RNA - Per usual, Yemen is still fighting against the ugly lunacy of the House of Saud and its allies. The UN’s humanitarian affairs office says the illegal war has killed at least 10,000 civilians. It says the figure is a low estimate and was reached using data from health facilities that have kept track of the victims of the war, which has largely been ignored by the international community. The figure does not include those recorded by hospitals and health centers as having died.
It’s unnerving, this dirty campaign. It has normalized the rationale that you can drop terror bombs, murder civilians, and get away with it. It’s jarring when one realizes that this is what the people of Iraq and Syria are also experiencing right now. More bomb tonnage has been dropped on them than in Yemen, but no worriers. The poorest country in the Arab world is slowly catching up - with not one word in Western mainstream media on what it must have been like to live under such terrible conditions.
Today equally unnerving is the lack of official protests as well as the deafening silence at the United Nations Security Council. Over 10,000 people killed thus far (while independent sources have put the number at somewhere between 15,000 and 19,000), millions more made refugees, and nary an anti-Saudi resolution, let alone a word from the new UN chief. Maybe if he tweets out his whereabouts in New York, someone will notice.
In any case, the bombing of Yemen at will to “invoke universal values” is not a one-time thing but rather the start of a long course of military presence in Greater Middle East for the US Empire of Bases. Yes, the US military began building a new naval base off the coast of Yemen the moment it gave the go-ahead to Saudi vassals to start bombing – with a “moral obligation” to punish a supposed Tehran-backed resistance front, protect a deposed puppet regime, force Yemen to cooperate with Israel, upset regional security, invent new wars, sell them as a cakewalk, hide the extent of assassinations by drone, and hide the ugliness of it all.
This March, we will have the anniversary marking the start of the Saudi-led, US-backed war on Yemen - in the name of the highest ideals with the most brutal tactics. The dirty campaign has turned victims into aggressors and aggressors into victims. As previously, the vast majority of mainstream media outlets and observers, which focus on debates over class and race, or the unraveling of domestic coalition and Trump Tweets, will pay little or not attention to this never-ending crisis.
Likewise, America’s moral collapse will continue under the Trump presidency. Many good people will try, but there will be no reconstruction of meaning, no end to the war. Quite the contrary, there will be all the new lies, all the new deceits, all the new UN manipulations basically to blame Iran for the mess, whose most dangerous activity at the time, we all know, is fighting terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria.
Which brings us to this conclusion, that the rise of Trump will bring with it a larger humanitarian crisis, not just to Yemen, but also to Iraq, Syria, and the rest of the region. This is a man that does not answer, or even address, the question in Trumpland. This is a man that doesn't like Muslims and doesn't want anyone accountable for the vast torture programs of the Bush-Cheney years.
The loan ranger says he will go it alone. He will wage wars without allies – “without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people.” He will fuel terrorism by means far more drastic than waterboarding and targeted assassinations. He will kill the terrorists’ children. He will make America vilely great again.
“The worst president ever” does not recognize the legitimacy of any offices in his country. For him, it won't be that much of a problem to also unmoor ethics from their foundation and dismiss the legitimacy of Yemeni people’s struggle for freedom and self-determination.
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