Middle East Eye
Time for a pop quiz: What, according to the United Nations, is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis - one that has killed more than 100,000 people over the past five years and wrought all manner of other torment?
Hint: It’s not coronavirus.
Rather, it’s the war in Yemen, which - despite the extensive complicity of the United States and Britain - consistently eludes Western attention and concern.
Much of the blame for the deadly state of affairs lies with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, preferred psychopath of the Trump administration, who as defence minister in March 2015 commenced giddily bombing Yemen, with the help of the United Arab Emirates and other allies.
As New York Times Beirut bureau chief Ben Hubbard notes in his new book, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman, the war constituted a departure from business-as-usual for the Saudi military, which had traditionally abstained from action and simply “served to employ large numbers of Saudi men and enabled princes to sign massive weapons contracts with the United States and other Western countries to underpin alliances and enrich networks of middlemen”.
Of course, massive weapons contracts come in handy in battle, too, and - comfortably backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in US weapons sales and other assistance - the Saudi-led coalition has succeeded in slaughtering thousands of Yemeni civilians.
Among the more publicised manifestations of the gruesome partnership was the 2018 coalition massacre of some 40 Yemeni children on a school bus by a US-supplied bomb.
When a journalist asked then-US Defence Secretary James Mattis whether the fact that such strikes were carried out with “US training, US targeting information, US weapons” was causing him “to rethink the US role in that coalition”, Mattis coherently replied: “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.” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.
