And to add to this, today's episode of Pushback is very informative. One
important fact is that Yemen has natural resources that several regional
powers are competing for: oil, gas and fresh water.
Miriam
How Rational Can the US Be in Dealing With Yemen and Iran?
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
07 February 21
We're also stepping up our diplomacy to end the war in Yemen - a war which
has created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe. I've asked my Middle
East team to ensure our support for the United Nations-led initiative to
impose a ceasefire, open humanitarian channels, and restore long-dormant
peace talks..
And to underscore our commitment, we are ending all American support for
offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.
- President Biden, foreign policy speech, February 4, 2021
This announcement does not augur peace in Yemen any time soon. Rather it
looks a bit like political mystification that some have chosen to celebrate
now, regardless of what it actually means, apparently in hope of making it a
meaningful, self-fulfilling prophecy some time in the future. This does not
seem likely, given what Biden actually said, but we shall see.
For the foreseeable future, Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East,
will remain the victim of a Saudi war of aggression and Saudi war crimes.
Since March 2015, with the full support of the Obama administration, Saudi
Arabia and its allies have turned Yemen into the world's worst humanitarian
disaster, as assessed by the United Nations. Six years of relentless bombing
of military and civilian targets alike, including pumping stations and
hospitals, weddings and funerals, has devastated the country. Saudi terror
bombing not only kills directly, it destroys the limited infrastructure of a
very poor country, creating the conditions that have caused the deaths of
more than 100,000 Yemenis from famine and disease. Millions more currently
need international aid if they are to survive.
One hopeful sign now is the Biden administration's announcement on February
5 that the US designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization has
been rescinded. This was a necessary corrective, not a bold move. The
Houthis are ethnic natives in northwest Yemen. Their current territory holds
about 70% of Yemen's 30 million people. They are the victims of Saudi terror
bombing.
The Houthis are also the victims of US Iranophobia, the paranoid policy
framing that sees Iranian devils behind every difficulty in the Middle East,
regardless of any lack of evidence. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is
an Iranophobe, as well as a Christo-fascist. In a midnight news dump on
January 10, Pompeo announced the terrorist designation to go into effect on
January 19. The announcement provided little basis in policy or fact and
received bipartisan criticism because its most likely impact would have been
to exacerbate human suffering in Yemen.
While the Biden administration's decision to rescind the terrorist
designation eliminates a factor that would have made the Yemen situation
worse, there is little in Biden's speech that promises to make the situation
better any time soon.
Supporting United Nations efforts is probably helpful as far as it goes, but
it's a far cry from US engagement on the peace side to match US engagement
on the war side. And to suggest that the UN might "impose a ceasefire"
implies a military deployment that is pretty much imaginary. The conflict
within Yemen is multi-sided, with few if any clearly-defined frontlines.
The Houthis control most of the northwest, but not all, and that may be the
most coherent governmental region in the country. In the south, the official
Yemen government, unelected but imposed by international fiat and controlled
by Saudi Arabia, shares territory with its own rebel faction controlled by
the UAE (United Arab Emirates). The eastern two-thirds of the country,
mostly desert, contains islands of control under Al-Qaeda, the Islamic
State, and other, smaller factions.
The US was misguided, at best, to sanction the Saudi aggression. The US was
criminal to support the Saudi aggression for the past six years. Now Biden
has said the US is ending "all American support for offensive operations in
the war in Yemen." There are NO defensive operations in that war, the war is
effectively all in Yemen. And when Biden says the US is ending all American
support, does that mean no more military guidance from the US mission in
Riyadh? No more logistical support? No more intelligence sharing? No more
training Saudi pilots? No more target selection? No more mid-air refueling?
No more maintenance for Saudi bombers? No more spare parts? Does it mean an
end to the US naval blockade, itself an act of war?
The US has been doing all these things, and probably more, with Obama's and
Trump's blessings since 2015. Will the US stop doing all of them now, or in
the near future? Biden didn't say (the State Department later hedged). Biden
promised to end "relevant arms sales," whatever "relevant" is supposed to
mean, since it means nothing on its face. And in the next line of his
speech, Biden revealed the calamitous duplicity of the US position all
along:
At the same time, Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks, UAV strikes, and other
threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries. We're going to
continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its
territorial integrity and its people.
This is cover-your-butt spinning to excuse future failures planned to
appease the Saudi aggressors. Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks and UAV
strikes from the Houthis because the Houthis, in the face of relentless
attack, have been fighting back.
Biden's undefined "other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple
countries" is murky, non-specific, unverifiable. This makes Biden sound like
he's channeling Pompeo in pure Iranophobe-speak. This fearmongering portends
nothing good for Yemen.
Saudi Arabia's sovereignty is under no discernible threat, except perhaps
from within the monarchical police state. So the US is committed to
defending an anti-democratic dictatorship that murders its critics in the
most brutal fashion? How is that a good thing?
Saudi Arabia's territorial integrity is under no credible threat. Quite
literally, Saudi Arabia has NO territorial integrity, since most of its
border with eastern Yemen has never been drawn. The Saudis and the Houthis
have a territorial dispute in the northwest dating to the 1930s. The Saudis
have built more than one wall over the years in an effort to block Yemeni
migrants seeking work in Saudi Arabia, which has some ten million migrant
workers mostly treated abominably.
Saudi Arabia's people face a chronic, lethal threat from their own
government. There are occasional, minor threats from dissidents. Threats
from abroad are likewise all but non-existent. Those missiles and UAV
worrying Biden have apparently killed no one; there are no Saudi civilian
casualties from the Yemen war, just the 100,000-plus Yemenis.
Biden's reassurances to Saudi Arabia weren't just specious, they represent
an unchanging rigidity in American thinking that continues as a threat to
peace. On Democracy Now, Michigan State University assistant professor
Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni scholar and activist, put Biden's comments in
perspective:
So, in his speech, Biden said that he is ending offensive operations in
Yemen, but committed - he went on to commit to defending Saudi borders. Now,
this is really concerning to me, because I still remember the statement that
the White House put out when Obama initially entered the war in March of
2015, and that was the exact same framing, that they were defending Saudi
territory from the Houthis. This is what led us here - six years of war,
over 100,000 Yemenis killed, 250,000 people starved to death, if not more,
the entire country destroyed. And the framing was always to protect Saudi
borders.
In reality, in 2015, the Houthis were nowhere near the Saudi border, they
were deep in southern Yemen, on the verge of overrunning Aden and driving
out the Yemeni puppet government controlled by Saudi Arabia. That was when
the Saudis launched their undeclared war; that was when the US supported the
unrestricted aerial bombardment of a country with no air defense.
And beneath all the other arguments was the widespread fear of Iran,
Iranophobia, based on little to no evidence. Iran is a despised Shia Muslim
state in a Sunni Muslim world, and the mutual distrust is deep-seated and
irrational, except that the Iranians remember that the western allies of
Saudi Arabia imposed one of the world's bloodier dictatorships on Iran. The
Iranians weren't ever very grateful, so how could the US trust them after
that: obviously, if Iran had an interest in supporting the Houthis in
resisting a puppet government controlled by the Saudi dictatorship, the US
had a reason to intervene against the defenders of freedom. Or as Reuters
reported in 2015:
RIYADH/ADEN (Reuters) - The United States is speeding up arms supplies and
bolstering intelligence sharing with a Saudi-led alliance bombing a militia
aligned with Iran in neighboring Yemen, a senior U.S. diplomat said on
Tuesday..
"Saudi Arabia is sending a strong message to the Houthis and their allies
that they cannot overrun Yemen by force," he told reporters in the Saudi
capital Riyadh.
"As part of that effort, we have expedited weapons deliveries, we have
increased our intelligence sharing, and we have established a joint
coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation center.."
That US diplomat in 2015 was US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken,
now President Biden's new Secretary of State. He was an architect of a
criminal war rooted in a largely irrational fear of Iran, along with cynical
fealty to Saudi Arabia. Since 1979, US relations with Iran have been
poisoned by Iranians taking American diplomats hostage, then manipulating
those hostages to push Americans to elect President Reagan. There's plenty
to regret on both sides. But on February 5, Secretary Blinken started a new
round of talks with American allies aimed at shaping a new relationship with
Iran. The trick will be to treat Iran as a rational adversary, and even more
so to persuade Iran that the US can be rational, too. The Yemen initiatives
are steps in a positive direction, but only baby steps.