Pentagon Lies About Yemen, Says US Role in Saudi War Is "Noncombat"
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
22 March 18
"The U.S. government claims that it's not engaged in hostilities unless U.S.
troops are on the ground being shot at by the enemy.. It stretches the
imagination, and it stretches the English language beyond its breaking
point, to suggest the U.S. military is not engaged in hostilities in Yemen."
- Senator Mike Lee, Utah Republican, Senate floor March 13
The Pentagon, having spent three years creating famine and spreading cholera
on an unprecedented scale in one of the poorest countries in the world,
Yemen, now lies, baldly but with lawyerly gracelessness, that the American
bombs guided by American officers to targets as often as not civilian is
somehow "noncombat." Effectively, the Pentagon argues that when US military
forces only enable genocide, it's not combat. Strictly speaking, the
Pentagon is only following orders to commit ongoing war crimes.
In late March 2015, with US blessing from the Obama administration, Saudi
Arabia and its allies started bombing Yemen more or less indiscriminately,
making as many as 200 sorties a day. Yemen, with no air force and few air
defenses, was helpless. From the start this was an illegal war of
aggression, a nexus of war crimes in all its particulars, and so it will be
until it ends. Without US approval and participation, it's highly unlikely
Yemen would have become the world's most serious humanitarian crisis,
regardless of the crimes of others.
The gross criminality of US enabling of and participation in the genocidal
war on Yemen is not part of the official discussion of the horror our
country perpetuates on a daily basis. From the beginning, US military has
engaged in the war by providing tactical advice on bombing, offering
intelligence, maintaining warplanes, re-fueling Saudi warplanes in mid-air,
providing cluster bombs and smart bombs, and generally offering military
support for a bombing campaign as vicious as any since the US dropped more
explosives on Vietnam than were used in all of World War II.
This is the official view of the scope of US involvement in the Saudi war on
Yemen, along with a perverse insistence on calling it a "civil war," when
there is only one outside aggressor: the Saudi coalition and its supporters.
Even Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, accepts this
demonstrably false framing, as she did at the Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing on March 13. She even accepts as gospel the alleged
Iranian involvement in Yemen for which there is scant evidence and less
precise definition. That has been a chronic Saudi-American lie about Yemen
from the beginning, pretending that a local territorial dispute between the
Houthis and the Saudis was some sort of grand geopolitical last stand. It
wasn't true when Obama green-lighted the killing, and it's not true now as
Trump keeps the slaughter going, but it will continue to be accepted as
official truth until people like Warren challenge it. But Warren is also the
Senator from Raytheon, the defense contractor that sells billions of dollars
worth of precision-guided munitions to the Saudi coalition. Euphemistically,
Raytheon says it helps the Saudis "meet their security needs," even though
there is no serious threat to anyone from the Houthis in Yemen, and the
Saudi war is less about security then aggression.
The Pentagon says what it is doing with the Saudi war is "limited US
military support," in the words of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis before the
Senate on March 13. Mattis did not acknowledge that the Saudi war could not
continue without US support, since the Pentagon position is that the US
provides "noncombat assistance." None of the US senators present asked about
this big elephant taking a dump in the middle of the room. There was only
the slightest objection when the Pentagon Central Command head who runs the
American part of the war, General Joseph Votel, told senators with a
straight face: "We're not parties to this conflict."
According to General Votel, the US is not party to the conflict even though
it chooses targets, programs smart bombs, and re-fuels bombers that have now
killed something like 10,000 civilians and an unknown number of combatants.
General Votel claims US noncombatant status mainly because once the bombs go
up, the US pays no official attention to where they come down.
In late February, three senators introduced Joint Resolution 54, designed to
put some Congressional check on US war-making in Yemen and elsewhere. The
Pentagon's official response was that Congress has no right to tell the
Pentagon what it can and cannot do under presidential authority. This view
is spelled out in a February 27 letter from the general counsel of the
Department of Defense, opposing Joint Resolution 54 and explaining why all
the war-making activities of US forces in Yemen have nothing to do with
"hostilities" (even though they do in any honestly rational world). The
letter even refers obliquely to actual "hostilities" that are mostly
ignored, "the October 2016 strikes against radar facilities in
Houthi-controlled territory in defense of US Navy ships in international
waters." That's the whole reference, but even as it confirms the US firing
weapons at Houthis, it then defends this engagement as an exception that
somehow doesn't count as "hostilities." Navy Times lists the Red Sea/Gulf of
Aden region off Yemen as one of the "Navy's 5 most dangerous at-sea
deployments." Navy Times frames the issue with a clear statement of the
hostilities and a hilarious version of the geopolitical history:
The fact that sailors have already had full-on missile battles with Yemeni
rebels near this global choke-point makes the Bab-el-Mandeb, or the BAM, an
obvious pick for the most dangerous place in the world where sailors are
deploying.
The Gate of Tears is the maritime equivalent of the Wild West. Yemen is a
failed state in the grip of a bloody civil war that has roped in both Saudi
Arabia and to a lesser degree, the United States. But spillover from the
conflict, as well as meddling from Iran, has made the waters around Yemen
extremely dangerous.
This is all duplicitous kabuki on both sides, Pentagon and Senate. They are
arguing within a falsely framed reality to perpetuate deceit they all own.
Even if the US role were actually limited to merely supporting the aerial
attacks, everyone lies by omission by failing to acknowledge (much less
object to) the air campaign's role in blockading Yemen, thereby directly
causing famine and disease and toxic drinking water for more than half the
population. This biological warfare is also a war crime.
The blockade of Yemen is also a land blockade along the Saudi-Yemeni border
in the north. To the east, the blockade relies on the desert and the
presence of al Qaeda and ISIS forces, also at war with the Houthis. US
Special Forces were operating in Yemen for years with the blessing of
Yemen's internationally-imposed "legitimate" government headed by a Saudi
puppet. When the Houthis, long a rebellious, independence-minded minority,
overthrew the imposed government in 2014, US forces withdrew for awhile. Now
the US operates in Yemen on a contingency basis, if not continuously.
As is well established in international law, a blockade is an act of war.
The "noncombatant" US admittedly participates in the aerial blockade of
Yemen. The US does not admit its much greater participation in the naval
blockade of Yemen. The US-Saudi naval blockade depends on the US Navy, which
has enforced the blockade since 2015. Yemen has needed to import food to
survive for decades. The US-Saudi blockade cut off food to Yemen, as well as
medical supplies, fuel, and all the other things needed to support a normal
civil society. The US-Saudi blockade has led directly to starvation and
famine. The US-Saudi blockade has led directly to the spread of cholera and
other diseases. The US-Saudi blockade is a war crime of stunning enormity.
And no one talks about it.
When President Bashar al Assad engages in similar tactics in Syria, as in
Ghouta of late, the world hears about it, but doesn't do much. When the US
and its allies in the war on terror terrorize and destroy places like Raqqa,
the world hears much less about it and does nothing. When the US, Saudi
Arabia, and its allies spend three years in Yemen committing war crimes that
have yet to end, the world hears little about it, humanitarian agencies and
the United Nations raise objections, but nothing humane is accomplished. The
US in Yemen is morally indistinguishable from Bashar al Assad.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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