Evan R. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon–

Once again, Yemen has become a flash point in the global conflict against imperialism. On March 17, the Trump regime announced “sustained” and “decisive” military operations against the nation and its people for the crime of standing firm against the genocide of Gaza. This is a continuation of a long running campaign of genocide against the small nation, perpetuated by the United States and its thralls with widespread bipartisan support.

Yemen is home to the Ansarallah movement. Often called “Houthis” by the media. Ansarallah may control only the western portion of Yemen, but this portion contains most of the nation’s population. The land in the east held by the US and Saudi-backed General People’s Congress is largely uninhabitable desert. Ansarallah governs as part of a big-tent national coalition, unifying both right and left-wing forces together against the GPC.

Yemen has been one of the most steadfast supporters of the Palestinian people during their resistance against genocide and apartheid. The Yemenis have fought to prevent the ongoing genocide of Gaza by American backed Zionist forces. Yemeni missiles and rockets closed the vital Bab-el-Mandeb straight to Zionist shipping, causing severe damage to the Israeli state’s economy, and even took on the United States Navy in direct confrontations. The Yemeni attacks were so ferocious that two USN carrier battle groups were forced to withdraw from the region.

However, this courage has come at a great cost to the people of Yemen. Yemen has suffered from the predations of American capital for decades now, it has already been the victim of one of the worst genocides carried out during the “Global War on Terror” waged by the United States and its allies. While this terroristic campaign of mass slaughter, illegal detention on a colossal scale and intentional destruction almost a dozen nations is largely seen as the legacy of George W. Bush, we cannot forget that he had widespread bipartisan support among all factions of the American ruling class.

To wit, it was liberal former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama who took point in the genocide of Yemen. The Yemeni uprising and resulting civil war started only in 2014, during Obama’s term, and therefore cannot be blamed on Bush and Cheney. Yemen was Barack Obama’s war, and by extension, Vice President Joe Biden’s.

The campaign in Yemen was so brutal and unnecessary that even the Council for Foreign Relations, the blood drunk neoconservatives who orchestrated the war in Iraq, viewed it as a terrible mistake. This is a particularly damning response coming from CFR, who’s primary goal is to launder the crimes of American imperialism.

CFR is a very obvious example of the bipartisan support for endless wars among the American ruling class. The president of CFR is Michael Froman, a former treasury secretary and member of the national security council who worked for Citibank and Mastercard before re-entering politics as part of the Obama cabinet.

Lest you believe this is a liberal organization, the chairman of CFR is David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, an investment group linked at the hip to the Bush regime owing to dozens of its staff finding their way into Bush’s cabinet. The most notable was former vice president Dick Cheney, who served as the company’s CEO for many years.

To put it simply, the Carlyle Group is a war profiteer. They received billions in government contracts both to support the endless invasions and to rebuild after they were finished. Unsurprisingly, most of this was simply fraud, the company stole billions and left very little in their wake. When they bothered doing anything, the work was often so shoddy that it killed American soldiers instead of their enemies.

Despite, or more likely because of these ties, David Rubenstein is such a close personal friend of Joe Biden that the Biden family spent thanksgiving at Rubenstein’s $39 million dollar estate in Nantucket.

Knowing this, we can understand just how shocking and extreme Joe Biden’s slaughter of the Yemeni people was. Even his close friends and fellow war criminals who had stood behind him as he orchestrated and then led the looting and pillaging of Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan and so many others could not bring themselves to back him this time.

In Yemen, America did not put boots on the ground in an official capacity. Rather, the United States relied on their proxy force in Saudi Arabia, stuffed to the gills with American tax dollars and the latest and greatest killing machines that they can buy. During the genocide of Yemen, Saudi Arabia became the single largest purchaser of American arms, with their outlays dwarfing even those of the Zionist entity and American vassals like Australia, Japan and South Korea.

All those weapons were put to use against the people of Yemen. Starting in 2014, Saudi Arabia committed genocide in real time, with the full, unconditional backing of the US Government. The Obama regime even provided free 24/7 access to US Air Force aerial tankers so Saudi airplanes could stay in the air longer. Aircraft from the US-backed coalition carried out as many as 68,000 air strikes in Yemen, crushing the country into rubble as they intentionally targeted critical infrastructure.

Outbreaks of disease became widespread due to the intentional targeting of medical and sanitation facilities all throughout the country. Cholera, a disease long ago eradicated in wealthy countries, reached epidemic levels. The United Nations estimates that Yemen suffered from 2.5 million cases of Cholera, the largest outbreak of the disease in history. The country has also been wracked with outbreaks of measles, diphtheria, dengue fever and the re-emergence of polio, all of which are easily preventable via the vaccines which American sanctions keep out of Yemeni hands. 

The crimes committed against the Yemeni people go on and on. Over half of all Yemeni children face some sort of malnutrition, a condition which will have lifelong consequences. The country’s small amount of arable land has been poisoned by American made weapons, meaning Yemen will be even more dependent on foreign aid in the future, and diseases like cancer are already at epidemic levels. The only crop that will come from the soil of Yemen are hundreds of thousands of unexploded munitions in the form of landmines and cluster munitions, a gift from the American people which is already the #1 killer of Yemeni children.

While Biden promised to end the war when he was running for president, as has always been the case, this was nothing more than a lie to get him elected. Once he took office, Joe Biden doubled down on support to the Saudi regime, even loosening the restrictions on weapons that Trump had put in place, until a peace deal brokered by China finally pulled the rug out from under him. Little else could be more telling of American hypocrisy than seeing the very same Chinese government who Biden constantly named as a threat to peace mending the supposedly eternal Shia-Sunni split simply by being reasonable.

By the end of Obama and Biden’s decade long campaign, at least 377,000 innocent people died and with tensions radically escalating in the region, that number will only increase.

The Trump regime is now saying that it will hold Iran responsible for every attack launched by Yemen in a brazen precursor to war between the two. For their part, Ansarallah has vowed to hold firm against US aggression and continue to support the Palestinian cause against Zionist genocide.  It seems like the situation is spiraling rapidly towards all out war between the United States and Zionist entity on one side against Iran and Yemen on the other. As working people, we must forcefully reject this war and all other Capitalist wars.

With Trump moving rapidly to solve the latest crisis of Capitalism through the endless profits generated from yet another war, we must ask ourselves who really benefits from a conflict with Iran. The answer is the same as always.

The only people who will benefit from this war are the arms dealers, the capitalists and the oligarchs who have lined up behind the Trump regime in record numbers and with unprecedented force. It is this sector of our society who benefits from all wars. As the people bleed and die, corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing make a killing, turning the blood of the poor and downtrodden into gold like alchemy. We owe it not only to the people of Yemen and Palestine to resist this war, but to all working people who are having their futures and their lives sold off for a profit.

Categories: Anti-War, International, U.S. News, Yemen