{"id":123229,"date":"2018-12-03T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=123229"},"modified":"2018-11-30T15:02:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-30T15:02:16","slug":"the-long-brutal-u-s-war-on-children-in-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/12\/the-long-brutal-u-s-war-on-children-in-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long, Brutal U.S. War on Children in the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

When children waste away to literally nothing while fourteen million people face conflict driven famine, a hue and cry\u2014yes, a caterwaul \u2014most certainly should be raised, worldwide.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

30 Nov 2018 – <\/em>On November 28, sixty-three U.S. Senators voted<\/a> in favor of holding a floor debate on a resolution calling for an end to direct U.S. Armed Forces involvement in the Saudi-UAE coalition-led war on Yemen. Describing the vote as a rebuke to Saudi Arabia and the Trump Administration, AP reported<\/a> on Senate dissatisfaction over the administration\u2019s response to Saudi Arabia\u2019s brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi last month. Just before the Senate vote, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called<\/a> current objections to U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia \u201cCapitol Hill caterwauling and media pile-on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201ccaterwaul\u201d on Capitol Hill reflects years of determined effort by grassroots groups to end U.S. involvement in war on Yemen, fed by mounting international outrage at the last three years of war that have caused the deaths of an estimated 85,000<\/a> Yemeni children under age five.<\/p>\n

When children waste away to literally nothing while fourteen million people endure<\/a> conflict-driven famine, a hue and cry\u2014yes, a caterwaul \u2014most certainly should be raised, worldwide.<\/p>\n

How might we understand what it would mean in the United States for fourteen million people in our country to starve? You would have to combine the populations of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and imagine these cities empty of all but the painfully and slowly dying, to get a glimpse into the suffering in Yemen, where one of every two persons<\/em> faces<\/a> starvation.<\/p>\n

Antiwar activists have persistently challenged elected representatives to acknowledge and end the horrible consequences of modern warfare in Yemen where entire neighborhoods have been bombed, displacing millions of people; daily aerial attacks have directly targeted Yemen\u2019s infrastructure, preventing delivery of food, safe water, fuel, and funds. The war crushes people through aerial bombing and on-the-ground fighting as well as an insidious economic war.<\/p>\n

Yemenis are strangled<\/a> by import restrictions and blockades, causing non-payment of government salaries, inflation, job losses, and declining or disappearing incomes. Even when\u00a0food is available, ordinary Yemenis cannot afford it.<\/p>\n

Starvation is being used as a weapon of war\u2014by Saudi Arabia, by the United Arab Emirates, and by the superpower patrons including the United States that arm and manipulate both countries.<\/p>\n

During the thirteen years of economic sanctions against Iraq\u2014 those years between the Gulf War and the devastating U.S.-led \u201cShock and Awe\u201d war that followed\u2014I joined U.S. and U.K. activists traveling to Iraq in public defiance of the economic sanctions.<\/p>\n

We aimed to resist U.S.- and U.K.-driven policies that weakened the Iraqi regime\u2019s opposition more than they weakened Saddam Hussein. Ostensibly democratic leaders were ready to achieve their aims by brutally sacrificing children under age five. The children died first by the hundreds, then by the thousands and eventually<\/a> by the hundreds of thousands. Sitting in a Baghdad pediatric ward, I heard a delegation member, a young nurse from the U.K., begin to absorb the cruelty inflicted on mothers and children.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I understand,\u201d murmured Martin Thomas, \u201cIt\u2019s a death row for infants.\u201d Children gasped their last breaths while their parents suffered a pile-up of anguish, wave after wave. We should remain haunted by those children\u2019s short lives.<\/p>\n

Iraq’s children died amid an eerie and menacing silence on the part of mainstream media and most elected U.S. officials. No caterwauling was heard on Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n

But, worldwide, people began to know that children were paying the price of abysmally failed policies, and millions of people opposed the 2003 Shock and Awe war.<\/p>\n

Still the abusive and greedy policies continue. The U.S. and its allies built up permanent warfare states to secure consistent exploitation of resources outside their own territories.<\/p>\n

During and after the Arab Spring, numerous Yemenis resisted<\/a> dangerously unfair austerity measures that the Gulf Cooperation Council and the U.S. insisted they must accept. Professor Isa Blumi<\/a>, who notes that generations of Yemeni fighters have refused to acquiesce to foreign invasion and intervention, presents evidence that Saudi Arabia and the UAE now orchestrate war on Yemen to advance their own financial interests.<\/p>\n

In the case of Saudi Arabia, Blumi states that although Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman wants to author an IPO (Initial Public Offering), for the\u00a0Saudi state oil company, Aramco, no major investors would likely participate. Investment firms know\u00a0the Saudis pay cash for their imports, including billions of dollars\u2019 worth of weaponry, because they are depleting resources within their own territory. This, in part, explains the desperate efforts to take over Yemen\u2019s offshore oil reserves and other strategic assets.<\/p>\n

Recent polls indicate<\/a> that most Americans don\u2019t favor U.S. war on Yemen. Surely, our security is not enhanced if the U.S. continues to structure its foreign policy on fear, prejudice, greed, and overwhelming military force. The movements that pressured the U.S. Senate to reject current U.S. foreign policy regarding Saudi Arabia and its war on Yemen will continue raising voices. Collectively, we\u2019ll work toward raising the lament, pressuring the media and civil society to insist that slaughtering children will never solve problems.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

This article first appeared on the website of\u00a0<\/em>The Progressive<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Kathy Kelly is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>,<\/em> an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of <\/em>Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a co-coordinator <\/em>Voices for Creative Nonviolence<\/a>. <\/em>Three times since 2000, she has been nominated for the <\/em>Nobel Peace Prize. As part of peace teamwork in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US-Iraq wars. Her recent travel has focused on Afghanistan and Gaza, along with domestic protests against U.S. drone policy. She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of U.S. military bombardment and inmates of U.S. prisons. She lives in Chicago.<\/em> Kathy@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When children waste away to literally nothing while fourteen million people face conflict driven famine, a hue and cry\u2014yes, a caterwaul \u2014most certainly should be raised, worldwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":123231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123229","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=123229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}