A few bits of good news, three

I was pointedly informed just the other day that "war knows no morals." I replied at the time that while that may well be true (even though it's more often an excuse for perversity than an philosophical observation), the decision to go to war does. I could have added that so does the decision to employ weapons which not only are designed to maim rather than kill but can keep doing so long after the morality-ignorant war in which they were used has ended.

It develops, however, that there are efforts going on to ban such weapons. The Boston Globe reported last week that

[d]elegates from more than 100 countries will open a conference in Dublin tomorrow that will try to hammer out a treaty banning the production, use, stockpiling, or transfer of cluster munitions - bombs or artillery shells packed with up to several hundred bomblets or submunitions that are sprayed over wide areas of territory. ...

Support for a ban on cluster weapons has risen sharply since the 2006 conflict between Israel and Lebanon, when, according to United Nations estimates, Israeli troops fired some 4 million Vietnam War-era submunitions, of which a quarter failed to explode.

These have reportedly caused more than 200 casualties since the end of the war and required a costly and hazardous cleanup operation by international aid agencies - often funded by Western governments.

In Laos, where the United States dropped 2 million tons of ordnance in the 1970s, including an estimated 260 million submunitions, unexploded weapons still kill and maim people and hinder economic development.

As many as 10 percent to 15 percent of cluster munitions normally fail to explode on impact but those who support the treaty say the figure could be much higher. A study by Handicap International, a nongovernmental organization based in Belgium, found that 98 percent of recorded victims were civilians and one-third of casualties were children.

The "but" in this case is that despite all that, the big boys, the bully boys - the US, Russia, and China - will not be at the conference and are opposed to any such treaty. They are not alone in their reluctance: Some of the more industrialized nations, while attending, are pushing to have "sophisticated" cluster weapons with self-destruct mechanisms and target sensors - in other words, the sort that they have - excluded from the treaty's definitions. A lot of "bruising" negotiations are expected.

Still, there is hope that this conference, building on a series of regional and international gatherings that have laid the outlines of a treaty, will succeed in turning those principles into a legal agreement. And even if the bully boys are not there,

disarmament specialists liken the cluster treaty to the Ottawa Treaty of 1997 banning land mines, which was shunned by the major powers but has proved influential in shaping the policies of countries outside the convention.

What's more, there is some cause for optimism that goes beyond the speculative. On Friday, the end of the first week of the conference, France announced it is going to "immediately withdraw the M26 rocket" - which accounts for over 90% of France's cluster munition stockpiles - "from operational service." It is being done, the French foreign and defense ministers said in a joint statement, to maintain the momentum of the talks. So perhaps this all will achieve the same sort of result as the landmine treaty, whose diplomatic path it has followed.

Footnote: Two, in fact. One is that, interestingly and revealingly, India, Pakistan, and Israel are also no-shows. And two sources of more information are the Cluster Munition Coalition and Handicap International's page on banning cluster bombs.