Why We Know So Little About the US-Backed War in Yemen
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
29 July 18
What the U.N. calls the "world's worst humanitarian crisis" is an unhappy
confluence of American media taboos
Thursday, from Al Jazeera: "Yemen 'on Brink of New Cholera Epidemic,'
Charity Warns." The piece details how recent developments in the Yemeni
civil war - specifically, the possible siege of the port city of Hodeidah -
may cause a surge in cholera cases. There were over a million reported cases
of cholera between the fall of 2016 and spring of 2018, the largest
documented outbreak in modern times. The rate of infection had slowed, but
observers now fear resurgence.
Since the conflict began, medical services have been devastated across the
war-torn country, and children in particular have been affected, with as
many as 400,000 at imminent risk of starvation. In April, U.N. General
Secretary Antonio Guterres said that 8 million people in Yemen didn't know
where they were getting their next meal.
If you want to be saddened to the point of nausea, look at these images, in
which weeping mothers can be seen holding their malnourished babies and
saying things like, "I'm losing my son and there's nothing I can do about
it!"
Yemen is a catastrophe on a scale similar to Syria, but coverage in the
United States has been sporadic at best. PBS News Hour did a thorough
three-part series, but MSNBC, for instance, has barely mentioned the crisis
in a year, during a period when it has done 455 segments on Stormy Daniels
(this according to media reporter Adam Johnson).
The reason for inattention is obvious: The United States bears real
responsibility for the crisis. A quote from a Yemeni doctor found in PBS
reporter Jane Ferguson's piece sums it up:
"The missiles that kill us, American-made. The planes that kill us,
American-made. The tanks . American-made. You are saying to me, where is
America? America is the whole thing."
The Yemeni civil war pits Iran-backed Houthi rebels against Saudi-backed
government forces, who receive weaponry and other forms of assistance from
the U.S., including the in-air refueling of Saudi warplanes. You can see the
reporter Ferguson touring collections of American-made weapons dropped on
Yemen - including cluster bombs - at about 2:40 of this video.
Leaving aside the complex question of who is right and who is wrong in this
multipolar war (which also includes Al-Qaeda/ISIL forces), there is no
question that masses of innocent civilians have wrongly become targets.
Hospitals, schools, mosques and other non-military locations have been
destroyed indiscriminately.
As Human Rights Watch notes, the Saudi-led coalition forces have used
cluster munitions (made by both the United States and Britain), while the
Houthi side has used antipersonnel landmines. International treaties have
banned both weapons.
Ultimately, the ancillary humanitarian disaster that has grown out of the
war has become a distinct tale in itself. The U.N. puts the number of
displaced persons at over 2 million, with more than 22 million people "in
need." Yet still the Yemen crisis has received little attention, likely
because it represents a whole continuum of American media taboos.
For one thing, the victims are poor nonwhite people from a distant
third-world country. Also, our involvement is bipartisan in nature, which
takes the usual-suspect cable channels out of the round-the-clock-bleating
game (our policies in the region date back to the Obama presidency, and have
continued under Trump).
Thirdly, covering the story in detail would require digging into our
unsavory relationship with the Saudi government, which has an atrocious
human rights record.
Another dark angle: The United States has been conducting drone missions in
Yemen for some time. Rolling Stone documented our country's erroneous
killing of anti-terrorist imam Salem bin ali Jaber in a piece earlier this
month.
But we have not yet supplied any of the anti-Houthi coalition partners with
drones. The reason, ostensibly, is that the United States only sells drones
to countries that will "use these systems in accordance with international
law." So we can sell Saudi Arabia F-15s, but not drones - at least not yet.
But this may soon change. The Chinese have been supplying both Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with drones, which reportedly have been
used in this campaign.
The Trump administration, perhaps freaked out about the loss of market
share, is said to be pushing for the relaxation of rules that will allow
sales of our unmanned assassination technology to actors like Saudi Arabia.
Selling drone technology to repressive third-world governments is the
logical next step in America's human rights slide. Allowing vicious client
states to fill their skies with drones will sharply increase
state-sanctioned violence around the world, in addition to emboldening
regimes to launch wars in neighboring countries.
Yemen could become a poster child for this development.
In the end, Yemen is a classic example of what Noam Chomsky and Edward
Herman described as the "worthy and unworthy victims" problem in their
iconic examination of American media, "Manufacturing Consent." The
obvious-sounding theory holds that violence committed by Americans or by
their client states will be covered a lot less than identical acts committed
by adversary states.
So a Polish priest murdered by communists in the Reagan years was a "worthy"
victim, while rightist death squads in U.S.-backed El Salvador killing whole
messes of priests and nuns around the same time was a less "worthy" story.
Yemen features the wrong kinds of victims, lacks a useful partisan angle
and, frankly, is nobody's idea of clickbait in the Trump age. Until it
becomes a political football for some influential person or party, this
disaster will probably stay near the back of the line.
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