"It's an amazingly relentless and terrible thing, war from the air" wrote Gertrude Bell in 1917, marvelling at the speed and efficiency with which RAF bombers could burn an entire village to the ground in a matter of minutes. Bell was part of the Iraq British High Commission advisory group, charged with the task of drawing up the borders of Iraq in order to ensure that Britain would keep control of the oil resources of the North so that they wouldn’t go to Turkey. At the time Iraq was Britain's testing ground for the use of aircraft against guerrilla fighters and their villages, although similar tactics were also employed by the British against resistance fighters in Afghanistan. Sir John Maffrey, chief of colonial Britain’s Northwest Frontier Province (now Pakistan’s troubled tribal zone along the Afghan border) was told by regional airforce headquarters that international law did not apply “against savage tribes who do not conform to codes of civilized warfare”.

It is depressing to think, as we move into the 21st century, British foreign policy has remained largely invariant, with the same disdain being shown for the lives of those who happen to get in the way of the pursuit of our grand designs. Hundreds of individual stories exist, as yet mostly untold, of how the proximity of civilian populations to what British and US war planners deemed a “military target” has led to high numbers of innocent civilians being killed. Ghulam and Rabia Hazrat, for example, lived on the outskirts of Kabul near a Taliban military base. One day, a US missile landed in the family’s courtyard and the neighborhood was showered with cluster bombs. Mrs. Hazrat remembers: "there was no warning. I was in the kitchen making dough when I heard a big explosion. I came out and saw a big cloud of dust and saw my children lying on the ground. Two of them were dead and two died later in the hospital."

It does not take access to special military intelligence to realise that the decision of British planners to bomb perceived military targets in urban areas, using weapons with great destructive blast and fragmentation power, will result in heavy civilian casualties. There are indications that the US/UK air war against Iraq has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. According to statistics provided by The Lancet study's authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes. On top of this, air strikes have left the country littered with live bomblets from US and British attacks, injuring at least 15 people a day since Saddam Hussein's government fell on April 9 2003, the vast majority of which have been children.

As HRW researcher Bonnie Docherty pointed out in an interview with BBC radio, the use of cluster bombs is frequently illegal especially when employed in civilian areas. They almost always result in terrible civilian harm — both the damage inflicted during the original strike and that suffered from duds that later explode in the targeted area.

Last month, while Gordon Brown was telling an audience of businessmen at Mansion House that he wanted to work towards an international ban on the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions “which cause unacceptable harm to civilians”, officials working for his administration were at the Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva, negotiating for the continued use of the controversial Israeli-made M85 cluster munitions.
Ahead of a conference in Vienna this week, aimed at hammering out a ban on cluster bombs, a British spokesperson has informed Al Jazeera that the government has once again reneged on its commitment to a ban on these weapons that “cause unacceptable harm to civilians”.

Despite the claims of manufacturers and the British government that these weapons are safe for civilians, evidence from the UN team coordinating the clear-up of unexploded bombs said: “We can categorically state that we are finding large numbers of unexploded M85 submunitions that have failed to detonate as designed and failed to self destruct afterwards. In effect these submunitions are more dangerous than other types because the self destruct mechanism makes them more problematic to deal with.”

The deadline to sign a petition to ban the manufacture and continued use of M85 sub-munitions comes up on the 18th of this month.