Speaking today in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed the Saudi government’s decision to attack Yemen in March of last year, starting a war which has raged ever since and killed thousands of civilians.
Kerry claimed the decision for war was made in part to target “al-Qaeda operatives,” even though in reality the Saudis left the local al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), totally untouched for nine months, and allowed them to occupy the major city of Mukallah early in the war, where they’ve remained ever since.
Kerry followed on these comments with complaints about Iranian “interference” in Yemen. Though the Saudi war is against a Shi’ite faction in Yemen, the group has few historic ties to Iran, and despite Saudi claims they’ve provided little evidence of Iran being even tangentially involved.
On Saturday, the White House issued a statement of “concern” about the massive civilian death toll in Yemen, but conspicuously did not mention Saudi Arabia, who has killed the vast majority of them, and simply urged all sides to exercise “restraint.”
Half not a percentage — Half is pure greed
4thefuture
“you have abandoned your earlier rigid 50-50 stance
for a somewhat broader range of percentages.”
Half is when a greed driven Empire has since World War II owned one-half of all the wealth on earth.
Half is when a bunch of slave owning Founding Fathers create a paradise for the educated upper half of society by allowing them to be the voting majority, which allows them to own not just half the wealth, but both halves of the wealth.
Half is when one-half of USA kids suffer the misery of growing up in a slum, all because your greed driven upper-half is addicted to the glory power of wealth.
On a map, Yemen looks like a small appendix on Saudi Arabia. Americans generally know nothing about Yemen.
However, Yemen’s population is bigger than Saudi Arabia’s, much bigger when corrected for the roughly 1/3 Saudis who are ex-pats excluded from Saudi society. Almost all that space on the map is empty desert, for both countries.
The Saudis are afraid of that large, radicalized, poor and desperate population. They are also afraid that their method of controlling it via imposed dictator has failed, and they have not been able to re-impose it.
It is a huge vulnerability to a Saudi monarchy that is also afraid of its own population.
That is why they are fighting. Not al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is theirs anyway.