Aiding and abetting the Saudi slaughter in Yemen
http://harpers.org/archive/2016/09/acceptable-losses/?single=1
Such was the dire condition of the country before Saudi Arabia unleashed a bombing campaign … which has
destroyed warehouses, factories, power plants, ports, hospitals, water tanks, gas stations, and bridges, along with miscellaneous targets ranging from donkey carts to wedding parties to archaeological monuments. Thousands of civilians — no one knows how many — have been killed or wounded.
Along with the bombing, the Saudis have enforced a blockade, cutting off supplies of food, fuel, and medicine. … the country is on the brink of starvation.
This rain of destruction was
made possible by the material and moral support of [Washington] which supplied most of the bombers, bombs, and missiles required for the aerial onslaught. … U.S. Navy ships
aided the blockade. …
Khalid bin Sultan, … declaring the southern portion of the country a “killing zone,” he mobilized the entire Saudi military. The air force carpet bombed the border region ... The result, however, was a humiliating setback for the House of Saud. Their ground troops were bested by the Houthis … The aerial campaign was no more impressive. … A senior U.N. diplomat put it to me more bluntly: “They lost.”
The Obama Administration … already bent on expanding arms sales … now [received] manna fell from heaven. … the Saudis embarked on a massive weapons-buying spree.
At the top of their shopping list were
eighty-four specially modified Boeing F-15 jets … 170 helicopters. … 1,300 cluster bombs sold by the Textron Corporation … neither the United States nor Saudi Arabia had endorsed the Convention on Cluster Munitions … [ banned] by more than one hundred nations …
the largest arms sale in U.S. history. …
[
Washington’s] housing compound a dozen or so miles outside Riyadh … is home to 2,000 Americans, military and civilian, dedicated to the security of the regime … inhabitants of the compound supervise the
arming and training of the Saudi National Guard … Others are attached to the U.S. Military Training Mission to Saudi Arabia, which services the regular armed forces… this group is charged …
building the capability and capacity of the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces” …
acting as an “advocate for U.S. business to supply defense goods and services to the S.A.A.F.” In other words, the Saudis host a
sales team dedicated to selling them weapons. …
the U.S. government is the official vendor for weapons sales on behalf of corporations such as Boeing and Textron. …
the Saudis are [also] certainly in need is keeping their expensive toys in working order, a lucrative prospect for firms such as Astrolabe. …
the maintenance contract for the F-15s alone was worth $2.5 billion …
Other features of the U.S.–Saudi security relationship are more obscure, such as the “secret” CIA drone base … Dedicated to launching drone strikes against Al Qaeda in Yemen … even as the drones regularly incinerated Al Qaeda members along with innocent bystanders and the occasional wedding party, [S.A.] not only declined to arrest the terrorists but on occasion provided them with safe houses in Sanaa. …
[Washington] announced it was supplying “logistical and intelligence support.” … the Saudi-led coalition imposed
a comprehensive air and sea blockade of Houthi-held areas … For a population that relied on imports for at least 90 percent of its food, not to mention almost all other essentials such as fuel, cooking gas, and medicine, the effect would be devastating.
U.S. diplomatic cover would be unstintingly maintained as the war raged on. … the Dutch government sponsored a resolution in the U.N. Human Rights Council calling for an independent and unfettered investigation into war crimes … The Saudis strenuously objected …The United States declined to support the Dutch, effectively killing the idea. … the Obama Administration’s support for the Yemeni adventure was never in doubt
Civilians began to die early on the day the war started. … Five days into the assault, the attackers leveled Yemen’s largest cement factory, … struck the Yemany Dairy and Beverage factory … A strike on a refugee camp at Mazraq … the Beni Hassan refugee camp in Hajjah …
As reports of civilian casualties and Houthi advances seeped into the media, … Tony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state, arrived in Riyadh, … told reporters. “As part of that effort,
we have expedited weapons deliveries [and] increased our intelligence sharing.” … In an intelligence official … “Plan?” he replied in exasperated tones. “There was no plan. No plan at all. They just bombed anything and everything that looked like it might be a target.” …
For hundreds or thousands of strikes, there was less excuse, or none at all. … there appears to have been
a concerted attempt to destroy all the gas stations … Thanks to the blockade, fuel was scarce, … the number of victims is actually unclear, since so many were burned beyond recognition. … on May 8, the coalition declared that the entire 4,000-square-mile governorate of Saada was now a “military target,” and therefore open to indiscriminate attack. …
cluster bombs were heavily used.
“I witnessed about a thousand air strikes,” recalled Tariq Riebl, an aid worker with a major international humanitarian organization … the strikes were relentless, lasting up to five hours. “You’d have that four to six times a day.” …
Crowded markets appear to have had a particular attraction for the targeteers. Human Rights Watch documented a dozen such attacks across northern Yemen, … “When the first strike came, the world was full of blood,” … “
People were all in pieces, their limbs were everywhere. People went flying. Most of the people, we collected in pieces, we had to put them in plastic bags. A leg, an arm, a head. There wasn’t more than five minutes between the first and second strike.”… Metal fragments retrieved from the scene were revealed to be from U.S.-manufactured GBU-31 satellite-guided bombs, a thousand of which were included in a $1.29 billion weapons sale to the Saudis …
Yemeni civilians were being deliberately targeted. … the coalition bombed a housing compound for workers of the Mokha power plant, … Tariq Riebl concluded that the civilian targets were not an accident. “Let’s be very clear,” he told me. “The civilian targeting is absolutely astounding. I’ve seen
hospitals, mosques, marketplaces, restaurants, power plants, universities, residential houses, just bombed, office buildings, bombed. Everything is a target. … the Saudis were hitting donkey carts. … the water tank in one of the towns got hit, and it sits on a lonesome little hill. There was nothing there. When you’re hitting a donkey cart or you’re hitting a water tank, what is your rationale? “ …
the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Hayden, destroyed last October by air strikes — one of three of the organization’s facilities to be hit during the war — leaving 200,000 people in the region without access to lifesaving medical care. The group had repeatedly relayed the hospital’s GPS coordinates to the Saudis … and prominently displayed their logo on the roof.
As of February 2016, the Saudis noted that
the coalition had flown more than 46,500 sorties over Yemen. …
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