YEMEN SUFFERS AND USA IGNORES ITS TRAGEDY

AMERICA IGNORES YEMEN AS BOMBS KILL WOMEN AND CHILDREN

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We read little about the tragedy of Yemen in the main stream press.  That story does not sell copy.  But thousands of civilians—mostly women and children are suffering and dying there and our government and its Saudi Arabian ally are responsible for their deaths..  

Yemen is an Arab nation about the size of Iraq (think of Pennsylvania and Ohio together). It is a coastal nation, situated in the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula with a shoreline which extends along the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean for more than a thousand miles.    Powerful, regional hegemon Saudi Arabia is its neighbor to the north, while Oman borders it to the east.  It’s inland capital city, Sanaa, is located in the north west of the nation.  It’s main port is Aden in the south, on the Indian Ocean.  

Yemen with its estimated population of nearly 30 million is the world’s most recent “basket-case” nation.    Its ‘basket case status’ derives from its unforgiving desert climate, inherent poverty, food shortages, lack of fresh water resources, a chaotic political situation, religious diversity, with a large Shia minority in a majority Sunni Moslem nation. it has a powerful neighbor—a political and military adversary— in the form of a Sunni Moslem Saudi Arabia.  The Saudi monarchy has initiated a brutal air war against the Shia minority which it sees as a religious opponent.  (The situation reminds me of the aggressive foreign policy Elizabethan England pursued against its Catholic neighbor—Ireland.)  

Saudi Arabia and its allies began its air campaign against the Houthis ( a Shia Moslem minority) in March of 2015.  The war began when Yemen’s long term dictator (Ali Abdullah  Saleh) was deposed and replaced by a Sunni candidate (Abdrabbuh Hadi) with strong ties to Saudi Arabia (SA).  The deposed president  (Saleh) joined forces with an insurgent  Moslem Shia minority (Houthis) and with the collaboration of the Yemen military took over government offices and large tracts of land around the capital city of Sanna.  The new president (Hadi)—seen as too compliant to Saudi was deposed from power and retreated to the port city of Aden, where he remains trapped and supported only by SA air power...but largely unsupported by the rest of the population.  With the uncertainty of which government ( Houthis-Saleh or Hadi) is legitimate—chaos reigns in much of the rest of the nation where various terror organization hold sway.  

The inhumane Saudi air campaign to dislodge the Houthis from power and restore their candidate (Hadi) has caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths.  Unable or unwilling to mount a ground campaign against their Shia enemies, the Saudis have continued their brutal air war of attrition which has had no significant impact on the political situation, which has decimated civilian targets, infrastructure, agriculture, water access and exacerbated the decline of Yemen into another failed state in the Middle East.  

Human Rights Watch has documented nearly sixty incidents of “unlawful” airstrikes by SA which killed nearly 800 civilians.  These Saudi aerial attacks hit hospitals, markets, schools, civilian factories, warehouses and mosques.  A recent (2017) air strike on a crowded funeral cortege killed at least one hundred attendees.  Targeting  purely civilian sites is designed to weaken, demoralize and terrorize the civilian population...These acts of SA are in violation of internationally recognized“laws of war” and are considered war crimes or worse. Yet the Trump administration and our Secretary of Defense—General Mattis—one is is certainly fully aware of the illegality of these acts, continues our unwise and shameful support of Saudi Arabia’s war.    While the Trump Administration supports the actions of a despotic regime in Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration continues to hypocritically badmouth and incite against the Shia Moslem state of Iran—which has no history of violence or “unlawful wars” to its credit.  

What our USA policy should be is to immediately stand down from support of clearly illegitimate attacks on citizens in Yemen.  We should rather, put our efforts toward an end the military intervention and civilian suffering in Yemen.