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charrob
08-13-2016, 02:43 PM
Acceptable Losses: Aiding and abetting the Saudi slaughter in Yemen

By: Andrew Cockburn

Just a few short years ago, Yemen was judged to be among the poorest countries in the world, ranking 154th out of the 187 nations on the U.N.’s Human Development Index. One in every five Yemenis went hungry. Almost one in three was unemployed. Every year, 40,000 children died before their fifth birthday, and experts predicted the country would soon run out of water.

Such was the dire condition of the country before Saudi Arabia unleashed a bombing campaign in March 2015, 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. A year and a half into the war, the health system has largely broken down, and much of the country is on the brink of starvation.

This rain of destruction was made possible by the material and moral support of the United States, which supplied most of the bombers, bombs, and missiles required for the aerial onslaught. (Admittedly, the United Kingdom, France, and other NATO arms exporters eagerly did their bit.) U.S. Navy ships aided the blockade. But no one that I talked to in Washington suggested that the war was in any way necessary to our national security. The best answer I got came from Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California who has been one of the few public officials to speak out about the devastation we were enabling far away. “Honestly,” he told me, “I think it’s because Saudi Arabia asked.”

The principal targets of the Saudi bombers (augmented by a coalition of Arab allies) have been a tribal group from the north of Yemen, adjacent to the Saudi border, who follow Zaidism, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Though it is distinct from the variant of Shiism practiced in Iran, the connection was destined to excite the suspicions of the fervently anti-Iranian Saudi regime.

So, almost forty years ago, the Saudis planted an outpost of their own extreme Wahhabi sect in the heart of Zaidi territory. The emissary sent to found the madrassa was Muqbil al-Wadie, a leader of the 1979 assault on Mecca’s Grand Mosque, who had until that moment been rotting in a Saudi prison. As has been their habit, the Saudis solved their own terrorism problem by exporting it.

The intrusive enterprise, which attracted a growing stream of militant Sunnis, eventually provoked a reaction among the local Zaidis in favor of their Shia tendencies. Accordingly, under the leadership of Hussein al-Houthi, they sought religious instruction from Iran in the form of teachers and literature, which were duly supplied, much to Riyadh’s irritation.

For many years, this Iranian connection was treated with equanimity by Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Following 9/11, however, he came under pressure from Washington to play his part in the war against Al Qaeda, which had been active in Yemen since the late 1990s. Saleh found this mission unappealing, given the terrorist group’s connections with some of the country’s most powerful political forces. According to Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani, an activist whose family has long played a leading role in the nation’s politics, Saleh suggested to the Americans that he first deal with the Shiite troublemakers in the north. “From day one,” Iryani told me, “the Houthis were presented as an Iranian client, a terrorist movement.” This policy, unsurprisingly, was greeted with favor in Riyadh, and reciprocated with commensurate financial largesse. ... Saleh not only declined to arrest the terrorists but on occasion provided them with safe houses in Sanaa. Ignorant of (or perhaps unconcerned by) this double-dealing, Washington continued to indulge the wily Yemeni leader with copious aid and training missions.

Privately, U.S. officials were doubtful of the Iranian connection, even at the beginning of Saleh’s campaign against the group in 2004. “The fact that after five years of conflict there is still no compelling evidence of that link must force us to view this claim with some skepticism,” wrote the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Stephen Seche, in a classified 2009 cable later released by WikiLeaks. Nevertheless, the Americans were eager to secure Saleh’s cooperation against Al Qaeda. They did little to restrain him in his war with the Houthis, as they came to be called following the death of Hussein al-Houthi in 2004.

In 2009, hoping for a final victory, Saleh managed to involve the Saudis directly by eliciting their permission to send Yemeni troops across the border to attack the Houthis from the rear. In response, a small force of Houthis invaded Saudi Arabia. Adding to the complications, Yemen now became embroiled in Saudi court politics: Khalid bin Sultan, the prince who effectively controlled the defense ministry, moved to assert dominance at the expense of a rival prince at the interior ministry, using the Houthi incursion as an excuse. Promptly declaring the southern portion of the country a “killing zone,” he mobilized the entire Saudi military. The air force carpet bombed the border region, including Saada, the Houthi heartland.

The result, however, was a humiliating setback for the House of Saud. Their ground troops were bested by the Houthis and suffered numerous casualties. The aerial campaign was no more impressive. “It was not a moment of glory for the Saudi air force,” according to David Des Roches, who formerly oversaw Saudi-related policy at the Pentagon and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University. “They were basically just dropping rounds in the desert.” A senior U.N. diplomat put it to me more bluntly: “They lost.”

Saleh’s own offensive was equally ineffectual, and the Houthis were left to fight another day. Meanwhile, Yemen’s ill fortune proved a blessing, not for the last time, for the U.S. defense establishment. The Obama Administration was already bent on expanding arms sales as part of its drive to boost exports, and now manna fell from heaven. Shocked by their poor performance against the Houthi guerrillas, the Saudis embarked on a massive weapons-buying spree.

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...This enormous deal [to Saudi Arabia] totaled $60 billion: the largest arms sale in U.S. history. The scale of the transaction says much about America’s relationship with the House of Saud. The bond was forged at a 1945 meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz, with both parties agreeing that Saudi Arabia would guarantee the United States cheap oil in return for American military protection. Both sides largely kept to the bargain. The Saudis even subsidized the price of oil exported to the United States — at least until 2002, when they abandoned the policy out of irritation at George W. Bush’s plan to topple the Sunni regime in Iraq.

America’s adherence to its side of the deal is most concretely manifested in a housing compound a dozen or so miles outside Riyadh. Eskan Village is home to 2,000 Americans, military and civilian, dedicated to the security of the regime. For the U.S. military, it is a gratifyingly lucrative arrangement. Some inhabitants of the compound supervise the arming and training of the Saudi National Guard — a mission that has so far generated $35 billion in U.S. military sales. Others are attached to the U.S. Military Training Mission to Saudi Arabia, which services the regular armed forces. According to its website, this group is charged with enhancing American national security “through building the capability and capacity of the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces” — a task that absolutely includes 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. Furthermore, they fund its upkeep, paying roughly $30 million a year for the privilege.

As Des Roches reminded me, the U.S. government is the official vendor for weapons sales on behalf of corporations such as Boeing and Textron. “We levy a surcharge for the U.S. government’s involvement,” he explained, reminding me that the sale of the F-15s and other assorted items ran to $60 billion. “Seven percent of that is a significant amount of money,” he continued. “That basically covers U.S. government operating expenses to run things like training for the Bolivian armed forces in counternarcotics, and stuff like that. Up until very, very recently, the Saudis pretty much subsidized everything. People do not realize how much benefit we get from our interaction with them.”

This long relationship has sunk deep roots in the U.S. defense establishment, especially since close acquaintance with the free-spending Saudi hierarchy can lead to attractive postretirement opportunities. ... Other features of the U.S.–Saudi security relationship are more obscure, such as the “secret” CIA drone base deep in the southwestern desert, which became operational in 2011 and has been periodically rediscovered by the media in subsequent years. ...

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...The comfortable arrangement became unstuck in early 2011, when the so-called Arab Spring reached Yemen. The populace united in massive demonstrations against the president’s dictatorial and corrupt rule. Wounded in an unsuccessful assassination attempt, Saleh eventually resigned in favor of his vice president, the former army general Mansour Hadi. Endorsed by both the United States and Saudi Arabia, Hadi ran for election in 2012 and won with 99 percent of the vote — hardly a surprise, given that he was the only candidate. He quickly launched a “national dialogue” with the aim of reconciling Yemen’s many tribal and regional factions. This failed to mollify the Houthis, who felt (somewhat reasonably, according to Ambassador Seche) that they were being dealt out of the new arrangements. In September 2014 they marched into Sanaa and, not long afterward, placed Hadi under house arrest.

After Saudi's King Abdullah died in 1/2015, it soon became apparent that real power had devolved to his twenty-nine-year-old son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who in short order took control of the defense ministry as well as the royal household. Given his nation’s long-standing readiness to see “a Persian under every khat bush,” as the diplomat put it, Mohammed was eager to try out his expensive new weapons. He could crush the Houthis with a quick campaign and thereby shore up his own position at the expense of potential rivals in the ruling family.

On March 26, 2015, having secured a request for intervention from Hadi, the Royal Saudi Air Force went into action. The United States announced it was supplying “logistical and intelligence support.” Five days later, the Saudi-led coalition imposed a comprehensive air and sea blockade of Houthi-held areas, including Hodeidah, the principal port serving northern Yemen. 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.

...

Civilians began to die early on the day the war started. Among the first were three young sons of Yasser al-Habashi, a grocery-store owner whose home on the outskirts of Sanaa was hit by a bomb around two in the morning on March 26. Habashi himself woke up in a hospital after thirteen days in a coma. “There is nothing left of my house that I lived in,” he said later, “and on top of all this, three of my children were killed.”

Five days into the assault, the attackers leveled Yemen’s largest cement factory, killing at least ten people, most of them employees preparing to head home on a bus. A further thirty-one workers died when bombers struck the Yemany Dairy and Beverage factory on the coast. A strike on a refugee camp at Mazraq, full of people who had fled the bombing in Saada and elsewhere, killed forty-five and injured two hundred more.

The United States agreed to help man the coalition’s joint operations center with a liaison group that would advise the Saudis on how to hit their targets most effectively. The group would also ensure that U.S. Air Force tankers were on hand to refuel bombing sorties, a duty they performed more than 700 times by February 2016 — charging, of course, for the gas.

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Indeed, as Iryani explained to me, the allies had put all their chips on Hadi. “The Saudis and Americans believed that once the bombing started, Hadi would be able to rally loyal elements in the army and regain control,” he said. “But it turned out that the entire military was with Saleh. Hadi had no influence at all.” So the war went on, with the Houthis and Saleh’s forces advancing steadily despite the bombing.

In August, after visiting Sanaa and Aden, Peter Maurer, the head of the International Red Cross, declared that “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years.” Maurer attributed this not only to the fighting and bombing but to the ongoing blockade. A day earlier, coalition planes had bombed the vital port of Hodeidah, carefully targeting cranes and other necessary equipment.

The port city of Mukalla, however, was left completely unmolested, despite the fact that it was now controlled by Al Qaeda, the object of so many U.S. drone attacks in previous years. The takeover, in April 2015, had been a peaceful one. Saudi-backed forces evacuated the city with barely a shot fired. Al Qaeda would continue to occupy the city and most of eastern Yemen, enriching itself in the process, over the following year. In bitter fighting for the city of Taiz in February 2016, Al Qaeda fighters formed a crucial component of the Saudi-backed anti-Houthi forces.

In Washington, I asked an intelligence official in close touch with the Yemeni situation, who asked not to be named, what the Saudi plan had been at the outset. “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. Trucks on a highway — that became a military convoy. Buildings, bridges, anything. When they did find a military target, they bombed it, and then went back and bombed it again.”

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Crowded markets appear to have had a particular attraction for the targeteers. Human Rights Watch documented a dozen such attacks across northern Yemen, including five in Saada alone. On May 12, for example, three bombs, five minutes apart, hit a market in the Houthi-controlled town of Zabid, killing at least sixty civilians. Another attack killed sixty-five on July 4. In the deadliest market attack to date, on March 15, 2016, two bombs in the village of Mastaba killed at least ninety-seven people, including twenty-five children. Many of the victims died as they fled the scene of the first strike only to be hit by the second, a notable example of the double-tap technique frequently employed during the campaign. “When the first strike came, the world was full of blood,” Mohammed Yehia Muzayid, a cleaner at the market, told Belkis Wille, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “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. The second strike was there, at the entrance to the market. People were taking the injured out, and it hit the wounded and killed them.”

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 in November 2015. I asked the senior State Department official if there was ever any consideration of refusing such deals. He responded by suggesting that supplying high-tech precision weapons was essentially a humanitarian gesture: “If you want the Saudis to be able to limit collateral damage, then it’s not particularly useful not to give them the weapons that would be most effective in doing that.”

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. In Saada, there were dead donkeys on the side of all the main roads because the Saudis were hitting donkey carts. In Hajjah, 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? Is that donkey cart transporting a Scud missile? What is the thinking here from a military perspective?”

As of June, the World Health Organization reported nearly 6,500 dead and more than 31,400 injured, on the basis of information from hospitals around the country. But Doctors Without Borders officials insist that they alone have treated more than 37,000 people with war-related injuries. In any case, more than half the population lacked access to any health care, let alone hospitals. “As you can of course imagine, those numbers are an underestimation, as people might not bother to take their killed relatives to the hospital just to be counted,” observed Alvhild Strømme, a W.H.O. spokesperson, in a candid email. “I am sure there are many more, especially killed, but also wounded.” ...

Al Qaeda was meanwhile permitted to evacuate Mukalla with all its equipment. Disappearing into the countryside, the terrorist group began a series of deadly bombing attacks. U.N. officials talked of a “humanitarian catastrophe” and issued a call for $1.8 billion in emergency funds. By July, the United States had contributed $148 million, just over 8 percent of the requested amount. [B]Meanwhile, weapons sales to Saudi Arabia over the course of the Obama Administration had topped $111 billion.

The country is in ruins, like Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani’s own house. “Yemen,” he told me sadly as the explosions continued, “is such a small part of the U.S.–Saudi relationship.”

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/09/acceptable-losses/1/

charrob
08-13-2016, 03:33 PM
With Yemeni Casualties Rising, Rand Paul Looks to Block Big Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia:



Citing concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he’s looking for ways to stop a $1.15 billion weapons deal with Riyadh that would include the sale of 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored vehicles, and other military equipment.

Paul’s pledge comes as Saudi Arabia resumed its bombardment of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa following the collapse of peace talks in Kuwait between representatives of the government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“I will work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale,” Paul told Foreign Policy in a statement. “Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

Humanitarian organizations are criticizing the proposed weapons sale as a setback for efforts to bring pressure on Riyadh to throttle back its military campaign. The U.N. estimates that at least 6,400 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict while more than 2.8 million have been displaced from their homes.

Earlier this week, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, also expressed concern about the sale, noting the high civilian casualty rate in Yemen and Riyadh’s shrinking role in the military campaign against the Islamic State. “I’d like to see them commit to rejoin that fight as part of major new military sales,” Murphy said in a statement.

Still, stopping the deal is going to be an uphill battle. The main beneficiary of the deal is General Dynamics Land Systems, according to a statement by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. The firm is a subsidiary of General Dynamics, a massive defense contractor that wields significant clout on Capitol Hill. That could make it hard for Paul to find the allies he would need in the House and Senate to permanently block the sale.

The State Department defended the proposed deal, saying it did not amount to an endorsement of Saudi Arabia’s activities in Yemen. “This proposed sale is aimed toward strengthening Saudi Arabia’s long-term defense capabilities,” David McKeeby, an official at the department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, told FP. “If finalized, this proposed sale will require major refurbishment of some existing tanks, and manufacturing of the rest over the course of several years.”

Human rights groups, by contrast, say the move sends the wrong message to Saudi Arabia.

“The international community must go ‘all in’ on a peace agreement,” said Scott Paul, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam America. “A sale of major arms to Saudi Arabia signals the opposite — that the U.S. is instead all-in on a senseless war that has created one of the world’s largest humanitarian emergencies.”

As the fighting resumed in Yemen this week, local medics told Reuters that 14 civilians were killed after Saudi-led air strikes struck a potato chip factory in Sanaa’s Nahda district. On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia said it intercepted two ballistic missiles fired by Houthi rebels toward its cities Abha and Khamis Mushait, the Associated Press reported. It said the missiles did not cause any damage.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/11/with-yemeni-casualties-rising-gop-senator-looks-to-block-big-arms-sale-to-saudi-arabia/