No Legal or Moral Justification for Yemen Suffering

After US President Donald Trump’s veto of the War Powers Act demand by Congress to end the illegal Yemen war, a new report from the UN Development Program now says the US-backed, Saudi-led war has set back the poorest country in the Middle East more than 20 years.

According to the UN’s new report, the economic losses caused so far are around $88.8 billion, and that’s just assuming the war ends now. If it lasts until 2030, the report estimates losses of $657 billion, and 84 percent of the population chronically malnourished. The report concludes that even with immediate peace, it would take decades just to get Yemen back to the impoverished ex-ante situation.

Of course, this is still good news for the American military-industrial complex – the reason Trump vetoed the War Powers Act by the Congress. More specifically, war profiteers: The five largest US arms makers - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics - and their dealings with Saudi Arabia worth over $110 billion dollars and counting. By their own account, of all the wars underway from which they are profiting, “none is greater than the Saudi war on Yemen.”

The criminal Saudi air campaign, fueled by the US war profiteers, has hit endless civilian targets, using American smart bombs and missiles, without any protest or complaint from the War Party in Washington. Even though the UN Security Council has appointed a group of experts to detail US-backed Saudi war crimes and egregious attacks on Yemeni civilians, including people attending weddings and funerals, nothing has so far come out of the UN headquarters in New York to suggest that the war and the blockade are coming to a decisive end anytime soon.

This is while the naval blockade of the country by Saudi Arabia and the UAE has also cut humanitarian aid ships docking in the port city of Hodeida. The result: far less food and medicine entering the country, creating a disaster for Yemenis, a deliberate disaster that according to the World Bank, has put “some 8.4 million people on the brink of famine.”

It gets worse. According to a new World Health Organization report, in 2018, there were more than 1.1 million cholera cases in Yemen. At least 2,310 people died from the disease, most of them children.

It goes without saying that as per the Charter of United Nations, wartime economic blockades that starve and sicken civilians and soldiers alike amount to a war crime. The Saudi-Emirati claim that the blockade’s sole purpose is to stanch the flow of Iranian arms to the Houthi Ansarullah has never been substantiated with even a shred of evidence, meaning that there are no Iranian arms in Hodeida. But US and European arms are flowing to Saudi Arabia unabated. By the standards of international humanitarian law, blockading Yemen’s imports is a disproportionate response and therefore illegal.

True to form, American-supplied weapons have included cluster munitions as well, which pose a particular hazard to civilians because, when dropped from a plane, their devastating bomblets often disperse over enormous areas. These arms continue to flow to Saudi Arabia despite Washington’s denials, while Saudi warplanes rely on US Air Force tankers for mid-air refueling, as the Saudi military receives regular intelligence information and targeting advice from the Pentagon.

Which is to say that with Trump’s recent veto, such military involvement will only deepen, hence making the US government complicit in Saudi war crimes in Yemen.

One thing is obvious though: The US policy in Yemen won’t achieve its declared goals of defeating Ansarullah and retaking Yemen. After all, the War Party’s drone strikes began there in 2002 under George W. Bush. Under Obama, as in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, drones became Washington’s weapon of choice. Yet they never managed to change the situation in Washington’s favor.

Likewise, the US-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen will prove not just self-defeating but self-prophetic, as well. The criminal campaign has no justification, legal or moral. That’s why it is cementing an alliance at the United Nations against the Americans, the Saudis and their lackeys. The international community is now more than ever determined and demanding for an end to the illegal war and blockade so that peace and flow of humanitarian aid into the country could begin immediately.

Source:FarsNews