Do You Know How Many Innocents the U.S. Is Killing—Right Now—in Yemen?
Do You Know WHY... and WHAT That Tells Us?

September 3, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

What would you say—and do—if you knew the United States was directly involved in slaughtering and maiming thousands of civilians, including children? If you knew it was deliberately starving millions of people and exposing them to deadly diseases? That both political parties supported this cruelty and killing, and actions constituting war crimes? And that this system’s media was largely censoring this story so very few people know it’s happening—or WHY it’s happening?

Well, this is exactly what the United States and its close allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are doing right now in the bitterly poor country of Yemen in the Middle East.

On August 9, a bus full of children was returning from a recreational outing in Sa’ada in northern Yemen when it was obliterated by a U.S.-made bomb, fired from a U.S.-made plane by Saudi Arabia. Body parts were strewn over a crowded street: 40 children and 11 adults were killed and 79 more wounded, 56 of them children. At the hospital, “Some were screaming, some were scared, many went straight to the morgue,” one aid worker said.

The strike was deliberate: Saudi Arabia called the school bus full of children a “legitimate target.”

This wasn’t an exception or “mistake.” On August 23, Saudi warplanes attacked a refugee camp and killed at least 31 civilians, including 22 children. In late April, the Saudis bombed a wedding in the village of Raqah, killing 22. “There was blood everywhere,” one survivor said. Saudi Arabia and the UAE—backed by the U.S., Britain, and France—are deliberately targeting civilians—bombing hospitals, clinics, schools, apartment buildings, markets, gas stations, factories, farms, and more.

“The Royal Saudi Air Force cannot operate without American and British support”

The United Nations estimates that since the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen began three years ago, at least 6,475 civilians had been killed and more than 10,000 injured, and that the “real figure is likely to be significantly higher.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are fighting with U.S. planes, loaded with U.S. bombs, directed by U.S. intelligence, and enabled by U.S., British, and French political support. One former CIA agent said, “The Royal Saudi Air Force cannot operate without American and British support.”

One victim in Raqah said, “If it wasn’t for the American aircraft, Saudi Arabia would never strike Yemen.... America gives them weapons, and the Saudis hit us.”

As If This Weren’t Bad Enough:
Waging War Through Mass Starvation and Disease

This slaughter from the air is being carried out to terrorize millions of Yemenis into submission as part of defeating Yemen’s Houthi movement. But in some ways this isn’t even the worst of it. The U.S.-Saudi-UAE are also attacking Yemen’s food chain, launching 250 attacks on fishing boats, 942 attacks on farms, 114 on markets, and 61 on food storage sites, according to the Guardian, while restricting shipments of food to a country that imports 90 percent of its supplies! One study concluded this was a deliberate strategy “to destroy food production and distribution” in Houthi-controlled areas.

This has left 22 of Yemen’s 28 million people in need of humanitarian aid to survive and 8.4 million on the brink of starvation.

The Worst Cholera Epidemic in History: “I felt like death”

U.S.-backed Saudi attacks have also destroyed much of Yemen’s water and health infrastructure and led to the largest epidemic of deadly cholera in history: one million Yemenis were infected last year. “The cholera ward is full of children,” CBC (Canada) reports, “some writhing in agony, others eerily still, and the blanket over one boy too weak to move rises and falls with his shallow breathing.”

This war is hitting children hardest—113,000 children in Yemen died of hunger or preventable disease in the last two years.

The UN also reports that UAE troops are carrying out widespread detention and torture in their prisons, and the abduction and rape of women to extort money from family members.

All this barbarity hasn’t led to victory. So on June 13, Saudi Arabia and the UAE—with U.S., British, and French backing, escalated—assaulting Al Hudaydah, the port through which three-quarters of Yemen’s humanitarian aid flows. They even destroyed a Doctors Without Borders cholera treatment facility that had just opened.

Why Are the U.S. and Saudi Arabia Going to Such Extremes?

Why have the U.S. and Saudi Arabia unleashed such massive, savage violence against the people of Yemen? And what does this reveal about America’s economic and political system?

Why? Because the wealth and resources piled up by capitalist-imperialist America have come first from slavery and theft of land domestically, and then from the relentless economic, political, and military domination and exploitation of key regions, key resources, and especially the masses of people all over the world. This is what enables the rulers to deliver the spoils—the standard of living—to people in this country that it does, to keep their system running and maintain their political power.

The Middle East is one of those key regions, and Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil exporter, is a key cog in the whole U.S. empire. It plays a critical role in America’s economic, energy, and financial dominance. It’s located near key global trade and transit routes. And it has been a key operator for the U.S.—propping up its shaky clients, helping derail anti-imperialist struggle, and directly facilitating many U.S. wars, military assaults, coups, and interventions around the world.

Maintaining U.S. domination of the Middle East and keeping Saudi Arabia’s oppressive, theocratic monarchy in power has compelled America’s imperialist rulers—Democrats and Republicans alike—to back or carry out massive crimes—wars, invasions, coups, sanctions, and backing tyrannical “allies”—for the past 70 years. This region of over 300 million people has been left with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine; shattered societies in Libya, Syria, and Iraq; millions dead and tens of millions of refugees; brutal torturers in power; women chained and suffocated by patriarchy; the rampant spread of Dark Ages religious fundamentalism—all while America plunders its resources, especially oil.

Now the U.S. is supporting the slaughter in Yemen because they feel it’s critical to maintaining Saudi Arabia’s stability, power, and influence, and because it’s one front in their all-around assault on the Islamic Republic of Iran, which they consider their main regional challenger at the moment.

This is why Obama OK’ed the war, and now the Trump/Pence regime is escalating it. This is why literally tens of thousands of Yemeni children have been slaughtered, starved, and infected by disease—for no other reason than the need of America to maintain its global dominance and the monstrous world of oppression and exploitation it presides over.

What Does This Tell You?

Any system that depends on massacring, starving, and infecting millions isn’t a system fit to exist a moment longer. Any system that’s carried out these crimes decade after decade—no matter whether Republicans or Democrats are in power—has proven it cannot be reformed, that THIS is how it operates. Any system like this needs to be overthrown through revolution as soon as the conditions come into being that make that possible. People need to confront the real nature of an empire based on starving children, HERE, and the real solution to ending it, and all the horrors it inflicts on humanity, HERE.