{"id":216812,"date":"2022-07-18T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=216812"},"modified":"2022-07-17T05:57:06","modified_gmt":"2022-07-17T04:57:06","slug":"no-starvation-for-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/07\/no-starvation-for-oil\/","title":{"rendered":"No Starvation for Oil"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Yemen – Rod Waddington \/ flickr.<\/p><\/div>\n

As President Joe Biden embarks on his trip to the Middle East, those of us back home must acknowledge the suffering the United States has caused in places like Yemen.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

11 Jul 2022 – <\/em>President Joe Biden\u2019s foreign policy advisors are applauding themselves for devising a \u201csensitive\u201d itinerary as he plans to embark on a trip to the Middle East on July 13.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0op-ed,<\/a>\u00a0Biden defended his controversial planned meeting with Saudi Arabia\u2019s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (known as MBS), saying it is meant not only to bolster U.S. interests but also to bring peace to the region.<\/p>\n

The war has caused one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, creating an unprecedented level of hunger in Yemen, where millions of people face severe hardship.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems that his trip will not include Yemen, though if this were truly a \u201csensitive\u201d visit, he would be stopping at one of Yemen\u2019s many beleaguered refugee camps. There he could listen to people displaced by war, some of whom are shell-shocked from years of bombardment. He could hear the stories of bereaved parents and orphaned children, and then express true remorse for the complicity of the United States in the brutal aerial attacks and starvation blockade imposed on Yemen for the past eight years.<\/p>\n

From the vantage point of a Yemeni refugee camp, Biden could insist that no country, including his own, has a right to invade another land and attempt to bomb its people into submission. He could uphold the value of the newly extended truce between the region\u2019s warring parties, allowing Yemenis a breather from the tortuous years of war, and then urge ceasefires and settlements to resolve all militarized disputes, including Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine. He could beg for a new way forward, seeking political will, universally, for disarmament and a peaceful, multipolar world.<\/p>\n

More than 150,000 people have been\u00a0killed<\/a>\u00a0in the war in Yemen, 14,500 of whom were civilians. But the death toll from militarily imposed poverty has been immeasurably higher. The war has caused one of the\u00a0worst<\/a>\u00a0humanitarian crises in the world, creating an unprecedented level of hunger in Yemen, where millions of people face severe hardship.<\/p>\n

Some 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure<\/a>; by December 2022, the projected number of hungry people will likely rise to nineteen million. The rate of child malnutrition is\u00a0one of the highest<\/a>\u00a0in the world, and nutrition continues to deteriorate.<\/p>\n

I grew to understand the slogan \u201cNo Blood for Oil\u201d while living in Iraq during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm war, the 1998 Desert Fox war, and the 2003 Shock and Awe war. To control the pricing and the flow of oil, the United States and its allies slaughtered and maimed<\/a>\u00a0thousands of Iraqi people. Visits to Iraqi pediatric wards from 1996 to 2003 taught me a tragic expansion of that slogan. We must certainly insist: \u201cNo Starvation for Oil.\u201d<\/p>\n

During twenty-seven trips to Iraq, all in defiance of the U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq, I was part of delegations delivering medicines directly to Iraqi hospitals in cities throughout the country. We witnessed the ghastly crime of punishing children to death for the sake of an\u00a0utterly misguided<\/a>\u00a0U.S. foreign policy. The agony endured by Iraqi families who watched their children starve has now become the nightmare experience of Yemeni families.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unlikely that a U.S. President or any leader of a U.S-allied country will ever visit a Yemeni refugee camp, but we who live in these countries can take refuge in the hard work of becoming independent of fossil fuels, shedding the pretenses that we have a right to consume other people\u2019s precious and irreplaceable resources at cut rate prices and that war against children is an acceptable price to pay so that we can maintain this right.<\/p>\n

We must urgently simplify our over-consumptive lifestyles, share resources radically, prefer service to dominance, and insist on zero tolerance for starvation.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> 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. <\/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> – info@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original – progressive.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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