{"id":115666,"date":"2018-07-30T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=115666"},"modified":"2018-07-29T18:04:10","modified_gmt":"2018-07-29T17:04:10","slug":"why-we-know-so-little-about-the-u-s-backed-war-in-yemen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/why-we-know-so-little-about-the-u-s-backed-war-in-yemen\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Know So Little about the U.S.-Backed War in Yemen"},"content":{"rendered":"

What the U.N. calls the \u201cworld\u2019s worst humanitarian crisis\u201d is an unhappy confluence of American media taboos.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Legs of civilian victims are seen at a hospital after they were killed by an airstrike of the Saudi-led coalition that targeted their house on June 25th, 2018 in Amran province north Sana\u2019a, Yemen.
Mohammed Hamoud\/Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Jul 2018 \u2013 <\/em>Thursday [26 Jul], from Al Jazeera<\/a>: \u201cYemen \u2018on Brink of New Cholera Epidemic,\u2019 Charity Warns.\u201d The piece details how recent developments in the Yemeni civil war \u2014 specifically, the possible siege of the port city of Hodeidah \u2014 may cause a surge in cholera cases. There were over a million reported cases of cholera<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. In April, U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres said that 8 million people in Yemen didn\u2019t know where they were getting their next meal.<\/p>\n

If you want to be saddened to the point of nausea, look at these images<\/a>, in which weeping mothers can be seen holding their malnourished babies and saying things like, \u201cI\u2019m losing my son and there\u2019s nothing I can do about it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Yemen is a catastrophe on a scale similar to Syria<\/a>, but coverage in the United States has been sporadic at best. PBS News Hour did a thorough three-part series<\/a>, but MSNBC, for instance, has barely mentioned<\/a> the crisis in a year, during a period when it has done 455 segments<\/a> on Stormy Daniels (this according to media reporter Adam Johnson).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s piece sums it up:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe missiles that kill us, American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks \u2026 American-made. You are saying to me, where is America? America is the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> of Saudi warplanes. You can see the reporter Ferguson touring collections of American-made weapons dropped on Yemen \u2014 including cluster bombs \u2014 at about 2:40<\/a> of this video.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As Human Rights Watch notes<\/a>, the Saudi-led coalition forces have used cluster munitions (made by both the United States<\/a> and Britain<\/a>), while the Houthi side has used antipersonnel landmines. International treaties have banned both weapons.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the ancillary humanitarian disaster that has grown out of the war has become a distinct tale in itself. The U.N. puts<\/a> the number of displaced persons at over 2 million, with more than 22 million people \u201cin need.\u201d Yet still the Yemen crisis has received little attention, likely because it represents a whole continuum of American media taboos.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, and have continued under Trump).<\/p>\n

Thirdly, covering the story in detail would require digging into our unsavory relationship with the Saudi government, which has an atrocious human rights record<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another dark angle: The United States has been conducting drone missions in Yemen<\/a> for some time. Rolling Stone <\/em>documented our country\u2019s erroneous killing of anti-terrorist imam Salem bin ali Jaber in a piece earlier this month<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to countries that will \u201cuse these systems in accordance with international law.\u201d So we can sell Saudi Arabia F-15s<\/a>, but not drones \u2013 at least not yet.<\/p>\n

But this may soon change. The Chinese have been supplying<\/a> both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates<\/a> (UAE) with drones, which reportedly<\/a> have been used in this campaign.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration, perhaps freaked out about the loss of market share, is said to be pushing for the relaxation of rules<\/a> that will allow sales of our unmanned assassination technology to actors like Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

Selling drone technology to repressive third-world governments is the logical next step in America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Yemen could become a poster child for this development.<\/p>\n

In the end, Yemen is a classic example of what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman described as the \u201cworthy and unworthy victims<\/a>\u201d problem in their iconic examination of American media, \u201cManufacturing Consent<\/a>.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

So a Polish priest murdered by communists<\/a> in the Reagan years was a \u201cworthy\u201d victim, while rightist death squads in U.S.-backed El Salvador killing whole messes of priests and nuns<\/a> around the same time was a less \u201cworthy\u201d story.<\/p>\n

Yemen features the wrong kinds of victims, lacks a useful partisan angle and, frankly, is nobody\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for <\/em>Rolling Stone<\/em>. He\u2019s the author of five books and a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary. Please direct all media requests to taibbimedia@yahoo.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 rollingstone.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Jul 2018 \u2013 What the U.N. calls the \u201cworld\u2019s worst humanitarian crisis\u201d is an unhappy confluence of American media taboos. A quote from a Yemeni doctor sums it up: \u201cThe missiles that kill us, American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks \u2026 American-made. You are saying to me, where is America? America is the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":39943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}