Old Guy - you're missing the point. Cluster bombs are quite small - some less than the size of a packet of cigarettes. Even if painted yellow (and paint fades over time and exposure to the Elements) they cannot always be seen easily. They get hidden in long grass, among stones, between logs of wood, in the gutters of houses, you name it. They get caught in the branches of olive trees, meaning that farmers let most of their crop rot rather than risk getting an arm or leg blown off harvesting the olives. You ask if the Lebanese are so stupid that they wouldn't recognise them if told what they were. I'm quite sure the Lebanese are not stupid, but that still means that cannot risk farming or using certain areas of land, or travelling some paths. And what about Lebanese children? They are not stupid either, but very small children, even when they are warned about the dangers of things, cannot be counted on to follow instructions. The yellow paint on visible cluster bombs might just serve to make them all that more attractive. If I were to arrive along at your house and scatter a few dozen cluster bombs around your garden, hiding a few here and there, don't tell me you'd traipse around without a care in the world, not worrying too much where you put your feet or hands!

Israel may have dropped the cluster bombs to make the area unpalatable to Hezbollah, but it also makes the area unpalatable to civilians who live there, effectively exiling them from their homes. The Israeli army knew this before it dropped them, and most of them were dropped in the last few days when a ceasfire was imminent anyway. You will find a sort-of-parallel situation in Cambodia, which has some 10 million mines still in the ground. Whole swathes of the country are still un-farmable because of them, and every year dozens of people accidentally lose arms or legs or fingers etc., over them. I have just returned from Bosnia myself. As you may remember, there was a war there about 10 years back. What is remarkable is how much destruction there still is - about 30% of the houses I saw were still riddled with bullet holes, people were living in houses that were still being patched up, pocket handerkerchief cemeteries appeared here and there - sometimes virtually in people's back yards, as they were unable to get to the normal cemetery because of snipers etc., It took only 4 years to do all this damage (and the tension still lies under the seemingly normal surface) yet 10 years later people are still trying to recover, pick up the pieces. In Lebanon, the civilians got it worst. All that damage to infrastructure etc., will hurt them the most in trying to get back to normal, find work, build an economy etc., The cluster bombs are just a part of that problem. I was talking to someone last Saturday who has just returned from Lebanon. He showed me photos he'd taken of some of the destruction. It'll be a while before things get back to any way normal there. Yet he told me the Lebanese were estatic, which seemed odd to me. I asked why: it was because despite the damage, they were delighted they'd managed to stem the invasion. They told him the Israeli army spent part of the last few days of the invasion removing their knocked out tanks and other equipment from the front lines before journalists got a chance to take photos of them. When the jubilation is over, however, like the Bosnians, they'll be left with trying to rebuild, no small task. Even the physical rebuiliding will be made more hazardous by the remaining cluster bombs.