Yemen: Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam
American media outlets
largely ignore this war.
August 15, 2018, 5:38 AM GMT
Photo
Credit: Secretary of Defense (Navy Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class
Kathryn E. Holm) / Flickr
Three years ago, the royal family of Saudi Arabia
asked the United States to support the Saudis’ planned military intervention in
Yemen’s civil war. Before requesting U.S. help in this venture, the Saudis
attempted to raise a Pan-Arab army that would sweep into Yemen in order to
expel the Houthis, a Shi’a minority group in a region that is largely Sunni,
and impose a government that would be more favorable to the Saudis. Their
attempt failed. Other Arab countries did not rally to the Saudis. In hindsight,
of course it failed. Who would want to fight and die for the royal family of
Saudi Arabia and further Saudi political ends?
The Saudis decided not to deploy their own,
unaided ground forces into Yemen. Instead, they embarked on an aerial campaign
to bomb the Houthis into submission, much like the Americans once tried in
Vietnam. It seemed that Prince Salman and his advisers were unaware of the
truth about the Vietnam War. Despite dropping countless shells in Southeast
Asia, we Americans ultimately lost that war. The Vietnamese expelled the
Americans and then rapidly rebuilt their country to become the thriving nation
and economy that Vietnam is today. It’s possible that the mistaken strategy of
aerial campaigns was not solely that of the Saudi government. President Obama
promised to aid the Saudis by providing bombs to the Saudi air forces,
directing that U.S. air tankers refuel Saudi bombing sorties, and sharing of
intelligence to aid the Saudis in their efforts to quell the civil war in
neighboring Yemen.
The war in Yemen began when the Houthis had
enough of governmental corruption and rebelled. Their violent rebellion toppled
then-President Saleh and forced him into exile. The Houthis took control of
large parts of the country, including the capital, Sana'a. At the same time,
and to add to the chaos, ISIS took root in the northeast region of Yemen and began
an anarchic and lethal campaign fighting everyone on either side of this war;
so there are situations where the Saudis and ISIS have fought together in
opposition of the Houthis. The U.S. opposes ISIS, but one is never sure that
the Saudis oppose ISIS. Who is the “bad guy” in this scenario?
Both the U.S. and the Saudis blame the war in
Yemen on Iran for supplying weapons and sectarian support to the Houthis.
American Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s narrative blames the
Iranians, eliding the fact that the Saudis intervention is what exacerbated
this conflict—more Trump administration testing of what is and what is not a
fact. The hawkish agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government probably
emerged, in part, from the Saudi opposition to the Obama administration’s
agreement with the Iranians regarding nuclear development and prohibiting
militarization of Iran’s nuclear program. This agreement was opposed by Saudi
Arabia and Israel—politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows.
Yemen was already the poorest nation in the
Middle East. Now ISIS, the U.S., the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have
all contributed to driving an impoverished nation into dire famine. For three
long years this has gone on. American media outlets largely ignore this war.
Yemen is seldom seen and seldom mentioned in a cycle of continuous repetition
of willful blindness. It’s almost like we are not at war. But we are at war, a
real one. People are dying as a result of U.S. ordnance and U.S. drone strikes.
In a war, the real question is “what does a
victory look like?” In Yemen, the victor will take control of the poorest
country in the region one without oil reserves and one where most of the
buildings, hospitals and schools have been leveled by American-made,
Saudi-deployed bombs. Most Americans do not know we are at war and few would
know where to locate Yemen on a map. Incongruously, both the Democrats and
Republicans support this war.
Contrary to the American mass media’s general
indifference to the conflict in Yemen, the Washington Post reported the
following story on July 26, 2018, and did a superb job of covering it.
On April 23, Saudi planes dropped cluster bombs
on a wedding being celebrated in western Yemen, where the population supports
neither side of the war. The airstrikes killed 22 people, including children.
The villagers did not know why they had been targeted. The surviving villagers
and international investigators found American made bombs, including cluster
bomb remnants, all over the target area. Cluster bombs are banned by
international law, yet ordnance found on the bomb site was made by Raytheon, a
Massachusetts-based arms manufacturer. These bombs are illegal, in part because
they can roll around the grounds of the attack for weeks after deployment.
Children in conflict areas often pick them up and are destroyed in what one
could tragically imagine as a hopeful, happy moment that they’ve found
something unusual or a toy.
This is a red line, folks. Designing bombs that
linger around for weeks in civilian areas and the killing of children seems to
me to be outrageous. Decent people would never allow any company to produce
them. But an American manufacturer makes them for sale and profits from their
distribution and eventual detonation.
Simply put, the United States must get out of
this war. Given that President Trump has little interest other than keeping
company with brutal dictators, Yemen will not likely surface in his mind. In an
ideal world, he would call the Saudi prince and ask why we are in Yemen.
U.S. involvement in the Yemen war has never been
voted on or approved by Congress—the voice of the American people. Yet,
substantial sums of U.S. tax dollars are being spent on fuel and bombs that
sustain the conflict there. Neither political party will even discuss this war.
Someone needs to tell the Saudi Crown Prince
that, despite all the bombing, we Americans ultimately lost in Vietnam. Vietnam
got better once the Americans left. We and the Saudis should do the same in
Yemen. Get out of Yemen, broker a peace without the use of bombs and drone
strikes, and let that nation rebuild.
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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