Cluster bombs can't kill anger

It is more than 21 years ago now, yet it is something I promised myself never to forget, and never - if I could - to allow others to forget.

In the dark corridor of a hospital without electricity, three young boys waited on either side of the entrance to the operating theatre. Sometimes, as the sweating stretcher parties ran through with their bloodied burdens on trolleys, they would stop for a moment for the boys to pull the larger pieces of shrapnel out of the victims' bodies. Then, in the operating theatre, the surgeons would extract the smaller, more life threatening pieces.

That was West Beirut during the Israeli invasion of 1982, and the weapons that caused these disgusting injuries were cluster bombs: worse, in their way, than anti-personnel mines.

Cluster munitions are dropped from aircraft or fired from guns as shells, and when they reach the ground they throw out hundreds of bomblets that explode like grenades. Every human being in the immediate area is likely to die or be badly injured.

Those that do not explode, and the American version has a "dud" rate of anything up to 14 per cent, remain lethal for months or years afterwards.

According to a recent United Nations study, unexploded cluster bombs still pose a serious threat in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, 30 years after the Americans dropped them.

The packages of explosive are painted bright yellow: just the thing children would think were interesting or valuable.

Last week, the American-based Humans Rights Watch, HRW, published a report on the use of cluster bombs during the Iraq invasion. It says that the allies used almost 13,000 of these bombs, often in populated areas and estimates that they would have contained two million bomblets.

The Ministry of Defence said in April that Britain had dropped 50 cluster munitions in Iraq, although the actual figure may have been higher. It is estimated that British ground forces fired 2,100 cluster shells. The remaining 10,000 cluster weapons used during the war came from the Americans.

British and American officials insist that their troops took considerable care to avoid civilian casualties.

The Americans employ battlefield military lawyers to approve particular attacks, and the British use experienced military spotters.

Errors during invasion

Yet neither group avoided some pretty egregious errors during the invasion, and there seems little reason to doubt HRW's estimate of hundreds of civilian deaths as a result of cluster weapons. HRW says its researchers visited 10 cities in Iraq for a month after the end of the war, and found civilian neighbourhoods still littered with unexploded bomblets.

There is evidence that the United States air force, having had shocking experience of killing civilians with cluster bombs during the 1999 Nato campaign against Serbia and the 2001 campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, was more careful this time. Even so, during the Iraq invasion, on March 31 alone, 142 civilians were killed or injured by cluster bombs in the city of Hillah, south of Baghdad.

The US army, however, says HRW, was not so careful. Saddam Hussain's forces were adept at setting up artillery and command posts near schools and hospitals, and the American forces seemed more concerned with getting rid of this potential threat than with the safety of the unfortunate people who found themselves in the firing line.

The air force could have advised the army about ways of dealing with these situations, but it seems that the army didn't consult it. Many innocent people died and were injured as a result.

Civilians are always in danger under the conditions of modern warfare. But civilised countries should understand that there is more to winning a war than simply blasting the enemy forces to destruction: the manner of winning matters almost as much as the outcome.

This wasn't even much of a war; Saddam had no air force and most of his troops were more anxious to surrender than to fight. If the British and Americans had decided not to use cluster bombs, they probably wouldn't have won the war a single day later.

These weapons are not designed for use in towns and cities. If the Vietnam war is anything to go by, unexploded American and British bomblets will still be killing Iraqi children in 2030, keeping the anger against us alive for generations.

On another matter of weaponry, I was clearly wrong when I wrote recently that the RAF, at Winston Churchill's suggestion, used poison gas against rebellious Kurdish villagers. My thanks to those who pointed out the error. It was tear gas that was used, and according to the Kurds it killed dozens of children and old people.

John Simpson is World Affairs Editor of the BBC