A surgeon's touch.

• Author: Zinn, Howard
• Position: About the land mines and war

As I write this, the frightening violence in Iraq continues, England and the United States are in a state of fear about suicide bombs, and the Senate is about to confirm a new, conservative Supreme Court justice. So it may seem peculiar to bring up a subject that is either at the far edge of all our attention, or over the edge and invisible. But here I go.

On August 3, Human Rights Watch announced that the Bush Administration "appears poised to resume the production of anti-personnel mines" for the first time since 1997. It noted that "the Pentagon has requested a total of $1.3 billion" for a new type of land mine.

This registered with me because I had just read Dr. Gino Strada's Green Parrots: A War Surgeon's Diary. The book tells of his fifteen years performing surgery in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Eritrea, Cambodia, and other places, on victims of land mines and other products of our technological expertise. The "green parrots" are land mines with tiny wings, which look like toys to children, who then pick them up--with horrible consequences.

Strada writes: "The countries, the names, the skin colors change, but the story of these wretched ones is tragically similar. There is the one who is walking in the meadow, the one who is playing in the backyard or who is shepherding goats, the one who tills the ground or who gathers its fruits. Then the blast.... Djamila felt a metallic click under her foot and had a fraction of a second to think before her left leg disintegrated.... Many others like Esfandyar do not remember a thing. A deafening noise and they are hurled on the ground.... They wrapped Esfandyar in a big sheet, and they loaded him in the back of a Farm truck. Esfandyar did not complain--the father told us--not of the pain, nor of the uneven roads. It was as if he were sleeping. And he was still in that drowsy state when he arrived at the emergency room of our hospital.... He woke up different, Esfandyar, without an arm and a leg, and he will remain different, a young disabled person in a country so poor that it cannot afford to care for him."

Since the early 1990s, when the movement to ban land mines became widespread, forty mine-producing countries stopped producing, and millions of land mines have been destroyed, the result being that the casualty rates dropped from 26,000 people a year to between 15,000 and 20,000. But fifteen countries still insist on producing land mines.

The United States maintains a stockpile of...