Yemen steps out of line

The article The US/UK attack on Yemen and the global eruption of imperialist war by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS) describes how the U.S. and UK opened a new front in their war on the middle east.

“[…] supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.”

Not for the first time, though, right? Vietnam was sold as a defensive war—defending against the specter of communism and the terrifying “domino theory”. Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada. They were all defensive. The U.S. is always defending its interests, so every act of aggression it perpetrates is, in fact, defensive. A rather banal rhetorical trick that otherwise-intelligent people seem to delight in falling for. It follows that preemptive attacks are also defensive. Since there is always a slight—perceived or actual—to which one can point, everything is defensive.

The Pentagon, which runs the by-far-largest military force that mankind has ever seen, stated, “We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”

JFC. 🤦‍♂️

So there you go. They just spend one trillion dollars per year on occupation and war because the U.S. is defending itself. It’s true, though! The U.S. thinks the entire planet belongs to it. That notion—the notion of empire—must be defended from anyone who thinks otherwise—even against the other people living on it..

“For nearly a decade, the Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.

“The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.

“Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aiden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.”

That’s a good summary of the U.S. Empire’s defensive posture. Look—people don’t pay their protection money willingly. You gotta lean on ‘em a bit. Sometimes a lot, for those who are hard of hearing.

The goal has always been Iran

Like Iran.

“The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.”

Bush II listed Iran as one of the baddies. The sanctions have continued since then uninterrupted. The only time most people hear about Iran is either when they’re being accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons (they’re not) or when an uprising looks ready to break the stranglehold that the mullahs have there—not that the U.S. would support an open, democratic regime there. It doesn’t need f*@kiing France there; it wants something like another Iraq: keep the cheap oil flowing under U.S. aegis, don’t get too uppity, and don’t think too much about stuff.

It’s incredible to think that the war on Iran was basically declared the second the mullahs took over and the U.S. never forgot about it. Through an unbroken chain of administrations led by both parties, the animus has remained, utterly unchanged. Biden’s foriegn policy is underpinned by the same precepts as Bush I or Bush II. Obama and Clinton looked no different. They all ran wars and incursions. Reagan and Carter as well. Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy were in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Truman mopped up Japan. Eisenhower was in Korea, for whatever reason. He was also quite busy squashing any leftist notions all over Europe, in Greece, Portugal, and Italy, among others.

If you’re at all interested in knowing more, check out William Blum’s Killing Hope (I read it in 2001, before I’d even started tracking my books) and Rogue Superpower (which I read in 2003, before I’d started writing notes for books). Or, like, anything by Noam Chomsky, but most especially his latest, which he wrote together with the inestimable Vijay Prashad, The Withdrawal

“Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.”

That’s all it is. Everything else is just window dressing.

The Biden administration is a mad dog

The article Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide Operations In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter) adds,

“[…] the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power.”

This is all done to protect trade routes, to keep prices low. The attacks by the Houthis have resulted in no casualties. They’re annoying. They cause companies to lose money. Some stuff gets to some countries more slowly. The U.S. and UK bombed the Sanaa international airport in Yemen. WTF. No declaration of war. No attempt to negotiate. No consideration of alternatives. No congressional approval. Just a dictator shooting things. This is what people were afraid Trump would do. This is what I wrote at the time that Biden would likely do. He’s a merciless piece of shit. He always has been.

Apparently wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not enough for the Biden administration. Nothing ever makes them think it’s time to back down, or that it might be time to negotiate, or that things might be getting out of hand. Forget cold wars. Biden makes everything hot immediately. He’s fighting Russians directly in Syria—and proxy-fighting them in Ukraine. He’s funding and arming Saudi Arabia to flatten the Houthis in Yemen. He’s funding and arming the Israelis to flatten the Palestinians in Gaza—and supporting tons of violence in the West Bank as well.

This is mindless violence, all to quash any hopes of rebellion against the empire. All to prevent any change to the system that subjugates so many and funnels so much wealth toward Empire—and a handful of people in it.

Learning the lesson of violence

The world organizations are also proving to Yemen that attacking merchant vessels really is the only recourse, just like Israel convinced any Palestinians who dreamed of living without a boot on their neck that the only way to get it off is violence.

The article Technicality Could Sink Genocide Case v Israel by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post) goes into more detail, but the upshot is that South Africa brought its case against Israel without 100% proper notification prior to the case, so Israel says that there is no standing “dispute”, which means that South Africa shouldn’t have been able to bring the case, and that the court should actually not even agree to hear it because it didn’t follow procedure.

Basically, if you put your fingers in your ears and scream so that you can’t hear accusations, you can pretend to have been blindsided by an official accusation, just shocked at a court summons, upon which the court has to instead reprimand the accuser, telling them to start all over.

I suppose it’s a neat trick, that. Of course, it just means that international law is completely and utterly toothless unless it’s being wielded against poor nations to relieve them of their resources and to load them up with debt incurred to pay fines for crimes committed by dictators emplaced and propped up for decades by the same countries that now accuse, prosecute, convict, and sentence them. In other words, international law is only wielded against African nations.

It’s a sham, a scam—and it always has been. The “International rules-based order” is no stupider than what it purports to replace.

Lauria’s article writes,

“American academic Norman Finkelstein, told an interviewer: “It will completely discredit the Court if they issue a decision — we have decided not to pursue this case of genocide because we don’t think there is a dispute. That just can’t work.” ”

“Murray added:

““I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s ‘no dispute’ argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means ‘no dispute’. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…””

What do NYC liberals think?

All of the good little NYC liberals are lining up behind King Biden and his wars, of course. The article Houthis And The Blowhards by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) is representative. It states that anyone who disagrees with him loves terrorism. He writes,

“These are our children, our academics, our overly-educated and unduly-passionate true believers that the terrorists are the good guys and these Israel, that the United States, both independently and in complicity with Israel, are evil.”

I didn’t misquote that. He is nearly incoherent in his rage. As usual, you can almost see the spittle flying over the keyboard, flecking the screen.

My, but how Mr. Greenfield likes to ascribe bad opinions to what he considers to be opponents, if only because they fail to unquestioningly love the things that he loves. He loves the USA and Israel, in no particular order. His context is that the U.S. modestly tiptoes through the world, minding its own business, and sometimes horrible, petty, small-minded, blinkered animals and terrorists wish harm on it and even try to do harm to it. The same story applies to Israel.

In his mind, there is no agency on the part of either of these countries. In his mind, they are always just reacting in as measured a manner as possible in order to prevent the next unprovoked, unforeseeable, completely unjustified, and utterly unexplainable attack on the unutterable magnificence that is the ship of state of these great nations. Anyone with a different context is automatically assigned the most ridiculous of opinions, the most straw-man-like of justification for their ideas, opinions, and world-view.

I’ve never seen him make any attempt to grapple with the real arguments that might be made. He always takes the biggest fools at their word—who, in fighting empire and against injustice, are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons—rather than taking on a real interlocutor, even if only a fictitious one.

The Houthis attacked shipping vessels, harming no-one. The U.S. and UK obliterated cities and an international airport, killing dozens of civilians. Greenfield will never analyze whether his “side” might be unjustified in doing so. It’s perfectly OK with him for his “side” to break all sorts of laws “defending itself” because laws are for other countries.

The epithet “terrorist” is exclusively for other states, certainly not his own or any with which he has developed an affinity. This is not a principle. This is just the same mush-brained American-liberal mindset that has helped build an empire. It’s great that he seems to be for justice for Americans wronged by the American court systems—that’s what he used to post about, almost exclusively—but this penchant for justice and fairness doesn’t extend beyond the border. And it certainly doesn’t extend to his precious Israel.