The US Helped Massacre Yemeni Schoolchildren

Jacobin

Back in 2010, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman descended briefly upon Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, where he “took part in a ‘qat chew’” with Yemeni officials, businessmen, and other elites.

Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.”

Fast forward to August 2018, and the concept of targeted kindergartens has acquired rather more sinister connotations following the recent slaughter of at least forty Yemeni children on a school bus. The perpetrators: the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition that, since 2015, has been terrorizing Yemen in the name of fighting terror. Among the coalition partners is the United Arab Emirates, glitzy land of ski slope–equipped malls, modern-day slavery, and love affairs with Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Additional coalition backing is provided by the UK and other friendly Europeans.

On August 17, CNN reported that the munition responsible for the school bus massacre was a five-hundred-pound “laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin,” pillar of the US military-industrial complex. The bomb’s provenance is not enormously surprising given the $110 billion US-Saudi defense deal to which Donald Trump gave birth last year in Riyadh.

Shortly after the airstrike on the bus, a journalist asked US defense secretary James Mattis for his thoughts on the US role in the conflict in Yemen given that such operations are conducted “with US training, US targeting information, US weapons.”

The transcript of Mattis’s response, which appears on the Defense Department website, includes such insights as: “There, I would tell you that we do help them plan what we call — what kind of targeting? I’m trying to trying of the right word.”

Whatever the word was, Mattis remained of the opinion that “we are not engaged in the civil war” and that “we will help to prevent, you know, the killing of innocent people.”

Of course, anyone familiar with the United States’ track record will be aware that protecting innocents is never really the name of the game. In addition to out-and-out killing sprees, more subtle modes of human elimination also come to mind — as when reports in 1996 that half a million Iraqi children had died because of US sanctions elicited the assessment from then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: “We think the price is worth it.” READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

On 'victims of terrorism' day, call out the real terrorists

Middle East Eye

Back in 1986, famed Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano penned an essay on Nicaragua, in which he highlighted some ironies he had detected concerning the matter of “terrorism”.

Specifically, Galeano wrote, a certain prominent nation then claiming that “even the stars must be militarised … to confront the terrorist threat” happened to be the very same one that was simultaneously engaged in “terrorist acts against Nicaragua, practising terrorism as an imperial right and … exporting state terrorism, on an industrial scale, under the registered trademark of the National Security Doctrine”.

The nation in question was, of course, the United States, which had committed itself to punishing Nicaragua for that country’s decision to veer from the straight and narrow path of obsequiousness to the needs of US capital. Punitive methods included unleashing havoc-wreaking right-wing proxy forces and mining Nicaraguan harbours.

Without doubt, it’s worth keeping such ironies in mind as we mark this year’s International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism on 21 August - not that plenty more irony hasn’t accumulated over the past three-plus decades.

A United Nations General Assembly resolution explains that the commemorative day is meant to “honour and support the victims and survivors of terrorism and to promote and protect the full enjoyment of their human rights and fundamental freedoms”. The resolution also reasserts the assembly’s conviction that “any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed”.

Typically vacuous UN language aside, it’s curious that the international body has chosen a terror-oriented day of remembrance, given that the UN has not managed to define terrorism in the first place. As the UN website specifies, “an unequivocal definition of terrorism would remove the political distinction that some make between the actions of so-called freedom fighters and terrorists”. 

Fair enough, but what about when there’s little distinction between the actions of governments and the actions of terrorists? READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Legal cannabis offers doubtful buzz for Lebanon's financial woes

Middle East Eye

The question as to whether a legal cannabis industry can salvage Lebanon's deteriorating economy has spawned a drove of recent headlines. The Guardian’s "Budding business: how cannabis could transform Lebanon" specifies that the Lebanese government will consider legalising medical cannabis production for export as "part of a package of reforms proposed by McKinsey & Company," a US consulting firm that operates globally.

The firm was contracted by the Lebanese government in January to devise a plan for lessening the economic plight of the world's third-most indebted country, where the poverty rate in certain areas approaches 65 percent.

According to Bloomberg, McKinsey's extensive recommendations were presented to Lebanese President Michel Aoun in early July and also include "building a wealth-management and investment-banking hub," "setting up a construction zone for prefabricated housing that can be used in the rebuilding of war-torn Syria and Iraq," and getting in on new avocado markets.

Given Lebanon's already flourishing illegal cannabis industry, concentrated in the Bekaa Valley, it's not difficult to detect the origins of this particular recommendation. And yet, there appears to be some disagreement among the Lebanese political elite over who thought of it first.

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, head of the Progressive Socialist Party and Twitter-user extraordinaire, tweeted in favour of legalisation back in 2014, but a recent Middle East Eye article quoted Lebanese MP Yassine Jabber as attributing the brainchild to Amal Movement leader Nabih Berri, Lebanon's eternal parliament speaker: "Berri got the idea when he visited a pharmacy in Italy recently and saw cannabis-derived products."

Of course, there are plenty of other manoeuvres that could help alleviate Lebanon's fiscal predicament.

For one, the country could presumably do without that preposterously expensive presence known as the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) - "interim" being used in the loosest sense of the word - which, since 1978, has done nothing to protect Lebanon from Israeli assault but has helped itself to prime coastal real estate and other Lebanese goodies.

According to the UN website, the approved UNIFIL budget for July 2017 to June 2018 alone was $483m. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Under fire: the perpetual US war on Native Americans

Al Jazeera English

August 9 marks International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples.

On its website, the United Nations notes that the focuses this year will include "the challenges and ways forward to revitalise indigenous peoples' identities and encourage the protection of their rights in or outside their traditional territories".

To be sure, the protection of indigenous rights is particularly challenging in this day and age. In various contexts around the world, the presence of indigenous communities is seen as an obstacle to profit-driven corporate exploitation and environmental despoliation.

In the United States - vanguard of the capitalist system and usurper extraordinaire of Native American land - the goal of "revitalis[ing]" indigenous identity will presumably prove formidable indeed seeing as the entire US enterprise is, in fact, predicated on the suppression of Native agency, culture, territorial bonds, and general dignity.

Also suppressed, of course, is the whole business of genocide upon which the US is built, which naturally complicates the country's self-advertisement as the epitome of liberty, justice, freedom, democracy, etc. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.