Y’all have sent me a deluge of email on this and, frankly, I’m still not sure of much of anything on the topic. War advocates have predictably dismissed any and all U.S. wrongdoing out of hand. War critics have declared us raving, immoral hypocrites.

Here’s what does seems clear:

1) White phoshporus isn’t on any banned weapons list, nor is it widely considered to be a “chemical weapon.”

2) But that’s because it’s largely used as a diversion, to light up battlefields, or for other purposes not directly related to killing people.

3) If it is used for killing people, it’s some pretty nasty stuff. It burns straight through anything it touches, and once lit, it’s nearly immpossible to extinguish. In that sense, it’s indiscriminate, making it more similar to a chemical weapon like Napalm than to conventional weapons.

4) Given number three, raining white phosphorus down over a city may not violate the letter of chemical weapons treaties, but it certainly appears to be morally questionable, particularly if used by a country that cited the immoral, indiscriminate use of chemical weapons by Iraq as one reason for going to war in the first place.

5) The U.S. military is using white phosphorus as a weapon. Whether we’ve careful to use it only against clusters of enemy solidiers (as I believe we’ve generally been careful to do throughout the war with other weapons, despite my objections to it) or more broadly against targets like Fallujah, where insurgents are more interspersed with civilians, seems to be the source of contention.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 7:27 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.