Tuesday 14 April 2015

The US isn’t winding down its wars – it’s just running them at arm’s length

 Seumas Milne                         Guardian/UK                            9 April 2015

So relentless has the violence convulsing the Middle East become that an attack on yet another Arab country and its descent into full-scale war barely registers in the rest of the world. That’s how it has been with the
onslaught on impoverished Yemen by western-backed Saudi Arabia and a string of other Gulf dictatorships.

Barely two weeks into their bombardment from air and sea, more than 500 have been killed and the
Red Cross is warning of a “catastrophe” in the port of Aden. Where half a century ago Yemenis were tortured and killed by British colonial troops, Houthi rebels from the north are now fighting Saudi-backed forces loyal to the ousted President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Up to 40 civilians sheltering at a UN refugee camp in the poorest country in the Arab world were killed in a single Saudi air attack last week.

But of course the US and Britain are standing shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi intervention. Britain’s foreign secretary, Phillip Hammond, has promised
to “support the Saudi operation in every way we can”. The pretext for the Saudi war is that Yemen’s Houthi fighters are supported by Iran and loyal to a Shia branch of Islam. Hadi, who was installed after a popular uprising as part of a Saudi-orchestrated deal and one-man election in 2012, is said to be the legitimate president with every right to call on international support.

The Houthi uprising, supported by parts of the Army has its roots in poverty and discrimination, and dates back to the time of the US-British invasion of Iraq more than a decade ago. But
Yemen, which has a strong al-Qaida presence, has also been the target of hundreds of murderous US drone attacks in recent years. And the combination of civil war and external intervention is giving al-Qaida a new lease of life. For the Saudis, Yemen is about enforcing their control of the Arabian peninsula and their leadership of the Sunni world

The idea that the corrupt tyranny of Saudi Arabia, the sectarian heart of reaction in the Middle East since colonial times, and its fellow Gulf autocracies are going to bring stability, let alone freedom, to the people of Yemen is beyond fantasy. This is the state that crushed the popular uprising in Bahrain in 2011, that funded the overthrow of Egypt’s first elected president in 2013, and has sponsored
takfiri jihadi movements for years with disastrous consequences.

For the Saudis, the war in Yemen is about enforcing their control of the Arabian peninsula and their leadership of the Sunni world in the face of Shia and Iranian resurgence. For the western powers that arm them to the hilt, it’s about money, and the pivotal role that Saudi Arabia plays in protecting their interests in the oil and gas El Dorado that is the Middle East.

Since the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its allies are reluctant to risk boots on the ground. But their military interventions are multiplying. Barack Obama has
bombed seven mainly Muslim countries since he became US president. There are now four full-scale wars raging in the Arab world (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen), and every one of them has involved US and wider western military intervention. Saudi Arabia is by far the largest British arms market; US weapons sales to the Gulf have exceeded those racked up by George Bush, and last week Obama resumed US military aid to Egypt.

What has changed is that, in true imperial fashion, the west’s alliances have become more contradictory, playing off one side against the other. In Yemen, it is supporting the Sunni powers against Iran’s Shia allies. In Iraq, it is the opposite: the US and its friends are giving air support to Iranian-backed Shia militias fighting the Sunni takfiri group Isis. In Syria, they are bombing one part of the armed opposition while arming and training another. The nuclear deal with Iran needs to be seen in that context. The US isn’t leaving the Middle East, as some imagine, but looking for a
more effective way of controlling it at arm’s length.

So a tilt towards Iran can be offset with war in Yemen or Syria. Something similar can be seen in US policy in Latin America. Only a couple of months after Obama’s
historic opening towards Cuba last December, he signed an order declaring Cuba’s closest ally, Venezuela, “an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security” and imposed sanctions over alleged human rights abuses.

What’s needed is a UN-backed negotiation to end the Yemeni conflict, not another big power-fuelled sectarian proxy war. These calamitous interventions have to be brought to an end. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/08/us-wars-barack-obama-saudi-arabia-yemen

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