How many dead Yemenis does it take to equal one Washington Post contributor?
The War Nerd dissects reporting on Saudi Arabia to show how the corporate
media cares more about a dead Washington Post columnist than a quarter of a
million Yemenis killed in a Western-backed war.
By Gary Brecher
Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe for
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The headline here is not a joke, unfortunately. It's a question you can't
help asking if you've followed the war in Yemen.
You probably noticed that on Radio War Nerd we've pointed out over and over
that some wartime deaths get a whole lot of attention, others very little -
or none. But it's not easy to get a real-life scientific-type test of the
relative weight of a Washington Post writer's death and the deaths of
"enemy" civilians.
Well, we've got such a test now. I just found it at the BBC News site. This
thing is going to be the gold standard of pixels-per-death calculations from
now on. It's Nobel Prize in Media Physics stuff. What's the molecular weight
of a dead Yemeni civilian? It's an amount so tiny that mere laypeople using
crude stone tools could never guess it. But thanks to this BBC story, we can
use our advanced math skills to figure it out.
Here's the story, our Eureka moment, our Rosetta Stone, our electron media
microscope: a BBC article headlined "Saudi Arabia: Just how deep are its
troubles?", published on May 13 2020, under the byline of Frank Gardner,
"BBC Security Correspondent."
BBC Saudi Arabia Yemen War Nerd
Gardner identifies many problems for the Kingdom, most of them purely
financial: the COVID-19 pandemic, the oil glut and falling prices. He
briefly mentions the PR problem suffered by de facto Saudi ruler Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS):
"Meanwhile the crown prince, while still largely popular at home, remains
something of a pariah in the West due to lingering suspicions over his
alleged role in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi."
That's Gardner's sixth paragraph, so the PR problem rates below the purely
financial problems, but still pretty high.
Paragraph placement in a news story is very important. And like the NFL
draft, it's not so much whether you get drafted or not but where you're
placed. The earlier the better, the more value you have, whether you're a
cornerback or a dead civilian. So being mentioned in the sixth paragraph of
a long (50-paragraph) story like this, as Khashoggi is, makes you something
like a third-round choice. Khashoggi must be proud, wherever he is now.
The point is that killing Khashoggi is MbS's ONLY PR problem, as far as the
BBC is concerned.
There's no doubt the killing of Khashoggi, an elite Saudi who'd gone rogue,
was not a triumph of professional assassinations. Forget Jean Reno, this was
more like hiring the boys from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to do the cleanup
operation. MbS's agents brought their hacksaws to the Saudi Consulate in
Istanbul, killed Khashoggi on the premises, were too stupid to realize
Turkish intel had the place bugged up worse than an Ontario cabin in July,
and had no cover story ready when the tapes showed up online.
And the Saudis' attempt at damage management was the most inept of all. The
Saudis' first response was that Khashoggi had left the consulate intact, his
limbs a virgin forest untouched by the saw, and only admitted under pressure
that he'd been killed and dismembered inside their consulate. No one's
disputing that the killing of Jamal Khashoggi was a bloody mess in every
sense.
Jamal Khashoggi
But the thing is, that wasn't the bloodiest mess MbS and the Kingdom were
involved in. And Khashoggi wasn't the only maimed body left in the wake of
MbS's "reform" policies.
Not by a loooooong shot. There was this other thing going on: The Saudi-led
invasion and blockade of northwest Yemen, the mostly Shia highland provinces
of Yemen. That bloody massacre started in March 2015, and it has been
killing untold (and I do mean "untold") hundreds of thousands since then.
How many people have died horrible deaths in Yemen since 2015? The official
sources like WaPo and NYT and BBC used to fix on a static figure: 10,000
dead.
Everyone laughed at that one. Every knew it had to be much, much higher, but
that just annoyed our news sources of record. So they tried fudging the
numbers with the face-saving formula "at least" 10,000, but even buzzards
sometimes gag, and people got sick of hearing such an obvious callous lie.
So by now, how many Yemeni Shia nobodies are dead? How many inconvenient
corpses, disproportionately children (because they're always the first to
die in a famine) are buried, untold, in that rocky ground?
Nobody even tries very hard to guess anymore, because nobody in the Western
media is interested. Especially not the crusaders at the Washington Post. As
far as they and their buddies in the NYT and BBC are concerned, those deaths
don't matter. No, that's wrong: those deaths are actually an annoyance, a
distraction. It's not that the news sites of record can't be bothered to
cover the hundreds of thousands who've died in Yemen after years of
blockade, air strikes, and artificial famine. It's not that at all. They
care, all right; they're annoyed.
Because those who died were nobodies, and the wrong-est kind of nobodies.
They were Shia, and Shia are all our enemies, as far as Riyadh, D.C.,
London, and Jerusalem are concerned. When a Shia Yemeni child dies gasping
of an easily curable disease like cholera, it's not just unimportant, it's
enemy propaganda, because the Houthis - or Ansarullah if you prefer, the
main Shia militia in Yemen - are officially "Iranian proxies."
They're not, of course. The Shia of northwestern Yemen have been fighting
against the Najd, home of the Sauds in Central Arabia, for centuries.
Najran was a Yemeni city before the 1930s, when the nouveaux riches Saudis
"rented" it from the dirt-poor Yemenis and simply refused to return it when
the lease was up. The Saudi response was simply "Oh, you want us to return
Najran? Meet our new friends, the US and UK militaries. We're paying them
for protection now, so if you take one step across the new border, they'll
blow you to bits."
Since then the alliance between Riyadh, Washington, and London has only
deepened. Arab leftists have been wiped out in Yemen, Oman, and Saudi
itself. It's corrupt Islamists/Royalists all the way down these days.
And this is just fine with the staff at WaPo/NYT/BBC. They have never had
ANY problem with all that. They had no problem at all backing the Saudi
"coalition's" blockade of medicines and food directed against northwestern
Yemen; no problem with the videos of kids dying of medieval diseases; no
problem with Saudi bombing of Hodeidah, the one port serving northwestern
Yemen; and no problem with the US Navy doing patrols to enforce the Saudi
blockade on food and medicine reaching the Shia provinces.
Yemen airstrike rubble UNDP
Rubble from a US-Saudi airstrike in Yemen (Credit: UNDP)
Remember, when Jamal Khashoggi was killed in 2018, this artificial blockade
and famine had been going on for almost three years. No one knows exactly
how many Shia Yemeni died in those years, because no one who matters wants
to know. I'm using "not want to know" as a transitive verb here; it's not
that they "failed" to find out but that their policy was outright boycott on
Yemen horror stories, even as they were hyping mostly BS horror stories from
Syria, which happened to align with the interests of the DC/Riyadh/London
cartel (and, annoyingly but not very importantly, a lot of woke-left idiots
who never noticed that they were doing fine PR work for the cartel).
So we're ready to set our experiment in motion. Jamal Khashoggi is mentioned
in Paragraph Six of this story. How about the hundreds of thousands of dead
nobodies in Yemen?
They are mentioned a total of three times in this 50-paragraph story. Always
very briefly, "in passing" as suave reporters like to say, and using terms
like "a spat" to describe the kerfuffle, as if it was a snarly moment on a
cooking show.
Here's the first of the three mentions. This one - the first one, remember!
- is in the eighth paragraph, two paragraphs after Jamal Khashoggi's death -
in NFL draft terms, a fourth- or fifth-round choice. Note also the phrasing
here:
"Then the war in neighbouring Yemen has bled Saudi coffers for more than
five years now with no tangible gains, and a spat with Qatar has wrecked the
surface unity of the six-nation Gulf Arab Cooperation Council (GCC)."
There is nothing on how many have died, or how many of the dead were
civilians, or how many (MANY) of the famine dead were children. Nothing at
all about that. Ah, but there is something about blood! ".[T]he war in
neighboring Yemen has bled Saudi coffers for five years now." Huh, there's a
medical novelty. Some hippie said "only women bleed," but it turns out here
that only "coffers" bleed. "Only money bleeds," as it were. Yemenis, no;
"coffers," yes.
And you know the worst about that fiscal bloodletting? It was all for "no
tangible gains." A bad investment, a far worse sin, apparently, than several
hundred thousand dead.
Now here's the second mention of Yemen. This one comes far down, about the
32nd paragraph (out of 50 paragraphs, remember) - which makes it like an
eighth-round draft choice in NFL terms.
This one is very brief, very dodgy in every sense:
"The Yemen War, prosecuted in part from the air by Saudi warplanes supplied
by the US and Britain, has seen alleged war crimes committed by all sides."
This one kind of makes me sick (and I once did a survey of British
journalism during the Great Famine of the late 1840s, so I have a tough
gut.) You'll note that it was "prosecuted" by the Saudis, a nice way of
saying "They invaded Yemen." Furthermore, they were only responsible "in
part" for this prosecution (though their "Coalition of the Willing" was even
more reluctant and useless than ours in Iraq).
And just to put an extra coat of whitewash on this squeamish, quick allusion
to a genocide, Gardner tops off the paragraph with "war crimes committed by
all sides." Yeah Frank, one's as bad as the other, right? Even if one side,
the ones with the money, have all the weapons, all the offensive firepower,
and all the lapdog media on their side. It's an old trick, this "one's as
bad as the other," but it works all too often.
Yemen rubble Saada 2015
Rubble after US-Saudi airstrikes on Saada, Yemen in 2015 (Credit: UN OCHA /
Philippe Kropf)
Ah, but Gardner does go on to admit there have been problems due to the
genocide in Yemen. What kind of problems? PR problems, of course! He says in
the next paragraph that KSA"s "prosecution" of a war has led, for reasons
which seem to be wholly incomprehensible to our friends at the BBC, to some
bad press.
"But the civilian death toll caused by those air strikes has led to mounting
criticism in Washington and elsewhere."
It's that first word, "But." that gets me. "But"? Why "but"? Read it aloud
with the "but" and then without. You'll see that with the "but" in the
beginning the sentence implies that the air strikes, the artificial famine,
all of it, is not a problem in itself; the problem is "But." these perfectly
valid policies have, alas, led to "mounting criticism in Washington and
elsewhere."
We'd better move on, to the third and final mention of Yemen, before I spew
on the monitor. So here it is, in a mere photo caption just below the 39th
paragraph of the story (in NFL terms, a UDFA):
"Five years of war in Yemen have cost Saudi Arabia dearly" [photo caption]
Or rather, here it was - because, in the time since I first read the
article, the BBC has changed the caption so that it now reads "Five years of
war in Yemen have achieved little."
Ah, those sly dogs at the BBC copy desk! They think they've thwarted our
rhetorical analysis but they are mistaken. Because now we can compare the
original caption and the revision as if they were lines from a poem.
Here they are, Exhibits A (the original) and B (the new version):
A: "Five years of war have cost Saudi Arabia dearly"
B: "Five years of war in Yemen have achieved little"
This is a very revealing change. Exhibit A made the emphasis on money a
little too clear when it said that the war has "cost Saudi Arabia dearly."
That's the author's real priority, of course, but somebody - a reader or an
editor, a paid empath or something - flinched at it, decided to blur the raw
indifference to those who've suffered by talking about what's been
"achieved" rather than what the war cost Riyadh. So now we get the nice,
bland predicate ".have achieved little."
So now, the article isn't saying outright that the war was too expensive for
KSA, but that it was wasted carnage, carnage that doesn't "achieve"
anything. It's dizzying to try to find a meaning in that; what would a
successful "achievement" be? The annihilation of NW Yemen? The crushing of
all Shia resistance in Yemen? Saudi hegemony over the whole country?
But I'm quibbling. Readers won't ask questions like that. They'll glean
something vague and well-meaning on the lines of "War, what is it good for?"
and let the BBC off the hook. See? The Beeb isn't totally obsessed with
Saudi finances!
But the new caption is balanced, in that winsome NYT/WaPo/BBC manner,
because it doesn't go too far by mentioning dead Yemenis. It's still looking
solely at the Saudi perspective.
From the Yemeni perspective, this war has "achieved" quite a bit, in a grim
sense: killing hundreds of thousands, crippling the next generation (because
no child ever really recovers from protracted starvation in childhood, as
studies have shown).
In fact, you could argue, if you were Satan, that this was an "achievement"
for the KSA: by stunting the mental and physical development on a generation
of Yemeni Shia, KSA has hit, in military jargon, the "second echelon," the
upcoming generation of potential enemies.
Now, thinking rhetorically, guess what the next photograph gracing the story
might be. Remember, this is a news-site of record from the Anglo/Saudi
consensus. So what would remind readers that after all, MbS is a reformer, a
maker of omelettes, despite all the broken and bloody eggs he splattered
over the landscape. What would show his progressive side?
Yup, a shot of a rich elite Saudi woman driving a car. And that is indeed
the next photograph:
BBC Saudi Arabia MBS women driving
So see, folks, there's good coming out of MbS's tough love after all.
And really, the story tells us, his only real mistake was killing Khashoggi,
a real human being, a Made Man in the global mafia. That death mattered. The
dead Yemenis? They were Shia; they were "pro-Iranian"; they were, above all,
dirt poor.
But us, we're scientists here. We have to figure out the ratio: how many
dead Shia poor people does it take to equal one Khashoggi?
Which means we have to come up with some estimate of how many untold deaths
have happened in Yemen. Keep in mind, very few of the dead were killed in
the air strikes that get the publicity, brutal as those no doubt were.
The real killer in Yemen has been famine and a blockade on essential
medicines. That technique kills or cripples a whole population, starting
with young children (as the BBC should know better than anyone).
But "untold" means "untold, right? How can we even guess? It's not easy,
because people-of-record don't want you to think about it. But we have had a
few brave people willing to name some sums. The representative for one NGO
trying to work in Yemen estimated that,
".an estimated 1,000 children are dying every week from preventable killers
like diarrhoea, malnutrition and respiratory tract infections."
That was back in 2016. So if you do the math: 52 weeks a year for five
years, that's roughly a quarter of a million dead children.
Most Western news sources of the respectable sort won't do the math. They'll
stick to that comically absurd "10 thousand dead" figure. I swear I'll never
understand those people. They're so very moral - except when it doesn't suit
them. They take me back to the respectable press in 1847 Britain, and that's
the last place I want to be.
They even retain the habit of not counting those who die in an artificial
famine, as if blockading a country that was always heavily dependent on food
imports and medical supply flights was an Act of God. They sometimes count
Yemeni civilians dead in direct "Coalition" air strikes on markets and
funerals, but even then there are dark hints that those might have been
"pro-Iranian" weddings, "pro-Iranian" funerals, "pro-Iranian" food markets.
You know, the suspect kind where they sell pro-Iranian onions.
The Iranian link to the Shia of Yemen is, let me repeat, BS. There's a very,
very powerful link between Iran and Hezbollah, as both sides will tell you
with pride; there's a somewhat more fraught link between Iran and Syria; but
Yemen has always fought the push from Saudi Arabia, and would do so if Iran
ceased to exist tomorrow. The people telling that lie must know better,
but.well, who knows how a weasel thinks? Proud to say I don't.
And Lord knows that's a depressing topic.
But let's go back to the original question up top and do the math as best we
can. Drum roll, while we reveal the answer to the big Q:
"How many dirt-poor, wrong-sect, non-English-speaking nobodies does it take
to equal one made man in the Cartel's media elite like Jamal Khasoggi?"
Answer (after the necessary wonk-ish qualifiers, e.g. "We can't set an exact
figure here.") The answer is roughly.
A quarter of a million. And that's a conservative estimate, not (by any
means) a neoliberal one.
Yup, that's the ratio: One dead WaPo contributor weighs as much, news-wise,
as a quarter-million nobodies from the wrong side of the sectarian tracks.
That's how these virtuous people think. Makes me gladder than ever I'm not
virtuous.
John Dolan Gary Brecher
Gary Brecher
Gary Brecher is John Dolan is the War Nerd. He is the host of Radio War Nerd
and the author of "The War Nerd Iliad" and "Pleasant Hell."
