Yemen War and the Bigger Picture

Rasa - Iran couldn’t be more accurate to say that the United States has admitted its own complicity "in the atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia" in the ongoing war against Yemen.

News ID: 435018

Date: 27 November 2017 - 23:53

RNA - The comments by Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Bahram Ghassemi, follow a statement released Friday by the White House, which said that the US remains "committed to supporting Saudi Arabia and all our (Persian) Gulf partners against the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' aggression and blatant violations of international law." The statement also praised Saudi Arabia for opening the port in Hodeidah and airport in Sanaa "to allow the urgent flow of humanitarian aid to the people of Yemen."

Aid groups, however, say the partial opening of the nearly three-week long blockade is "a minor and insufficient concession" that "still leaves the population of Yemen in a worse situation than they were two weeks ago before the blockade started" and the country still "on the brink."

That the US refuses to admit that for over two years has aided the Saudi-led coalition's bombing campaign against Yemen with arms, intelligence, and logistical support is beyond any doubt. Helping to fuel the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Yemen - and drawing sharp rebuke from human rights groups – is also there for all to see.

What’s beyond dispute, however, is that the White House statement clearly and without question proves America's participation and responsibility in the atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Instead of urging Saudi Arabia to end the bombardment of civilian targets and killing the innocent and defenseless people of Yemen, the United States and NATO allies blatantly continue their regime-change support for Riyadh to continue its horrendous war crimes and crimes committed against humanity against the poorest country in the Middle East.

In other words, the regime-change campaign against Yemen could not proceed without American help and complicity in Saudi war crimes. This has mainly involved a much more intensive use of air-power, including armed-drones; the utilization of long-range artillery and ground-launched ballistic-missiles; mid-air fueling of Saudi aircraft, and the much wider use of special forces and privatized military corporations – not to mention the UN-illegal land, sea and air blockade.

The war criminals pursuing this kind of offensive war see three advantages, two military and one political:

* Their own forces take minimal casualties, meaning fewer body bags and funeral corteges.

* They believe that the tactic works in practice – which hasn’t worked until now.

* There is very little coverage of this type of war by “fakestream” media, and in the case of some countries, most notably Britain, there has been a long-term political convention that the role of special forces should not be subject to public debate or even scrutiny.

Nor is that all. The US Air Force is on track to triple the number of bombs dropped on Yemen. Warfare by "remote control" (known as drone war) also seems to be working, not least in the almost three-year war against Yemen. It is now clear that Donald Trump’s policy of devolving more authority to the United States military in the war it is fighting is having a much wider effect on the civilian population. The Pentagon regime has quietly increased its forces by adding several hundred special-forces troops and ratcheting up airstrikes, while airstrikes against the people of Yemen on the pretext of fighting an Al-Qaeda offshoot are also continuing apace.

Make no mistake, the expanded operations in Yemen are further examples of the path to be taken in other places like Syria now that the terrorist group of ISIL – America’s own creation - holds no territory. In this Trumpian worldview, post-ISIL wars will be the order of the day. The dangerous myth of the endless "terror war" should be seen in this aspect. The disastrous results and humanitarian costs of military action in the Yemen war illustrate the point, and expose the dangerous myth of the "terror war".

Airwars, the monitoring group, finds the US-led wars on Syria and Yemen have involved airstrikes, using bombs and missiles against civilians. Airwars has done its best to assess the likelihood of civilian casualties, and currently puts these at a minimum of around 6,000 – far lower than the official figure, which is over 12,000. After all, where Iraq is concerned, Iraq Body Count says that over 179,000 civilians have died in the last fifteen years.

The entire Yemen war has been presented as a “legal” operation as well - which it evidently is not. The goal for Washington is not to get the kind of scrutiny and political debate the world community needs on the direction and long-term consequences of this illegal campaign. But the international community hasn’t taken the bait hook, line, and sinker, including desperate attempts by the Trump White House to fabricate cases involving Iranian forces aiding and abetting the resistance fighters in Yemen, for the entirely unrelated purposes of stoking a war panic, imposing harsher sanctions, and doing what the administration has long wanted to do: discredit the nuclear deal with Iran.

The colonial ploy is transparent despite the fact that the newly released documents and reports by human rights groups and official acknowledgements by Washington about direct US involvement and complicity in Yemen war don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. What’s transparent are the ultimate motives of the War Party and the Trump White House. These moves suggest they are reverting to the Bush administration’s playbook: claim terrorist ties plus aggression and blatant violations of international law as a rationale to contain Iran in the region. To anyone paying attention to the bigger picture in the failed US-led wars against Syria and Yemen, the trend is obvious.

847/940