As a kid who grew up hearing the lyrics of “War” by Edwin Starr:
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing ..
Oh, war, I despise
‘Cause it means destruction of innocent lives
War means tears to thousands of mothers eyes
When their sons go to fight
And lose their lives ..
.. and I still volunteered to join the US Navy in 1976 after the Vietnam War, thinking this country learned from that experience that was based on the lie of “Gulf of Tonkin” incident. Only later, after Gulf War II did I learn that not only Vietnam was based on a lie, but so too was the UN Korean conflict that the US joined, as well as the “surprise” (lie) attack on Pearl Harbor that had this country join in WWII .. as well as the sinking of the “civilian” (lie) ship Lusitania prompting the US to join in WWI. I knew that the Spanish-American War was based on a lie (USS Maine blown up in Havana, Cuba was NOT accomplished by the Spanish) .. but the further I go back the more I understand that truth is the first thing sacrificed with nation’s politicians consider war. So it is past time to evaluate the 17 year war in Afghanistan, as another generation of kids continue the fight there.
As a father, I was late in advising my own boys as to the nature of war, the American Empire and the way this country has been using new generations of our kids as cannon fodder through the decades going back several centuries. I am blessed that my kids were more wise than I was especially after Gulf War II was launched. I am hopeful that my writings today help their kids critically think through these things before they consider joining OR being drafted into the American Empire’s military.
Here is a veteran’s take ( excerpt and book ) on the Afghanistan War. The Moon of Alabama led me to this resource. I will use some of their dialog to reflect on this war in the context of all the other’s this nation has initiated since Moon of Alabama actually goes BEYOND what this book does and gets to the root of the issue.
The piece includes remarkably strong words about the strategic (in)abilities of U.S. politicians, high ranking officers and pundits:
On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command.Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continuedin varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.
That description is right but it does not touche the underlying causes…
Underlying causes? Go on sir, set the all important context to what many writers state as mean fact without doing more homework:
… The main military outpost in the valley was build on a former sawmill. Chivers writes:
On a social level, it could not have been much worse. It was an unforced error of occupation, a set of foreign military bunkers built on the grounds of a sawmill and lumber yard formerly operated by Haji Mateen, a local timber baron…
What is missing here is WHY this sawmill was abandoned:
Ten years ago a piece by Elizabeth Rubin touched on this:
As the Afghans tell the story, from the moment the Americans arrived in 2001, the Pech Valley timber lords and warlords had their ear. Early on, they led the Americans to drop bombs on the mansion of their biggest rival — Haji Matin. The air strikes killed several members of his family, according to local residents, and the Americans arrested others and sent them to the prison at Bagram Air Base. The Pech Valley fighters working alongside the Americans then pillaged the mansion. And that was that. Haji Matin, already deeply religious, became ideological and joined with Abu Ikhlas, a local Arab linked to the foreign jihadis…
S**T .. so this effort in Afghanistan is built on past military mistakes (but not in their eyes because continuous war means missions and money .. but I digress)
The U.S. special forces lacked any knowledge of the local society. But even worse was that they lacked the curiosity to research and investigate the social terrain. They simply trusted their new ‘friend’, the smooth talking Pashtun timber baron, and called in jets to destroy his competitor’s sawmill and home. This started a local war of attrition which defeated the U.S. military. In 2010 the U.S. military, having achieved nothing, retreated from Korengal..
Does this not sounds like Vietnam? Fighting for the same hill time after time while trying to “save democracy”? This is as bad as Abraham Lincoln’s “save the Union” bulls**t .. and if you still think he is “honest”, you have some research to do. The “Union” post 1865 was nothing like pre-1861 .. and this country post 1787 (Constitution replaces the Article of Confederation) is nothing like pre-1787. In fact, post Revolutionary War politics kept much of the previous pre-1776 politics with just a flag change when it was all said and done. Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion found this out the hard way.
Back to Afghanistan, as Moon of Alabama concludes:
… Back to Chivers’ otherwise well written piece. He looks at the results two recent (and ongoing) U.S. wars:
The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military machine.
… Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their countries’ futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist attacks across much of the world — exactly the species of crime the global “war on terror” was supposed to prevent.
The wars fail because they no reasonable strategic aim or achievable purpose. They are planned by incompetent people…
Incompetent people (generals, deep state and politicians) leading ignorant people (who believe themselves to be patriots who will reserve our freedoms) to death, brokenness (PTSD, etc.) and abuse (at the hands of the VA).
.. The U.S. population and its ‘leaders’ simply know too little about the world to prevail in an international military campaign. They lack curiosity. The origin of the Korengal failure is a good example for that.
U.S. wars are rackets, run on the back of lowly soldiers and foreign civil populations. They enriche few at the cost of everyone else.
Wars should not be ‘a presumed government action’, but the last resort to defend ones country…
In some ways, the Constitution did us all a disservice by giving us an “almost king” government office called the president of the United States. While some believe that office can right the wrongs of the last president or even the last decade or so of bad decisions, others believe that there are forces that remain hidden in government structure and other power structures in and outside of this country that use this position as a puppet of theirs. It was evident from our first president that the power of the office would be abused, and abused often.
From The Burning Platform comes an interview with Doug Casey that reflects on the good, the bad and the ugly from the latest president and what it means for us going forward. Just a few snips from this article I would like to highlight as you could go to the link above and see what you think:
Let me start by saying that I’m very pleased that Trump was elected because, first and foremost, he’s not Hillary. In addition, he’s never been in political office. So he lacks some of the vices common to professional politicians. Even better, all members of the Deep State reflexively hate him.
That’s a good thing, because there’s some truth to the meme “the enemy of my enemy just might be my friend.”
I also like some of the things Trump’s done since he’s been in office—besides driving liberals and Deep Staters insane. He’s done some deregulating—not nearly enough, but he’s moved in the right direction. Of course, he did this not because he understands Austrian economics, but simply because he’s a businessman. He has some personal experience with the destructiveness of regulations.
So he has disrupted politics to a degree, which is good, but to inact long-term change requires more than just randomly hitting some things. He is missing something at his core which has been obvious all along in the way he approaches problems and seeks solutions almost “off-the-cuff”.
I do like that at the end of the day he would rather talk to the Russians than escalate things, but it is obvious he is limited by his deep state handlers as far as how far he can take this. Sanctions are stupid and are in fact usually the first step towards conflict. At the end of the day there seems to be no overarching philosophy for foreign policy. Trumps knee jerk firing of Tomahawks at sites in Syria a year ago after accusations of Assad using chemical warfare on his own people was an epic stupid move on the part of Trump .. but maybe there was a gun heald to his head like was held to JFK’s?
On the negative side, Doug Casey focuses on the obvious:
…. starting with running a trillion-dollar deficit. Where does he think that money’s going to come from? The Russians and the Chinese aren’t buying US debt anymore. Foreigners are looking to offload US paper.
Americans aren’t buying much, either. The only real alternative is to sell it to the Federal Reserve. Which is a real problem when the Federal Reserve is not only trying to deleverage, but has to refinance hundreds of billions of short-term paper coming due. Recall that almost all the $20 trillion of Treasury debt is very short term. Interest rates are going to rise, a lot. And so will the interest portion of the government deficit. Interest payments alone will be a trillion a year by the end of Trump’s second term—assuming he gets one.
Trump also—like all red-blooded Americans—loves the military. So, he’s adding to the already bloated military budget. It’s ridiculous, dangerous, and provocative. The United States already spends more than the next 10 or 12 biggest nations in the world put together. And most of that money is wasted and misallocated. It’s being spent on dinosaur technologies. What he’s doing there is very foolish. It’s accelerating the looming bankruptcy of the Government. And of course the Government will drag the country down with it.
He’s foolishly antagonizing the Russians by placing troops in the Baltics. He’s doing the same with China by sending ships to the South China Sea, which is their equivalent of the Gulf of Mexico.
But my biggest problem with Trump is that he has no philosophical core. He’s not by any means a libertarian. He’s a pragmatist, and an authoritarian. He’ll do whatever seems like a good idea at the time.
He’s got no background in or understanding of economics or history. I think it’s true that, as his critics say, he hasn’t read a book in 50 years. He goes strictly on gut instinct.
Exactly. So what we have is someone that keeps kicking things and reacting but never solidifying long-term change. But at the same time, the swamp is huge and he can’t be the only one draining it. While Congress remains inept at doing anything productive (like dismantling spending programs that have outlived their usefulness and mission) because that might keep them from getting re-elected. With an 11% approval rating, incumbents get re-elected at a 95% rate. If voting changed anything they would NOT let us do it!
So basically, this is essentially entertainment that your tax money pays for, the bread and circus distractions that empires do in their dying days.
At the end of the day all we can really do well is love our families, love our neighbors and pray that God has a plan to keep our kids and grand-kids is His care as this American Empire spins down.
Over and over I have seen in my brief (60 trips around the sun) life when emotional and sometimes irrational fear grips leaders, a people group or even a spouse. Yes, from macro to micro, relationships of nations, to regions, to states, to communities and even to marriages there is fear of the future.
Some of this fear is good, some of it is bad. The fact the fear does dominate our thinking as humans is that we are unsure about tomorrow. That is a healthy fear, that we do not have everything in our control. The bad fear is when it gets blown out of proportion and we make decisions on the worst possible scenario. This is the type of fear (economic and political) that I see in this article from Zero Hedge called: “An Unparalleled Economic & Political Crisis”: Brexit Optimism Collapses As Ministers Fear “Historic Catastrophe” on the evaporating Brexit optimism:
“I have near zero optimism because I think it is going to be very messy,” warned one UK minister, speaking to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity. The prospects of getting an agreement are slim, the minister said. “If we crash out without a deal, it’s going to be a historic catastrophe.”
When this level of fear grips anyone, the likelihood of a peaceful and logical solution is increasingly unlikely. It takes two parties to agree on a union, and two parties to behave well as one or both desire to dissolve the union.
I do believe, that many times it is the abused partner that can have the most balanced approach to the process of dissolution in that they have seen this coming for a long time and are ready to state their terms for the exit.
Reflecting back in history, one has to say that the path communist USSR took to split into all those republic peacefully says volumes about the abuse that happened during the rigid communist era. Not only in the political realm, but also in terms of religion (communists were bent on atheism) and society in general.
Reflecting back in history, one has to say the path the republic USA took to split into two republics shows the opposite path, whereas the southern seven states (the abused) desired to exit peacefully, the balance of the states, especially the northern and western (Midwest), feared for the future that awaited them without those seven states. Those regions feared economic uncertainties and the government feared the loss of revenue first and foremost. Between the month where Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861 toward April, even the newspapers shifted from the assumption that those seven states would exit soon to that of economic panic. In their minds, without the “customers” in those states AND the fact that they wanted to be a free-trade zone with minimum tariffs scared the heck out of people and politicians (especially the new party called Republicans that just took control of the US government and doubled the tariff as they did).
The Brexit effort is similar as once the people’s will was displayed, the political fear escalated which sets the stage for a potentially bad deal no matter what path is taken. The nation of England had wedded itself into the EU to the degree that separation will cause pain, however, the long term future is much brighter. One can only hope that common sense and level heads prevail, that real leadership emerges and leads this people towards a better future. Who knows, may this success could be a model for the USA to try this secession/exit thing one more time, and maybe instead of splitting in two (which is long overdue), possibly splitting into six nations might be optimal as a first step. While it still depends on statism, my hope is that more freedom may emerge as not all these entities remain on the Marxist track the whole of the US is currently on.
Sheldon Richman is one of my “go to” people like Walter E. Williams. Wise men who have lived through decades of change and can see truths so easily while also doing the research that backs up the issues they bring light to.
From a Libertarian Institute article called “Depopulating Palestine, Dehumanizing Palestinians” Sheldon defines some words to set the context:
Dehumanization is an apt term because it consists of more than merely murder, massacre, torture, blockade, dispossession, humiliation, and the like. It consists of the very denial of the humanity of the victims and their cultures; it may include attempts to wipe them from the archives and from anyone’s memory.
I am sure most minds go back to the stories of Nazi efforts, but they were not the only ones that used this method to achieve their goals .. African peoples dehumanized by European powers, Maoist China, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, etc. However, it seems that the systematic and even popular effort to dehumanize the Muslim AND Christian people who have lived for a very long time south of Syrian and Lebanon and north of Saudi Arabia compounded with an effort to actually deny they ever existed:
No one better vocalized this denial better than a former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who famously said:
There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.
The tendency might be to counter with an effort to prove that a people group existed, however, that is beside the point. The point is that there is epic proof that individuals lived there and it was not like after WWII there was no one there and it would be the perfect place to put Jews, even though a vast majority of these Jews do NOT have as their ancestors a Hebrew people. So Sheldon fleshes out who these people were and part of their story as well as any claim to land based on a people group:
Morally, we have rights by virtue of our personhood, not by virtue of our inclusion in a subgroup of persons. The idea of rights not rooted in the individual literally is nonsense. Among other things, this means there is no Jewish land, Palestinian land, or land with any other ethnic, racial, or religious qualifier. There is only legitimately and illegitimately acquired land.
It is not up to governments or narratives to grant people land that belongs to others .. although many have been duped into thinking that God explicitly directed the events to create an apartheid state that has caused nothing but violence and death in the Middle East in the last 70 years.
But in fact, notwithstanding fabricated and wholly discredited “histories” of Palestine and Israel, it is now uncontroversial to state that the establishment of Israel saw hundreds of thousands of indigenous individuals driven from their ancestral homes and hundreds of others massacred by recent European immigrants (many of them atheists yet nevertheless claiming to be Jewish) with a tenuous connection to Palestine or ancient Israel. H. G. Wells posed a reasonable question: “If it is proper to ‘reconstitute’ a Jewish state which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.” (Quoted in Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, “Pseudo-Travellers,”London Review of Books, February 1985.)
Ian and David go on to state: “.. The modern Palestinians are a people of various ethnic origins, descended from the conquerors of Palestine since early Biblical times. Their ancestors are the Canaanites and Philistines who, unlike the Jews, were never deported. They remained in Palestine (which took its name from the Philistines) and their descendants formed, and still form, the core of the indigenous population…”
Evidence of this come from the founding members of the nation of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, as it came into existence in 1948:
The fellahin [Palestinian farmers] are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming.… They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes.
So, we have a 70 year old effort that has squeezed these people into smaller and smaller areas of their land …
What is clear is that people WERE in the land and a SMALL number of Jews could have settled there however, once there was a groundswell of dispensation religious support that made it appear that God had indeed brought the Jews back to the Promised Land, the Zionists (atheists) seized this opportunity for power and control:
Ahad Ha’am, a “spiritual Zionist” who had spent time there, reported in 1891, “‘Palestine is not an uninhabited country,’ and has room ‘for only a very small proportion of Jews,’ since there was little untilled soil except for stony hills or sand dunes.” Ha’am and others warned the Zionist movement to respect the indigenous population.
Thus if there was to be a Jewish state, most if not all of the non-Jews would have to go. “Only in a very few places in our colonialisation were we not forced [sic] to transfer the earlier residents,” Ben-Gurion told the 1937 Zionist Congress” (Gilmours). His militias would “be forced” to transfer many more a decade later.
The view most American Christians have is that these people are Arabs that came into this area in the 7th century, however, this is simply not the case:
The dehumanization of the Palestinians was manifest in the Western attitude that these individuals saw themselves merely as undifferentiated members of an Arab horde, indifferent to their immediate surroundings, that is, to their homes, towns, villages, farming communities, market connections, and ultimately their larger homeland, and thus would accept “transfer” to other Arab areas. No westerner ever thought of himself in such nonhuman terms, but thinking of Palestinians that way came easy. That’s the stuff of mass injustice, of literal and cultural genocide.
This injustice is real, and it is time to spread the truth of the 70 year lie and a people (Muslims and Christians) that are being evaporated and marginalized.
When you think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria (all adversely impacted by US foreign policy) and then consider the region’s powers of Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE that are pitted against Iran, it all becomes a bit more clear. Israel desires to be a permanent fixture in the Middle East in spite of its illegitimate birth at the expense of native Palestinians. To preserve their place in the Middle East, they have become more desperate in their quest to control the narrative as well as the lands outside their true borders (i.e. Golan Heights, West Bank as well as Gaza).
Paranoid to a fault, they have used the United Kingdom and the United States of America for seven decades since they were given partial ownership of land in this region after the Zionist movement gained UK support three decades prior to that.
From AntiWar comes a fair synopsis [ Titled: “Making Sense of US Moves in the Middle East” by Rebecca Gordon and Tom Engelhardt] of the region’s neighbors who have been decimated by US foreign policy working towards protecting Israel at all costs.
Starting with the US’s longest undeclared war to date, Afghanistan, the article points out:
The report was devastating – or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.”
If you think this has nothing to do with Israel, you are sorely mistaken. Israel has seen Iran (used to be Iraq) as it’s biggest enemy in the region since it has Saudi Arabia and UAE as allies.
Of course the US would like the world to believe that Iran is threatening the US but in reality just its existence WITHOUT any nukes it threatens Israel which has 100 nukes. Iran is not really an offensive powerhouse with its 40 year old military equipment mainly from the US before the Shah of Iran (US puppet) was overthrown.
So $2T to date has been spent in Afghanistan with 2,000 US soldiers dying there as well as 100,000 Afghans to date. The fact that the poppy-market (Opium) market there is thriving makes the country fantastic in funding CIA black budget towards its black ops worldwide as well as being lucrative for the Military Industrial Complex.
The background on Afghanistan and how it became a target after 9/11 is an interesting one:
In 1998, the Afghan anti-Communist movement Taliban and a western oil consortium led by the US firm UNOCAL signed a major pipeline deal. UNOCAL lavished money and attention on Taliban, flew a senior delegation to Texas, and also hired an minor Afghan official, one Hamid Karzai.
Enter Osama bin Laden. He advised the unworldly Taliban leaders to reject the US deal and got them to accept a better offer from an Argentine consortium, Bridas. Washington was furious and, according to some accounts, threatened Taliban with war.
In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines. But Washington still kept up sending money to Taliban until four months before 9/11 in an effort to keep it “on side” for possible use in a war or strikes against Iran.
The 9/11 attacks, about which Taliban knew nothing, supplied the pretext to invade Afghanistan. The initial US operation had the legitimate objective of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. But after its 300 members fled to Pakistan, the US stayed on, built bases — which just happened to be adjacent to the planned pipeline route
So with that unpleasant fact out of the way (i.e. rationale for invading Afghanistan), let’s take a look at the West Bank before we turn our eyes to Syria.
Early on, Israel has made a point to solidify it’s grip on ALL the land promised the Hebrews and given to the Zionists (close enough for government work right?) by the UK and US after WWII:
From the AntiWar article mentioned above:
… the United States has often been Israel’s sole ally as, in direct contravention of international law, that country has used its own settlements to carve Palestinian territory into a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces, making a contiguous Palestinian state a near impossibility.
Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained Israel’s plan for the Palestinian people in 1973 when he said, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them.” Promising to insert “a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank,” he insisted that “in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
Forty-five years later, his strategy has been fully implemented, as Barack Obama reportedly learned to his shock when, in 2015, he saw a State Department map of the shredded remains of the land on which Palestinians are allowed to exist on the West Bank.
The “pastrami sandwich” strategy has effectively killed any hope for a two-state solution.
How convenient for Israel, and now in its effort to solidify this even more (as they are in fact now the minority class in Israel in terms of shear population), they are doing this (again from the AntiWar article):
.. as the number of non-Jews begins to surpass that of Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, that country once again confronts the inherent contradiction of a state that aims to be both democratic and, in some sense, Jewish. If everyone living in Israel/Palestine today had equal political and economic rights, majority rule would no longer be Jewish rule. In effect, as some Israelis argue, Israel can be Jewish or democratic, but not both.
A solution to this demographic dilemma – one supported by present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is to legislate permanent inequality through what’s called “the basic law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which is now being debated in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. Among other provisions, that “basic” law (which, if passed, would have the equivalent of constitutional status) will allow citizens “to establish ‘pure’ communities on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” In other words, it will put in place an official framework of legalized segregation. [Editor’s note: The Jewish Nation-State bill described here was passed early Thursday morning. This article was written before passage.]
Apartheid .. segregation .. a last ditch effort to strong arm its way in a region that is hostile to its own paranoid agenda. Acting like the US Empire as a world’s bully, not even allowing UN inspectors in Israel while it demands Iran to have total transparency in the world’s court.
Blowback is a bitch, but the current Zionist leaders only care about themselves and not their kids when they use this method to coexist in this world.
So while the US has given the Israeli military almost every toy the US has in its inventory as well as $134.7B (current, or non-inflation-adjusted) dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding and promising $39B more in the next ten years it appears that GOP, Democrats and Zionist Christians are falling all over themselves to aid in this intimate partnership for the long term. The world is NOT impressed.
Lastly, what is up with Syria?
Meanwhile, if it weren’t for Yemen (see below), it might be hard to imagine a more miserable place in 2018 than Syria. Since 2011, when a nonviolent movement to unseat Assad devolved into a vicious civil war, more than half the country’s pre-war population of 22 million has become internally displaced or refugees, according to numbers from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. Actual casualty figures are impossible to pin down with any exactitude. In April 2018, however, the New York Timesreported that the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of directly caused deaths at 511,000, including fighters and civilians.
Death and destruction have come from all sides: al-Qaeda-linked terror groups and the Islamic State killing civilians; the Syrian military, which is presently driving opposition forces out of the southern city of Dara’a, where the original uprising began (creating a quarter-million refugees with literally no place to go); and U.S. bombs and other munitions – 20,000 of them – reducing the city of Raqqa to rubble in a campaign to liberate it from ISIS militants. Add it all up and the war, still ongoing, has destroyed millions of homes and businesses, along with crucial infrastructure throughout an increasingly impoverished country.
So with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria all smarting from Israel’s lover, the US, all to protect Israel (more than US citizens when you understand the $20T debt, $200T unfunded liabilities and the loss of freedoms across the spectrum the American people have suffered (out of ignorance they would not understand this sentence)) .. what else is there? Yemen!!!
Saudi Arabia with US weapons and assistance have decimated Yemen towards a genocidal disaster. It is almost as if the US is getting Saudi Arabia up to speed to be another useful puppet in the region to protect Israel .. yes, you heard that right .. in fact, the US/Israel/Saudi Arabia team were the proud parents of ISIS.
With U.S. logistical and financial support, Saudi Arabia has waged a cruel air war against the Houthis, a home-grown movement that in 2015 overthrew the government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh. What is the Saudi interest in Yemen? As in their support for a potential UAE-Israel-Russia-U.S. alliance in Syria, they’re intent on fighting a proxy war – and someday perhaps via the U.S. and Israel, a real war – with Iran.
In this case, however, it seems that the other side in that war hasn’t shown up. Although, like the Iranian government and most Iranians, the Houthi are Shi’a Muslims, there is little evidence of Iranian involvement in Yemen. That hasn’t stopped the Saudis (with American support) from turning that country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Their destruction of infrastructure in rebel-held areas has collapsed a once-functioning public health system, touching off a cholera epidemic, with the World Health Organization reporting a total of 1,105,371 suspected cases between April 2017 and June 2018. The infection rate now stands at 934 per 10,000 people.
Even worse than the largely unchecked spread of cholera, however, is Yemen’s man-made famine. Photographs from the country display the familiar iconography of widespread hunger: children with stick-like limbs and blank, sunken eyes. As it happens, though, this famine was not caused by drought or any other natural disaster. It’s a direct result of a brutal Saudi air campaign and a naval blockade aimed directly at the country’s economic life.
Before the war, Yemen imported 80% of its food and even today, despite a disastrous ongoing Saudi/UAE campaign to blockade and take the port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s main economic center, there is actually plenty of food in the country. It now simply costs more than most Yemenis can pay. Because the war has destroyed almost all economic activity in Houthi-controlled areas, people there have no money with which to buy food. In other words, the Saudi offensive against Hodeidah is starving people in two ways: directly by preventing the delivery of international food aid and indirectly by making the food in Yemen unaffordable for ordinary people.
Nice … am I right? American exceptionalism at its finest! A nation under God right?
The author summarizes with this statement of hope (she is young, so you will have that):
For more than 70 years, Americans have largely ignored the effects of U.S. foreign policy in the rest of the world. Rubble in Syria? Famine in Yemen? It’s terribly sad, yes, but what, we still wonder, does it have to do with us?
That Part of the World doesn’t wonder about how U.S. actions and policies affect them. That Part of the World knows – and what it knows is devastating. It’s time that real debate about future U.S. policy there becomes part of our world, too.
Fat chance on the US really having a debate on foreign policy as the only export this country really has anymore is weapons and a bully military.
Again, blowback will be a bitch someday. I just with my generation would have learned from Vietnam and thought more like Thomas Paine:
