All for Nothing:

The Enduring Shame of Saudi Arabia’s War of Paranoia Upon Yemen

Rasa - This Sunday, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in the capital Sanaa, in a mass demonstration decrying the ongoing US-backed, Saudi-led bombing campaign against Yemen.

News ID: 428459

Date: 27 March 2017 - 23:51

RNA - It was the second anniversary of Saudi Arabia’s war of paranoia, and it has been even more disastrous and harmful than opponents feared it would be:

- The United Nations estimates the dirty war to try to restore Saudi puppet president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power after he was ousted by pro-democracy protesters has claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people and pushed the impoverished country to the brink of famine.

- It is because the war has not produced a massive wave of migration across Europe, and has remained largely contained that the world community has relegated the conflict – and the search for a solution – to second-tier status. The attention of the world community returns to Yemen only when a Saudi airstrike kills hundreds of people at a wedding party or funeral.

- War is not the answer to Yemen's woes. The new government in Sanaa is seeing virtue in a political settlement. It is demanding an agreement on a cessation of hostilities. Several rounds of UN mediated peace talks have failed to end the protracted war. The Ansarullah movement and the government are demanding an agreement to resume political negotiations. This hasn’t gone so well with the embattled Riyadh, Washington and lackeys. Yet, their delaying tactics will not work because the people of Yemen have international support.

- The US military is directly engaged in the conflict now. There is really an urgency to prolong the conflict, not only because of regional designs, but also in view of the ominous signals emanating from the Trump White House in recent weeks that suggest an effort is afoot to expand both the geographic scope of the war, and the roster of direct US special forces.

- Saudi Arabia benefits from dragging the US deeper into this war – they can slowly sink together into the quagmire. On the face of it, it is difficult to see the people of Yemen would gain anything from new US air strikes targeting their shattered communities. For Riyadh, anything that further destabilizes Yemen’s already precarious situation is welcome news.

- In 2016, the US government did withdraw nearly all of its military personnel in the Saudi operational command center in Riyadh. It even blocked some arms sales to Riyadh. But these still fell well short of ending support. It did, however, register that the US government was losing patience with the Saudis, given their obvious failure to make any strategic military progress in the war. It still represents US pressure upon the Saudis to find a different political, rather than military, solution.

If the Trump White House wishes to end the costly war, it has a simple expedient at hand: The US can end its arms sales and refueling of the Saudi-led coalition planes. This would drastically reduce the scope of coalition bombing of civilian targets. But it seems unlikely President Trump will ever do this. Despite the distancing, he still supports the Saudi despots and indulges in their paranoia. He only says, “The Saudis, they make a billion dollars a day. If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t exist. They should pay us.”

This being the case, it falls upon the United Nations and the international civil society to step up their opposition to Saudi Arabia’s war of paranoia upon the people of Yemen. They must help to put Yemen on its feet again. As warned by the UN this month, Yemen represents the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. America’s direct involvement in the indefensible and unjust conflict has intensified and prolonged this enduring shame. It has caused enormous suffering for civilian population through an indiscriminate bombing campaign and systematic devastation of the country’s economy and infrastructure. The senseless carnage and the illegal blockade have predictably produced a horrific humanitarian crisis that now threatens to claim the lives of millions of people if nothing is done to stop the conflict.

The failure of the US-backed, Saudi-led war of paranoia was foreseeable right from the star. After two years of senseless carnage and destruction, the warmongers have clearly failed in all of their stated goals. The only thing they have accomplished is to ruin Yemen and starve its people. No colonial interest has been served by this, and none could be, since the people being targeted by the American-Saudi bombs and blockade have never done anything to them. It’s a shameful and atrocious war, and it has all been for nothing.

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