Yemen Matters - As a Target, as a Market, as a Culture

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/29655-focus-yemen-matters-as-a-target-as-a-market-as-a-culture

Arab aggression, in the form of a blitzkrieg unleashed by Saudi Arabia with the support of the United States among others, currently pits a coalition of five Sunni Arab police state monarchies in the Gulf Cooperation Council against the poorest country in the Middle East, Council non-member Yemen, where the Shia Houthi insurgency has taken control of perhaps one third of the country.

Yemen, insofar as there is a state entity that can be called Yemen, has attacked no other country and has little capability of doing so. For years, over at least two presidential administrations, Yemen has persisted as a disintegrating quasi-democratic kleptocracy, where years of systematic Saudi state bribery has reinforced chronic instability by supporting tribal independence and political disintegration. Yemen is roughly the size of Morocco, Germany, or California. It is also the same size as Iraq, with about three million fewer people and many more political and cultural fault lines.

So what did Yemen do to provoke weeks of US-supported terror-bombing carried out primarily by Saudi pilots flying US jets armed with US munitions? Yemen has a population of about 25 million people who are overwhelmingly dependent on food imports for survival. What terrible crime has Yemen committed to be subjected also to an international naval blockade that will cause widespread malnutrition, hunger, and in time starvation?

The proximate cause, it would seem, is the interruption of what US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power called the “peaceful, inclusive, and consensus-driven political transition under the leadership of the legitimate President of Yemen, Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi.” One problem with this formulation is that Hadi’s “legitimacy” derives from his being installed as president by an international diplomatic coup, followed by his election in a race in which he was the sole candidate. Essentially, there is no legitimate government of Yemen and has not been for decades at least. The present war of aggression by outside powers intervening in a multifaceted civil war relies for its justification on fiction.