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Tag: Yemen

  • Biden’s Appeasement of Hawks and Neocons is Crippling His Diplomacy

    by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies / April 22nd, 2021

    Biden with NATO’s Stoltenberg (Photo credit: haramjedder.blogspot.com)

    President Biden took office promising a new era of American international leadership and diplomacy. But with a few exceptions, he has so far allowed self-serving foreign allies, hawkish U.S. interest groups and his own imperial delusions to undermine diplomacy and stoke the fires of war.

    Biden’s failure to quickly recommit to the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, as Senator Sanders promised to do on his first day as president, provided a critical delay that has been used by opponents to undermine the difficult shuttle diplomacy taking place in Vienna to restore the agreement.

    The attempts to derail talks range from the introduction of the Maximum Pressure Act on April 21 to codify the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran to Israel’s cyberattack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Biden’s procrastination has only strengthened the influence of the hawkish Washington foreign policy “blob,” Republicans and Democratic hawks in Congress and foreign allies like Netanyahu in Israel.

    In Afghanistan, Biden has won praise for his decision to withdraw U.S. troops by September 11, but his refusal to abide by the May 1 deadline for withdrawal as negotiated under the Trump administration has led the Taliban to back out of the planned UN-led peace conference in Istanbul. A member of the Taliban military commission told the Daily Beast that “the U.S. has shattered the Taliban’s trust.”

    Now active and retired Pentagon officials are regaling the New York Times with accounts of how they plan to prolong the U.S. war without “boots on the ground” after September, undoubtedly further infuriating the Taliban and making a ceasefire and peace talks all the more difficult.

    In Ukraine, the government has launched a new offensive in its civil war against the ethnically Russian provinces in the eastern Donbass region, which declared unilateral independence after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014. On April 1, Ukraine’s military chief of staff said publicly that “the participation of NATO allies is envisaged” in the government offensive, prompting warnings from Moscow that Russia could intervene to protect Russians in Donbass.

    Sticking to their usual tired script, U.S. and NATO officials are pretending that Russia is the aggressor for conducting military exercises and troop movements within its own borders in response to Kiev’s escalation. But even the BBC is challenging this false narrative, explaining that Russia is acting competently and effectively to deter an escalation of the Ukrainian offensive and U.S. and NATO threats. The U.S has turned around two U.S. guided-missile destroyers that were steaming toward the Black Sea, where they would only have been sitting ducks for Russia’s advanced missile defenses.

    Tensions have escalated with China, as the U.S. Navy and Marines stalk Chinese ships in the South China Sea, well inside the island chains China uses for self defense. The Pentagon is hoping to drag NATO allies into participating in these operations, and the U.S. Air Force plans to shift more bombers to new bases in Asia and the Pacific, supported by existing larger bases in Guam, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

    Meanwhile, despite a promising initial pause and policy review, Biden has decided to keep selling tens of billion dollars worth of weapons to authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms, even as they keep bombing and blockading famine-stricken Yemen. Biden’s unconditional support for the most brutal authoritarian dictators on Earth lays bare the bankruptcy of the Democrats’ attempts to frame America’s regurgitated Cold War on Russia and China as a struggle between “democracy” and “authoritarianism.”

    In all these international crises (along with Cuba, Haiti, Iraq, North Korea, Palestine, Syria and Venezuela, which are bedevilled by the same U.S. unilateralism), President Biden and the hawks egging him on are pursuing unilateral policies that ignore solemn commitments in international agreements and treaties, riding roughshod over the good faith of America’s allies and negotiating partners.

    As the Russian foreign ministry bluntly put it when it announced its countermeasures to the latest round of U.S. sanctions, “Washington is unwilling to accept that there is no room for unilateral dictates in the new geopolitical reality.”

    Chinese President Xi Jinping echoed the same multipolar perspective on April 20th at the annual Boao Asian international business forum. “The destiny and future of the world should be decided by all nations, and rules set up just by one or several countries should not be imposed on others,” Xi said. “The whole world should not be led by unilateralism of individual countries.”

    The near-universal failure of Biden’s diplomacy in his first months in office reflects how badly he and those who have his ear are failing to accurately read the limits of American power and predict the consequences of his unilateral decisions.

    Unilateral, irresponsible decision-making has been endemic in U.S. foreign policy for decades, but America’s economic and military dominance created an international environment that was extraordinarily forgiving of American “mistakes,” even as they ruined the lives of millions of people in the countries directly affected. Now America no longer dominates the world, and it is critical for U.S. officials to more accurately assess the relative power and positions of the United States and the countries and people it is confronting or negotiating with.

    Under Trump, Defense Secretary Mattis launched negotiations to persuade Vietnam to host U.S. missiles aimed at China. The negotiations went on for three years, but they were based entirely on wishful thinking and misreadings of Vietnam’s responses by U.S. officials and Rand Corp contractors. Experts agree that Vietnam would never violate a formal, declared policy of neutrality it has held and repeatedly reiterated since 1998.

    As Gareth Porter summarized this silly saga:

    The story of the Pentagon’s pursuit of Vietnam as a potential military partner against China reveals an extraordinary degree of self-deception surrounding the entire endeavor. And it adds further detail to the already well-established picture of a muddled and desperate bureaucracy seizing on any vehicle possible to enable it to claim that U.S. power in the Pacific can still prevail in a war with China.

    Unlike Trump, Biden has been at the heart of American politics and foreign policy since the 1970s. So the degree to which he too is out of touch with today’s international reality is a measure of how much and how quickly that reality has changed and continues to change. But the habits of empire die hard. The tragic irony of Biden’s ascent to power in 2020 is that his lifetime of service to a triumphalist American empire has left him ill-equipped to craft a more constructive and cooperative brand of American diplomacy for today’s multipolar world

    Amid the American triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War, the neocons developed a simplistic ideology to persuade America’s leaders that they need no longer be constrained in their use of military power by domestic opposition, peer competitors or international law. They claimed that America had virtually unlimited military freedom of action and a responsibility to use it aggressively, because, as Biden parroted them recently, “the world doesn’t organize itself.”

    The international violence and chaos Biden has inherited in 2021 is a measure of the failure of the neocons’ ambitions. But there is one place that they conquered, occupied and still rule to this day, and that is Washington D.C.

    The dangerous disconnect at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy is the result of this dichotomy between the neocons’ conquest of Washington and their abject failure to conquer the rest of the world.

    For most of Biden’s career, the politically safe path on foreign policy for corporate Democrats has been to talk a good game about human rights and diplomacy, but not to deviate too far from hawkish, neoconservative policies on war, military spending, and support for often repressive and corrupt allies throughout America’s neocolonial empire.

    The tragedy of such compromises by Democratic Party leaders is that they perpetuate the suffering of millions of people affected by the real-world problems they fail to fix. But the Democrats’ subservience to simplistic neoconservative ideas also fails to satisfy the hawks they are trying to appease, who only smell more political blood in the water at every display of moral weakness by the Democrats.

    In his first three months in office, Biden’s weakness in resisting the bullying of hawks and neocons has led him to betray the most significant diplomatic achievements of each of his predecessors, Obama and Trump, in the JCPOA with Iran and the May 1 withdrawal agreement with the Taliban respectively, while perpetuating the violence and chaos the neocons unleashed on the world.

    For a president who promised a new era of American diplomacy, this has been a dreadful start. We hope he and his advisers are not too blinded by anachronistic imperial thinking or too intimidated by the neocons to make a fresh start and engage with the world as it actually exists in 2021.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2021 at 2:35pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Benjamin Netanyahu, China, Democrats, Diplomacy, Donald Trump, Europe, Exploitation, Imperialism, Iran, Iran Nuclear Agreement (JCPOA), Israel, Joe Biden, Media, Militarism, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South China Sea, Taliban, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, US Defence Department, US Foreign Policy, US Hegemony, US Military, US War Crimes, Viet Nam, War Industry, Xi Jinping, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden’s Drone Wars

    On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times posted an article headed, “How the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After Troops Exit Afghanistan,” just in case anyone misunderstood the previous day’s headline, “Biden, Setting Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says ‘It Is Time to End the Forever War’” as indicating the U.S. war in Afghanistan might actually come to an end on September 11, 2021, almost 20 years after it started.

    We saw this bait and switch tactic before in President Biden’s earlier announcement about ending U.S support for the long, miserable war in Yemen. In his first major foreign policy address, on February 4, President Biden announced “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen,” the war waged by Saudi Arabia and its allies since 2015, the war he called “a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.” Biden declared “This war has to end.”

    As with last week’s announcement that the U.S. war in Afghanistan would end, “clarification” came the following day. On February 5th, the Biden administration dispelled the impression that the U.S. was getting out of the business of killing Yemenis completely and the State Department issued a statement, saying “Importantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP.” In other words, whatever happens in regard to the war waged by the Saudis, the war that the U.S. has been waging in Yemen since 2002, under the guise of the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by congress authorizing the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks, will continue indefinitely, despite the fact that neither ISIS nor Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula existed in 2001. These other “offensive operations” by the U.S. that will continue unabated in Yemen include drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and special forces raids.

    While what President Biden actually said regarding the war in Afghanistan last week was “We will not take our eye off the terrorist threat,” and “We will reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland,” the New York Times could not be far off as they interpreted those words to mean, “Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.”

    It appears from his statements and actions regarding the war in Yemen in February and regarding the war in Afghanistan in April, that Biden is not so much concerned with ending the “forever wars” as he is with handing these wars over to drones armed with 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.

    In 2013, when President Obama promoted drone wars claiming that “by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life” it was already known that this was not true. By far, most victims of drone attacks are civilians, few are combatants by any definition and even those targeted as suspected terrorists are victims of assassination and extrajudicial executions.

    The validity of Biden’s claim that U.S. “counter terrorism capabilities” such as drones and special forces can effectively “prevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland” is taken for granted by the New York Times– “Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.”

    After the Ban Killer Drones “international grassroots campaign working to ban aerial weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance,” was launched on April 9, I was asked in an interview if there is anyone in the government, military, diplomatic or intelligence communities who supports our position that drones are no deterrent to terrorism. I do not think that there is, but there are many people formerly holding those positions who agree with us. One example of many is retired General Michael Flynn, who was President Obama’s top military intelligence officer before he joined the Trump administration (and was subsequently convicted and pardoned). He said in 2015, “When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,” and “The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.” Internal CIA documents published by WikiLeaks document that the agency had similar doubts about its own drone program- “The potential negative effect of HVT (high value targets) operations,” the report states, “include increasing the level of insurgent support […], strengthening an armed group’s bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.”

    Speaking of the effect of drone attacks in Yemen, the young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress in 2013, “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants.” The drone wars the Biden administration seems hell bent on expanding clearly damage and set back security and stability in the countries being attacked and increase the danger of attacks on Americans at home and abroad.

    Long ago, both George Orwell and President Eisenhower foresaw today’s “forever wars” and warned of nations’ industries, economies and politics becoming so dependent on the production and consumption of armaments that wars would no longer be fought with an intention of winning them but to ensure that they never end, that they are continuous. Whatever his intentions, Joe Biden’s calls for peace, in Afghanistan as in Yemen, while pursuing war by drone, ring hollow.

    For a politician, “war by drone” has obvious advantages to waging war by ordering “boots on the ground.” “They do keep the body bag count down,” writes Conn Hallinan in his essay, Day of the Drone, “but that raises an uncomfortable moral dilemma: If war doesn’t produce casualties, except among the targeted, isn’t it more tempting to fight them? Drone pilots in their air-conditioned trailers in southern Nevada will never go down with their aircraft, but the people on the receiving end will eventually figure out some way to strike back. As the attack on the World Trade towers and recent terrorist attacks in France demonstrate, that is not all that hard to do, and it is almost inevitable that the targets will be civilians. Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.”

    The war is never the way to peace, the war always comes home. With the exception of four known “friendly fire” casualties, every one of the many thousands of drone attack victims has been a person of color and drones are becoming another military weapon passed on from war zones to urban police departments. Technical advances and proliferation of drones as a cheaper, more politically safe way for many countries to make war on their neighbors or across the globe make forever wars more intractable.

    Talk of peace in Afghanistan, Yemen, the streets of the U.S., is not coherent while waging wars with drones. We must urgently demand a ban on the production, trade and use of weaponized drones and an end to military and police drone surveillance.”

    Activists Brian Terrell and Ghulam Hussein Ahmadi at the Border Free Center in Kabul, Afghanistan.  (Graffiti by Kabul Knight, photo by Dr. Hakim)

    This article was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2021 at 8:00pm and is filed under Activism, Afghanistan, Drones, Joe Biden, Militarism, Police militarization, Weaponry, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Killing Yemen


    The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized by the Houthis, the resistance group can use that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south.

    Origins of War

    Hadi administration’s territorial weakness reflects the failure of the 6-year long Saudi-UAE war against Yemen. The origins of the war can be traced back to 2011 when Arab Spring protests erupted in Yemen. Authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had survived in power since 1978, was forced to resign. He stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was his vice president from 1994 to 2011. Hadi’s interim government was legitimized by way of a February 21, 2012, referendum in which his was the only name on the ballot.

    From the day he assumed power, Hadi began a process of brutal neoliberalization. He steamrolled Yemen into membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2012, bringing about egregious amounts of austerity and untrammeled liberalization. Hadi’s first wave of privatizations included 11 of the 12 main sectors of the Yemeni economy with 78 of the 160 subsectors included for immediate liberalization. His open embrace of the World Bank exposed Yemeni companies to competition in the “free market,” a move that promised tens of thousands of layoffs.

    The Hadi government combined a neoliberal orientation with the undemocratic imposition of a new politico-legal structure. Early in Hadi’s mandate, the government arbitrarily rewrote many of Yemen’s laws, including setting in motion a process of federalization designed to benefit specific constituencies and forever weaken those regions known for resisting Yemen’s economic subordination to Saudi and Qatari interests. Faced with these unprecedented abuses of executive powers, millions of Yemenis supported the Houthi movement.

    Houthis represent a religious revivalist movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam led by the sons of Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a notable Zaydi scholar, in the Sa‘ada province on the Saudi border. In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, Houthis founded Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it decried as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010.

    American and international monitoring groups sent down to “assist” in the post-2011 transition openly condemned the popular AnsarAllah, referring to it as an “armed group” in the attempt to delegitimize it. There were even formal efforts to side-line AnsarAllah in the subsequent National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held between March 18, 2013, and January 24, 2014.

    The outright persecution of Houthis proved to be counterproductive, resulting in the formation of a temporary and unstable alliance between the ousted Saleh and AnsarAllah. Even after resigning from the presidency, Saleh retained a lot of support within the security services. In September 2014, Houthi militias, in alliance with Saleh, took over government buildings in the capital while the army stood by.

    It is important to note that when the forces allied with AnsarAllah entered Sana‘a’ they did not formally remove Hadi as interim President. Rather, they established committees that demanded the immediate establishment of a timeframe for elections, an immediate halt to the frantic selling off of Yemen’s assets, and review of all new laws instituted during the Hadi period.

    The Saleh-Houthi association unraveled after two years. On December 3, 2017, Saleh announced he was switching sides, leaving his two-year long alliance with the Houthis and joining Hadi and the Saudis. The Houthis quickly routed his forces in the capital and blew up his house. The next day they stopped him at a checkpoint and killed him too, announcing that they had also avenged al-Houthi – killed by Saleh’s military in 2004.

    Genocide

    Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis proceeded to assemble an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015 to prevent Aden falling to Saleh’s Republican Guards. This was the beginning of genocide.

    The Saudi intervention in Yemen was propelled by the monarchy’s domestic concerns. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), staked his prestige to a Saudi victory. Just prior to the war, King Salman took the throne and appointed his son MBS as defense minister. MBS appeared on Saudi television the day after the bombing began; he was in the military operations centre, on the phone, talking to pilots, looking at maps — trying to show that he really was in charge.

    Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis – all of which constitute war crimes under international law. Yemen imports 80% of its food. The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days. Other ships are never allowed to dock in Yemen. The delays the naval blockade creates cause food prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.

    Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began. Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), 92-95% of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions. Over 50% of Yemenis do not have access to healthcare, and the other half has access to a “compromised healthcare system” that lacks the personnel, medicine and medical equipment necessary to treat the population’s basic health needs. The coalition bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload medicine.

    In a nutshell, the effects of the imperialist war against Yemen have been devastating: cholera and hunger have arrived on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services.

    Saudi Arabia has justified the saturation bombing of Yemen by claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy. Given that the Saudis and local allies control the Gulf of Aden, Iranian ships laden with weapons cannot travel all the way to northern Yemen and Sana’a. The same applies to the airspace, which is entirely controlled by the Saudis. While Iran may have managed to send some support and advisors, it is absurd to describe the Houthis as Iranian-backed. Moreover, the Saudi usage of the Iranian bogeyman stokes the sectarian flames of the Shite-Sunni narrative and elides a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing Yemen after the 1990 unification.

    With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, the genocidal impact of the war has combined with an epidemiological crisis to generate a perfect storm for Yemenis. However, Yemeni lives don’t matter for the rulers sitting at the helm of our brutal system. War profiteers are least concerned about what happens in Yemen as long as they are able to sell a full range of arms that kill human beings and destroy nations. Without concerted action, the genocide in Yemen will continue, with the profits accruing to the arms industries.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2021 at 5:25pm and is filed under Genocide, Islam, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Hunting in Yemen

    Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

    Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

    Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

    “When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

    Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

    According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

    Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.

    As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.

    Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

    The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

    Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

    Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

    Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

    Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

    In response, Coe wrote:

    ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

    Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

    While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

    Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

    “The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

    Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

    Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

    This article was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2021 at 1:41am and is filed under Activism, Children/Youth, Crimes against Humanity, Hunger, Hunger Strikes, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism (state and retail), United States, War Crimes, War Industry, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The “Return” of America: Biden’s Maiden Foreign Policy Speech

    Few could have been slack-jawed at the first significant foreign policy speech of US President Joe Biden.  It can easily be filed under the “America is back” label.  Back as well, as if the previous administration had been incapable of it, was a promise for that practice unflatteringly called jaw-jaw.  “Diplomacy,” the President states from the outset, “is back at the centre of our foreign policy.”

    Doing so naturally meant much cap doffing to the US State Department, that long time enunciator of Washington’s imperial policies.  President Donald Trump had held a rather different view of the department he generally saw as fustian and obstructive.  Biden tried reassuring department staff that he valued their expertise, respected them and would have their back.  “This administration is going to empower you to do your jobs, not target or politicize you.”

    The effort of the new administration, outlined Biden, will focus on repairing and restoring.  Paint and scaffolding will be provided.  Alliances will be revisited, the world engaged with.  He strikes a collaborative note: cooperation with other states will be needed to fight the pandemic, climate change and nuclear proliferation.

    The speech has the usual sprinklings of concern and fear that other powers are posing challenges to US power, but is odd in not mentioning such states as Iran, at least explicitly, or North Korea.  “American leadership,” he urges, “must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy.”  Beijing remained “our most serious competitor” and needed to be pushed back “on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”  He asserts that the US will not roll over “in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions” and will be more “effective in dealing” with Moscow “in coalition and coordination with other like-minded partners.”

    This leaves the impression that the Trump administration was in the business of playing amiable golf with the Putin regime, a point that Democrats in Congress were always keen to push.  But whatever Trump’s strong man admiration might have been for President Vladimir Putin, the US record during his time in office was far from accommodating.  An overview of the various retaliatory sanctions is provided by the Brookings Institute.  They are many and include, among others, the imposition of sanctions in response to Russia’s alleged use of a nerve agent in the British town of Salisbury in 2018; the sanctioning of Russian and a Chechen group for human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings and torture; and sanctions for alleged Russian electoral interference in 2018.

    The speech also pays a mandatory pound of cant masquerading as homage to the misunderstood idea of democracy.  He spoke of defending “America’s most cherished democratic values: defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal human rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.”

    Democracy is always a conceptual problem for presidents, largely because the US executive and the country’s political system is a creation of a distinctly non-democratic mindset.  The framers of the US Constitution pooh-poohed democracy and purposely crafted a document and political system that would protect property, stifle the emancipation of slaves, and neutralise factionalism.

    Historians such as Charles Beard developed these ideas in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), noting how that celebrated document was ratified by fewer than one-sixth of adult males and excluding the un-propertied franchise.  “The Constitution was not created by the ‘whole people’, as the jurists said … but was the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in scope.”  Drafters of the Constitution “with a few exceptions, immediately, directly and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of a new system.”  Things were off to a cracking start.

    A recent smattering of critique of that problematic notion that is American democracy can also be found, if one cares to look.  Political scientist Yascha Mounk, looking at the foiled efforts of residents in Oxford, Massachusetts to secure the local water supply by buying out the company in question, Aquarion, furnishes us a gloomy example.  Despite securing enough funding to achieve their goal, the lobbyists and a generous effort at sabotage ensured that the water company would remain the supplier.  “The preferences of the average American appear,” rues Mounk, “to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

    The Trump era, while channelling the concerns of the powerless, left it at that.  Elites were still in rampant play, if only those elites preferred by the president.  The US republic moved ever more deeply into a terrain crawling with billionaires and lobbyists.  It was left for those against Trump and the Democrats to simply identify how best to retake old, unequitable terrain with their substitutes.  The participating voter could well sod off.

    Problematically, we return to democracy as an exportable commodity, an effort that has been, for the most part, a disastrous platform of US foreign policy.  Previous sages warned that democracy grown in indigenous climes, like certain wines, travel poorly.  Not acknowledging this fact has led to quagmires, the destruction of states and the crippling of regional and in some cases global security.

    Despite the US being sketchy about democratic ideals (he does allude to the Capitol riots), Biden is optimistic that “the American people are going to emerge from this moment stronger, more determined, and better equipped to unite the world in fighting to defend democracy, because we have fought for it ourselves.”  He also announced “additional steps to course-correct our foreign policy and better unite democratic values with our diplomatic leadership.”  A Global Posture Review of US forces would be conducted, which could only mean one thing: putting the brake on withdrawing US troops and reversing Trump’s policy in various theatres.

    He suggests an example of democracy promotion in action: marshalling cooperative support to address the military coup in Burma; reaching out to the Republicans to test the waters (Senator Mitch McConnell also “shared concerns about the situation in Burma”).  Force, he proclaimed “should never seek to overrule the will of the people or attempt to erase the outcome of a credible election.”  The ghosts of Chile’s Salvador Allende and Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh, along with many other casualties of US efforts to overrule the will of the people, would beg to differ.

    A more positive note is made on the issue of US support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, where an effort will be made to support UN-led initiatives “to impose a ceasefire, open humanitarian channels, and restore long-dormant peace talks.”  US support for offensive operations in the war, including arms sales, will also cease.

    What we can expect for a good deal of the Biden administration will be the resuscitation of the hackneyed and weary.  Even such an ordinary speech had Fred Kaplan claiming that Biden’s cliché’s, after Trump, sounded “revolutionary”.  Trump’s four years had been characterised by “diplomatic decline and atrophy”; Biden’s views, in light of that, “seemed fresh, even bracing.”  But Kaplan is not immune to the substance here.  Talk about stiffening democracy’s sinews, shoring up alliances when allies are doing their own deals with opponents, can come across as rather weak.  The pudding, and the proof that will come with it, is still being made.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2021 at 8:37pm and is filed under Democracy, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, US Foreign Policy, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ending the Other War in Yemen

    On February 4, in his first major foreign policy address, President Joe Biden announced “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” Speaking of the Saudi-led coalition that has been at war in Yemen since 2015, creating what he called “a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe,” Biden declared: “This war has to end.”

    Stating an intention is not fulfilling it and considering Biden’s further pledge, “to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people,” his use of the word “relevant” to modify “arms sales” could indicate a convenient loophole. Still, it is refreshing to hear a U.S. president at least recognize that the Yemeni people are suffering an “unendurable devastation” and this is due to the hard work of grassroots peace activists around the world.

    Whether Biden’s proclamation will mean much in the real world beyond a temporary hold on the weapons deals Trump made just before leaving office is yet to be seen. The Saudi kingdom welcomes Biden’s announcement and the U.S. arms sellers who have profited from the war seem unruffled by the news. “Look,” Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes reassured investors anticipating this move, “peace is not going to break out in the Middle East anytime soon. I think it remains an area where we’ll continue to see solid growth.” The prospects for peace in Yemen probably depend more on sustained international pressure than on a kinder and gentler administration in the White House.

    The Congressional Research Service in a report updated on December 8, 2020, “Yemen: Civil War and Regional Intervention,” references a major factor in U.S. policy planning regarding Yemen that the president did not mention. Roughly five million barrels of oil passes through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait off Yemen’s western coast on a daily basis, eventually making their way to Asia, Europe, and the United States.

    In case the president gave the false impression that the U.S. was getting out of the business of killing Yemenis completely, the next day the State Department issued a clarifying statement: “Importantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP.” In other words, whatever happens in regard to weapons sales to the Saudis, the war that has been waged for 21 years under the guise of the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by congress authorizing the use of the US Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks, will continue indefinitely, despite the fact that neither ISIS nor Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula existed in 2001.

    The “offensive operations” in Yemen that will continue under Biden include drone (UAV) strikes, cruise missile attacks and U.S. Special Forces raids and are a part of the larger “war on terror” that began in the administration of George W. Bush and was expanded under Obama. Despite his campaign promises to end the “forever wars,” a report from Airwars suggests that Trump has bombed Yemen more times than his two predecessors combined.

    In January 2017, just days after taking office, Trump ordered Navy Seal commandos supported by Reaper drone air cover to raid a compound suspected of harboring officials of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. While the raid’s targets escaped, one Navy Seal died in the raid, and eventually it came out that 30 Yemenis were also killed, including 10 women and children. The Navy Seal was not the only US citizen killed in that raid: the other was an 8-year-old girl, Nawar Awlaki. In September, 2011, Nawar’s father, Yemeni-American imam Anwar Awlaki, was assassinated in a drone strike in Yemen that was ordered by President Obama, on secret intelligence that he was an al Qaeda operative. A few days after her father was killed, Nawar’s 16 year old Denver born brother Abdulrahman was killed in another drone strike.

    Many other Yemeni families have suffered in these attacks. On January 26, 2021, relatives of at least 34 Yemenis alleged to have been killed in American military actions asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to determine whether the deaths were unlawful. The petition asserts that six drone strikes and one Special Operations raid during the Obama and Trump administrations inflicted catastrophic damage on two families.

    The statistics around the U.S. war in Yemen are difficult to come by, in part because many of the attacks are carried out secretly by the CIA and not by the military, but the Airwars and other studies count the number of drone strikes and their victims conservatively in the hundreds. The casualties of Saudi led war, in contrast, are more than 100,000 dead with almost as many killed by hunger and disease caused by the Saudi blockade and millions of Yemenis being deprived of food and other needs.

    While its death toll is much smaller, the U.S. drone attacks have a disproportional effect on Yemeni society. A 2014 screening study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms among civilians by the Alkarama Foundation found that “for a large swath of population in Yemen, living under a sky that has become a constant source of trauma is an everyday reality” and that under drone attack and surveillance, Yemen is “a precarious time and a peculiar place, where the skies are becoming traumatic and a generation is being lost to constant fear and suffering.”

    If the Special Forces and air strikes are intended to defeat terrorism in Yemen as in the other countries under attack, they are having the opposite effect. As the young, late, Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress in 2013: “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants. … Unfortunately, liberal voices in the United States are largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen.”

    Mothana’s observation about liberal voices in the US “largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen” was affirmed in Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for president. While Sanders has become outspoken in his opposition to the Saudi led war, as a presidential candidate he repeatedly voiced his support of Obama’s drone wars. “All of that and more,” he replied when asked if, as president, drones and Special Forces would play a role in his counter-terror plans. Again, in the 2019 resolution “To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen” offered by Sanders, passed in both houses of Congress and vetoed by Trump, U.S. participation in this other war was given a pass: “Congress hereby directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting the Republic of Yemen, except United States Armed Forces engaged in operations directed at al Qaeda or associated forces.”

    In Biden’s foreign policy address, he left open the possibility of arms sales as he pledged his commitment “to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.” The threats Saudi Arabia faces include, he said, missile attacks and UAV (drone) strikes from weapons he says are supplied by Iran. In fact, Yemeni Houthi Ansar Allah rebels have launched drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, most notably a September 14, 2019 attack on Saudi Aramco refineries that disrupted world crude oil supplies. It is a strange irony, that after the U.S. assaults Yemen with thousands of Hellfire missiles launched from Predator drones for over 20 years, the U.S. now must arm Saudi Arabia to defend itself (and our oil supply) from Yemeni drones and missiles.

    The global proliferation of weaponized drones is no surprise and Biden’s plea for peace in Yemen that allows for their continued use is a hollow one. Giving a pass, continuing  to ignore, if not condone, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen and elsewhere will not bring peace but will ensure that for generations to come, profiteers like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Atomics, will “continue to see solid growth.” Peace in Yemen, peace in the world, demands no less than an end to the production, trade and use of weaponized drones.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2021 at 9:09pm and is filed under Donald Trump, Drones, Joe Biden, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Yemen: Where America Tests its Weapons

    by RT / November 28th, 2020

    The US spends more on military aid to Saudi Arabia than on humanitarian aid to Yemen as the former continues to wage war on the latter. RT America’s Alex Mihailovich reports. Then former UK MP George Galloway weighs in on the conflict and why it is met with such widespread ignorance and apathy in the West.

    This article was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2020 at 1:11pm and is filed under Hunger, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Video, War Crimes, Weaponry, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.