the Interim Nazi Regime in Kiev because the Nazi American Terrorist Operation (NATO) has run out of the standard high-explosive artillery ammunition formerly lavished on its proxy military that has nearly expended all previous — and soon, possible — supplies of these munitions.

    The Russian Federation, for its part, has responded by pointing out that it has even greater supplies of such “cluster” ammunition — in addition to even greater supplies of every other type of military weaponry — and will feel free to use it in response to any use by the Kiev Regime. The only question remains: Which will the Kiev Regime exhaust first: the weaponry and/or its ammunition or the trained manpower required to effectively use it?

    The recent NATO “Summit” (or, as I prefer to call it, “Nadir”) in Vilnius, Lithuania, has provided a powerful photographic meme that clarifies what the sponsoring NATO nations truly think of their under-performing proxy and its “likely” (meaning, not lengthy) future, one from whose nasty and ugly demise they wish to distance themselves and their own political/economic futures. May they all find the adjective “Interim” attached to their own positions of power and privilege. See: NATO Throws A Furious Zelensky Under The Bus, by Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams, antiwar.com (July 16, 2023).

    [3:35] Daniel McAdams: “If you could put the entire Vilnius Summit in one photograph, this next one is what it would look like. This is going around the Internet. You see everyone else at the NATO Summit greeting each other, having a good time talking, and there’s Zelensky standing there without a friend in the world.”

    Ron Paul, “You know what? The pro is he did follow the dress code.”

    Daniel McAdams: “That’s right. They thought he was the waiter.”

    Cruel humor, yes, but when Reality explodes delusional rhetoric a real “cluster….” typically results. Time to face the music which implacably approaches …

    From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

    LI
    The Moving Finger writes; and, having, writ,
    Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
    Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

    LII

    And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
    Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
    Lift not your hands to IT for help — for It
    Rolls impotently on as You or I

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    1. Sixteen years ago, when first trying to teach myself composition in verse, I attempted to emulate the style of famous poets, hopefully as homage and not desecration. Hence, something of my own which still seems appropriate, I hope.

      For Whom the Moving Finger Writes

      Omar Khayyam said something much, I think:
      Who from iambic couplets did not shrink
      To say in verse that each relates to all
      As all relates to those of us who crawl
      Beneath that huge inverted dome of sky
      Which rolls, indifferent to you and I;
      Which writes with moving finger and moves on
      From twilight through the dark until the dawn
      Regardless of what piety or wit
      We beg to live again a word of it
      Nor with our tears wash out a single line:
      The poem of our past we can’t refine

      John Donne wrote also of a clod of earth
      From off a continent defined at birth:
      An island in itself, as is no man
      Who yet connects to all the human clan
      So that which we of others would compel
      Ourselves must suffer and endure as well
      For we and they can not identify
      A reason why yet one more soul should die
      To mark with tolling bells its passage plus
      The knowledge that its passing lessens us
      So let us not ask what fate’s finger writes
      For it but chronicles our pointless fights

      Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2007

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  2. Leaving aside for the moment discussion of this one type of artillery shell that the US-installed Kiev Putsch Regime has shown no compunctions about using on ethnic Russian civilians living in Crimea and the former “eastern Ukraine” (now reunited with the Russian Federation), what future contributions to the conflict do US/UK/NATO/EU political functionaries propose to supply? Taking just the United States — the principal instigator of this conflict — for example, see: Trump outlines ‘24 hour’ Ukraine peace plan RT.com (July 16, 2023). Yes, the blowhard narcissist himself has weighed in with what he considers a proposal of sorts:

    The former US president claims that he would be able to steer the Russian and Ukrainian leaders towards a negotiated solution

    Trump, currently the leading candidate for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, argued that he has enough influence with Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine to stop the bloodshed. With the right prodding from the White House, the two leaders would see no point in continuing the conflict, he said on Sunday in a Fox News interview.

    “I know Zelensky very well, and I know Putin very well, even better,” Trump told Fox host Maria Bartiromo. “And I had a good relationship, very good with both of them. I would tell Zelensky, no more, you got to make a deal. I would tell Putin, if you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give him a lot. We’re going to give them more than they ever got if we have to. I will have the deal done in one day – one day.”

    In response to this pompous bloviating by former POTUS Trump, I caught this comment on Andrei Martyanov’s blog Reminiscence of the Future:

    “This POS says he knows Putin very well. He very clearly does not. Russia will absolutely do a deal but on its terms. Give Russia what it wants and the deal will happen. No threats from this compromised fraud will move Russia from its position. This guy is making the same threats as Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Pence etc. He clearly is the establishment pick against Kennedy now since they know Biden will not happen.”

    Trump apparently seems to think that he can bully Russian President Putin into an — unspecified — “deal” by threatening to supply even more weaponry to the Kiev Regime than Obama/Trump/Biden already have supplied for the past eight+ years. In this respect, Trump proposes no change whatsoever from demented Joe Biden’s “policy” (to the extent one can even discern in this “just-somehow-hurt Russia” debacle a “policy”).

    Compare this to RFK, Jr.’s plan for ending the conflict, as related in an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano recently:

    RFK, Jr.: “I would settle that or I would negotiate a peace immediately. The Russians have tried and tried again to settle the war, to avoid it. They wanted to sign the Minsk Accords, which was a reasonable document that (1) we keep NATO out of Ukraine; that (2) Ukraine remain neutral; That (3) we remove the Aegis missile systems from Romania and Poland and (4) that the wholesale killing of ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government that America put in power should stop. So those are all things we should have agreed to. In fact, Zelenski won in 2019 by promising to sign the Minsk Accords.
    . . .
    “They’ve got a legitimate National Security interest.”

    As George Orwell wrote: “The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” As some of us in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent said about our proxy war in South Vietnam: “We lost the day we started and we win the day we stop.”

    So, just “win” this by stopping, and then go on about our own proper business at home. This leaves us, as things stand right now with “No,” to Biden; “No,” to Trump; and “Yes,” to RFK, Jr. I wish other third-party candidates would step up and offer positive Peace proposals, but so far, don’t see much on that horizon.

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    1. Speaking of unspeakable weapons (and the unspeakable persons who wield them), Jimmy Dore (July 22, 22023) has a short video presentation that gets right to the heart of the Apartheid Zionist lobby that has RFK, Jr buffaloed into reflexive obedience. See: Israel’s KAMIKAZE Drones Fly Inside Palestinians’ Homes!

      “If there is one thing wish I could do is to talk sense into RFK, Jr about the Israel/Palestinian issue. He does a bad job with it. He’s missing this issue, hard. Israel also has a stranglehold on our own government here in the United States. So, just as we have to break the hold of Big Pharma on our [corporate] government, we have to break the hold of the Israel Lobby on our government. And I’ll be lobbying RFK, Jr to be doing that for sure.”

      Good for you, Jimmy Dore. I would only add that someone also needs to tell RFK, Jr to knock off bad-mouthing Iran even as he says nothing about our Apartheid Zionist “friends” and their own possession of nuclear weapons while murdering Iranian scientists working on their country’s perfectly legitimate development of peaceful nuclear power technologies. So, while I support RFK, Jr’s proposed solution for ending America’s proxy war against Russia in the former Ukraine, he needs to knock off supporting the special privileges and lavish subsidies granted to crusading foreigners who do nothing to aid Americans in addressing our own many — and manifest — problems.

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      1. Patrick Lawrence finds RFK Jr’s political weakness vis-a-vis the Apartheid Zionist Lobby’s “Antisemite” Weapon as objectionable as does Jimmy Dore. Mr Patrick writes:

        “In its transparent silliness, the Kennedy-as-anti–Semite bit is an easy call. This is about the Jewish vote, primarily but not only in New York. Commanding the support of mainstream American Jews has been an imperative in Democratic politics since the Holocaust industry got going after the 1967 War and the Israeli lobby in Washington set itself the task of running U.S. policy in the Middle East. There is a supreme irony here that is near to impossible to miss. Kennedy’s support for Israel verges on the “unconditional,” as Hillary Clinton first used this term years ago. This, along with R.F.K. Jr.’s venomous attacks on “the genocidal regime in Iran,” are the two positions he articulates that I find most objectionable, but there is simply no denying he holds them. Kennedy, surely, knows all about the Jewish vote, and maybe he is playing to it. But I doubt this. “There is nobody running in either party who will be a better friend to Israel than me as president,” Kennedy said in an interview with a prominent rabbi not long ago.”

        I caught a similar note of skepticism regarding RFK Jr’s true foreign policy allegiance (similar to Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s) in some comments at antiwar.com in response to Dave DeCamp’s article <a href=”https://news.antiwar.com/2023/07/20/ukraine-begins-firing-us-cluster-bombs/“>”Ukraine Begins Firing US Cluster Bombs” (July 20, 2023) :

        wars r u.s. Lysistrata
        “The democrats already are. They called him an antisemite. So how did RFK respond? By bragging about his loyalty to Israel and saying nasty shit about Iran.”

        wars r u.s. Lysistrata
        “Yes, it takes a lot of courage and RFK folded. He didn’t have to declare his unconditional loyalty to Israel, and he didn’t have to talk shit about Iran. Already a coward. How long would he last before he caved on his anti-war rhetoric?”

        wars r u.s. Lysistrata
        “No question he is not an antisemite. But there was no reason to bring up his loyalty to Israel or for his remark about the 2 billion Biden sent to Iran to prove he isn’t.”

        Gypsy33 wars r u.s.
        “When asked about the Palestinians, he replied that they “had their chance in 1948 (!!!)”
        Riiiiight, their “chance” to give away over half their country to a bunch of Your-a-Peeins.”

        In short, notwithstanding RFK Jr’s interesting talk about ending the US/UK/NATO/EU war on Russia in the former “Ukraine”, his pronounced susceptibility to Apartheid Zionist pressures reveals him as no more an “Independent American” than Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Too bad.

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