Operation Oil Theft: Week 5, Day 1,

With it becoming increasingly apparent that if the world knew then what it knows now the UN would never have authorised military action against Libya Britain, France and the US are looking for new ways to justify their unprovoked aggression. The latest attempt is the revelation that Libyan government forces are using cluster munitions.

Although not an uncommon tactic of war and one that NATO pioneered the use of cluster munitions is a deeply troubling tactic. Cluster munitions work by launching a projectile, in this case from a mortar, into the sky. This projectile then breaks apart in mid-air and releases a cloud of smaller, explosive bomblets over a wide area. Apart from the indiscriminate nature of bombing such a wide area the main problem of cluster munitions is that only about 70% of these bomblets actually explode first time. The other 30% just lie there on the ground waiting to explode when they're picked up by children, farmers or scrap metal collectors. Cluster munitions are still killing and injuring people in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Lebanon and Kosovo often decades after the fighting has ended.

The most worrying thing about the use of cluster munitions in Libya though is that it is something that only started to happen after foreign military intervention begun. Therefore I can't help but thinking that it was something that could have been avoided if foreign aircraft hadn't spent the last five weeks destroying the Libyan government's stockpiles of conventional munitions and instead allowed them the space to safely and humanely put down the foreign sponsored armed uprising.