“When Saudi Arabia launched its bloody war in 2014, did they and their US allies not consider the possibility that Yemen might actually shoot back? I would think that is something that might be expected in a war.”

The barbaric Saudi regime and their bosom buddy allies in the corrupt Trump administration are outraged — outraged, I tell you! — that forces aligned with the Yemen insurgency actually caused some significant damage with the recent attack on a Saudi oilfield.

Apparently the message behind the outrage is something like, “We’ll do all the bombing around here, thank you very much.”

And to date most of the bombing — and death and destruction and human suffering — has in fact come from the Saudi/US side of the conflict.

In the five years since Saudi Arabia launched its brutal air campaign against Yemen, the statistics of what they have wrought are truly staggering …

Estimated number of people killed in Yemen
91,600

Estimated number of people currently in dire need of food and medical assistance
22,200,000

Estimated number of displaced people
2,000,000

(Source: Council on Foreign Relations)

Included among those cold statistics are an untold number of attacks which clearly constitute war crimes. An investigation of the situation last year by the United Nations found…

…a host of possible war crimes committed by various parties to the conflict over the past five years, including through airstrikes, indiscriminate shelling, snipers, landmines, as well as arbitrary killings and detention, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and the impeding of access to humanitarian aid in the midst of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. (Source: Yemen: Collective failure, collective responsibility – UN expert report)

 

Adding to this atrocious record, the UN panel of experts “expressed strong concern that the parties to the conflict may have used starvation as a method of warfare.”

Is it any wonder that Yemeni forces might want to strike back at their torturers? When Saudi Arabia launched its bloody war in 2014, did they and their US allies not consider the possibility that Yemen might actually shoot back? I would think that is something that might be expected in a war. But, no, we are all supposed to be outraged that Yemen pulled off a successful attack.

There’s another bit of double-think going on here, as well. In his first public comments about the bombing of the Saudi oilfield, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply.”

Let’s parse that a little bit. The loss of Saudi petroleum production from the drone attacks equals about 5% of total global production. No doubt, that’s a shock to the global system.

But let’s compare that to the amount of Iranian oil production which Donald Trump took off the world market when he unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear accord and imposed a near total embargo of Iran’s oil. How much oil do you think Iran was supplying to the world market market before Trump’s action? You probably guessed right: about 5%.

So, actually, Mr. Secretary, it was your boss who first launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply. Maybe we should bomb Mar-a-Lago.

And one final thing to keep in mind as you read the reporting about this latest turn of events in this ongoing tragedy: This past Spring, Congress passed a resolution invoking the War Powers Act precisely in order to rein in US backing of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war crimes. Indeed, the goal of the resolution was to end US complicity.

 Trump vetoed the measure.

In the coming hours and days, the US may very well launch a major strike against Iranian targets, threatening to make the bloodbath in Yemen a regional catastrophe.

The US will call it “retaliation” for the oilfield strike. It won’t be retaliation. It will be a violently loud statement in favor of continued war crimes and disruption of world oil supplies.

And the shooting back will go on and on and on.