RNA - In a televised address to Congress this week, Trump claimed a raid on an Al-Qaeda affiliate, conducted one week into his presidency, was the US military's first on-the-ground mission and that more will follow, adding that a Navy SEAL and ten civilians were killed when the team came under attack from Al-Qaeda, with others wounded and a US aircraft lost.
He described the January 29 raid in Yakla village in central Yemen as a success, full of patriotic fables. This certainly made him feel good, but it has been criticized by the father of the slain Navy SEAL, as well as some members of Congress who have raised questions about the value of the mission. It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable:
- This is not the first time that the US Army has raided Yemen. For years, the United States has been taking military action against the country on the pretext of fighting Al-Qaeda, predominantly through drone strikes and airstrikes. Long before Trump decided to join the Saudis in the conflict, the Obama administration was busy killing civilians there. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts Obama’s killings at ten times the number of Bush administration drone assassinations. According to the bureau, the Obama death toll included thousands of civilians at wedding parties, funerals, and more mundane activities.
- The ten civilian victims, including women and children, were in fact part of a total death toll of about 75, based on Yemeni news reports. Most of the killing resulted from fighting on the ground, where US-backed forces have launched an offensive against the resistance forces, who toppled the puppet government more than two years ago. Mind you, the SEALs didn’t kill or capture the Al-Qaeda leaders they were targeting!
- With President Trump now joining the circle of war-criminals-in-chief, there will be no trial in The Hague. This is the third opportunity to hold a murderous president to account for killing civilians and acts of official assassination that are patently illegal under International Law. But why prosecute Trump for what Bush and Obama got away with?
- That the raid “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth of all. It was a botched raid, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing proxy warfare. On the very morning of his political theater at the Congress, Trump was clumsily trying to pass off the failures of the mission onto the US Army and the Defense Department in an interview with Fox News. Twelve hours after he shifted blame for what went wrong, he gave a theatrical performance in front of Congress that attempted to hog the credit!
- It is silly to argue that the botched raid has set off a political firestorm back in the US. No one is going to criticize the process that the Trump administration has used to approve the criminal escalation of the conflict. Nothing is politically toxic about America’s involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen. America owns the war and the escalation – and the consequences. The Americans had all the answers during the Obama administration.
- Even at the United Nations no one (except for a few members) is going to question the illegality of escalation, much less take a very different path against the United States and Saudi Arabia. It marks such an incredible betrayal of the international community and the awesome responsibility that they must shoulder, especially in the UN Charter sphere. A world body that passes the buck is not one we can trust to lead our world or keep us safe.
This is an accurate recounting of the real situation in Yemen – destroy them and don’t help them, also destabilize and spread extremists to everywhere. Far from bringing “freedom and democracy” to that country, the US-backed conflict has sowed chaos. It is a recipe for targeting civilian objects and costing people their lives – without thinking about regional security or diplomatic and political consequences, things that the Americans and the Saudis never think about.
In light of the January 29 raid and his controversial Muslim ban, however, it is evident that President Trump wants to play a significant role in the instability of Yemen. That says why the people of Yemen hold his administration in contempt. Instead of delegitimizing these sentiments as “They hate us for our freedoms” or “They can’t fix their own problems,” perhaps he should pay more attention to the conditions these people live in and the US government’s role in the instability of their country. Corporate media not only fails to acknowledge this, but also does not rationally examine the criminality of the proxy war. Unfortunately, few in Washington are willing to accept such realities.
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