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A Unity of Opposites:

War Crimes When Others Commit Them

Justified When Done in the Interests of the U.S. Rulers

Missiles and bombs target residential neighborhoods, crash down on hospitals, schools, places of worship. Millions of refugees are driven from their homes. Critically needed imports of food and fuel that people need to survive are attacked or threatened. War on a smaller, weaker neighboring country to install a pliant regime, is “justified” with accusations that the bullying power is being “bullied” or threatened by its weaker neighbor.

Russia is doing these things in Ukraine.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are doing all these things in Yemen (where they are waging war against a rebel group known as the Houthi, which has ties to Iran) on an even more deadly scale, enabled by billions of dollars of U.S. cutting-edge weapons, training and assistance.1

Woman walks away from destroyed building in Kyiv, Ukraine.

 

Ukraine: Fleeing destruction from Russian bomb and missile attacks.    Photo: AP

US-backed-Saudi-airstrike-Yemen-2018.jpg

 

Yemen: Fleeing destructon from bomb and missile attacks by U.S.-armed and backed Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.   

The U.S. rails at Russia’s war crimes and demands the world condemn them.

The U.S. covers up even deadlier war crimes perpetrated by the Saudis and the UAE in Yemen.

Ukrainian refugees being served refreshments upon their arrival in Poland.

 

Ukrainian refugees fleeing war are welcomed by Poland and other U.S. allies.    Photo: AP

An internally displaced Yemeni family sit outside their shelter at Al-Suwaidan camp in Marib city, Yemen, June 2021.

 

Twenty million people in Yemen need humanitarian aid and four million are internal refugees with nowhere to flee. U.S. allies (and the U.S.) prevent aid from reaching them.    Photo: UNHCR

In Ukraine, the U.S. dismisses as ridiculous claims that the bully (Russia) is acting in self-defense.

In Yemen, the U.S. insists bombing and missile attacks by the Saudis on Yemen that have killed or injured over 18,600 civilians are “self-defense.”2, 3

NATOs expanding membership map crop

 

Ukraine: The U.S. aims to add Ukraine to its anti-Russian military bloc, NATO.  Source: NATO    

Map of Yemen and Saudi Arabia

 

Yemen, an isolated, impoverished country is the victim of a one-sided onslaught by U.S. allies.   

The U.S. condemns Russia for holding Ukraine and Europe hostage because Russia supplies these countries with gas, which could be cut off.

The U.S. enables and helps enforce a Saudi blockade of Yemen that chokes off oil desperately needed to boil water, to keep people alive and transport food.4

Yemen's 30 million people cannot survive without imported fuel to transport imported food throughout the country. The Saudi blockade keeps fuel from entering the country.
Children with gallon containers wait for water in Yemen.

 

Photo: UNOCHA

In Yemen, the U.S. condemns Iran for supplying the Houthis with small arms and small amounts of missile technology.

The U.S. is pumping billions of dollars in cutting-edge weaponry into Ukraine and ratcheting up an escalating war with the potential to become a nuclear war.5

The U.S. justifies a murderous blockade against Yemen because of small-scale, low-level military technology sent from Iran. At the same time, the U.S. is sending billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine.

Right: U.S. army trains Ukrainian tank crews in Germany in 2017 to “foster military partnership.”

German tanks supplied to Ukraine.

 

German tanks supplied to Ukraine.    Photo: Flickr

In two places, a powerful bully unjustly attacks a neighboring country bringing death, devastation and suffering to further its perceived interests. The rulers of the U.S. take OPPOSITE positions, condemning one, embracing the other.

Those positions are opposite, but they are UNITED in this way: For the rulers of this country, anything goes when they perceive a threat to their domination of this world of exploitation and oppression.

U.S. backed Saudi Arabia airstrike on Yemen.

 

For 7 years the U.S. has armed and enabled genocidal Saudi bombing of Yemen. Above: bombs fall on the capital city of Sana’a.    Photo: WikiCommons

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FOOTNOTES:

1. Overwhelmingly as a direct result of a U.S.-backed slaughter by Saudi Arabia and UAE, for seven years Yemen has been the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world. See “To All Those ‘Progressives’ Who Think That the U.S. Is Morally Superior to Russia Because ‘We” Would Never Invade a Country and Attack Civilians in Such a Wanton Manner: WE CHALLENGE YOU TO LEARN ABOUT YEMEN.” [back]

2. In his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden declared the U.S. would continue to supply Saudi Arabia with what he insisted were defensive weapons to “support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people” (emphasis added). This when the Saudis have not been invaded by anyone, and instead have launched tens of thousands of missile attacks and air raids in Yemen that have directly killed or injured over 18,600 civilians so far and destroyed schools, hospitals, residences and mosques. Under this twisted imperialist “logic,” the Biden administration sold the Saudis an additional $650 million of what it called “defensive” missiles last year. Today, a year after Biden’s promise to “end the war in Yemen,” the humanitarian crisis there is worse by many accounts than when Trump was president [back]

3. The U.S. and the Saudis claim the blockade they are enforcing is “legitimate” based on U.N. resolutions against other countries sending weapons into Yemen to use against the Saudis and the UAE. Aside from the glaring contradiction that the U.S. is sending exponentially more and more powerful weapons into Ukraine, this is a pretext for starving and killing off people in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. According to a pro-U.S. military analyst, Iranian weapons play a minor role in the conflict between the Houthis and Saudi-backed forces within Yemen and “the military impact of these [Houthi missile] strikes [aimed at Saudi Arabia and the UAE] has been limited and the material damage to Saudi Arabia has been negligible.” It is utter hypocrisy for the U.S. to orchestrate these U.N. resolutions supposedly because of small and relatively insignificant Iranian small weapons shipments to Yemen, and then ship billions of arms to Ukraine. [back]

4. Yemen imports nearly all its oil and most of its food. Yemen’s 30 million people cannot survive without imported fuel to transport imported food throughout the country. The Saudi blockade keeps fuel from entering the Houthi-controlled Hodeidah port and chokes off other imports through the main airport in Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a. The Saudis and the U.S. invoke the U.N. embargo on arms shipments to the Houthis, but a rare story in U.S. mainstream news about the famine in Yemen (“Famine has arrived in pockets of Yemen. Saudi ships blocking fuel aren't helping,” CNN) reported last year that Saudi warships have not allowed any oil tankers to berth at Hodeidah even after they have been cleared by UN inspectors. Not only does the U.S. enable this deadly Saudi blockade, the U.S. Navy is itself actively involved in enforcing the blockade. [back]

5. See Ukraine War Update: Behind the Comic Book Headlines—Escalating Horror, Danger of Nuclear War, and Imperialist Calculations. [back]

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