A Saudi Murder Becomes a Gift to Iran

The assassination of a journalist has further hurt the Trump administration’s frail strategy of buddying with Saudi Arabia to restrain Iran’s expanding influence.

By Vali R. Nasr

Professor Nasr, a scholar of Middle East politics and diplomacy, is the author of “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.”

The Trump administration just isn’t able to admit it, however its Center East technique is in serious trouble, now compounded by the homicide of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the Saudi consulate in Turkey final month. The administration’s current stress on the Saudis to hunt a truce of their battle in Yemen is a transparent sign of simply how a lot the credibility of Saudi Arabia, which is on the coronary heart of that technique, has shrunk, even perhaps in President Trump’s eyes.

The technique’s purpose was to work with the Saudis to include Iran’s affect within the Center East. As an alternative, we will now count on a rising sense of ease in Tehran about exerting its affect, even because it adjusts to the powerful financial sanctions that had been reimposed final week. That freedom is extra probably for use by means of maneuvering and deal-making, quite than by means of aggressions.

It’s not as if Iran expects a change in American coverage towards it within the aftermath of the Khashoggi affair. As an alternative, the weakening of confidence in Saudi Arabia all through the area is extra more likely to verify to Iran’s leaders the knowledge of their very own present technique — handle stress from America by mobilizing home assets; depend on Europe, China and Russia to maintain financial channels with Iran open; and consolidate Iran’s alliances and positions of affect politically.

Over the previous 12 months, Iran has been capable of keep away from escalating tensions with the US, partly as a result of it has confidence in Russia’s dedication to remain its course in Syria. Iran reveals no signal of ever abandoning Syria, even because it stays surprisingly quiet within the face of repeated Israeli strikes on Iranian bases there.

Equally, expectations of a confrontation in Iraq after the Iranian consulate in Basra was torched in September proved unwarranted. As an alternative, Iran quietly helped Iraqis forge a political alliance that fashioned a authorities reliant on Iranian-backed militias that the US desires disbanded.

Now, the leaders in Tehran might effectively count on weakened Saudi Arabia could possibly be compelled to finish each its navy marketing campaign in Yemen and its blockade of Qatar. All alongside, the Iranians have sought talks with the Saudis, who could also be prepared to speak to them — particularly if the Saudis take American recommendation and resolve to finish the Yemen battle. The federal government in Riyadh can also discover it vital to fix relations with Iran to rebalance its relations with Turkey, which has been aligned with a buoyant Qatar and was additional angered by the Saudi assassination on Turkish soil.

Remaining calm, in flip, may give Iran’s leaders higher confidence in their very own bargaining energy, maybe to the purpose of speaking to the US about its nuclear and missile packages. The ruling circles in Tehran already appear assured that the economic system has absorbed a lot of the shock of American sanctions and that Iran can promote sufficient oil and have sufficient commerce with Europe, China, Russia and India to maintain its economic system afloat. Conservatives and moderates have fashioned a united entrance to rally the inhabitants to the flag and to fend off any well-liked discontent that the US may hope financial hardship would convey.

The Trump administration has derided the nuclear deal, asserting that it was failing to curb Iran’s regional affect and claiming to desire a new deal sturdy sufficient to do exactly that. However Mr. Trump will now discover it much more troublesome to ship on his promise of forcing Iran to return to the desk on his phrases. If Iran comes in any respect, it won’t be ready of abject weak point. All it must do is stay dedicated to the deal it signed with Barack Obama and let Mr. Trump acknowledge that his “most stress” technique falls brief. Then Tehran is perhaps prepared to speak.

From the beginning, the Trump administration thought it may rein in Iran’s regional affect by forging a detailed partnership with Saudi Arabia’s younger crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. However a sequence of heavy-handed Saudi missteps, culminating within the homicide of Mr. Khashoggi, have backfired, leaving Iran with way more room for strategic initiatives.

Counting on Saudi Arabia to include Iran was at all times questionable. Saudi Arabia has by no means been actually profitable at rolling again Iran’s regional presence, and in recent times Iran’s affect within the area has solely grown. For instance, Saudi Arabia has for all sensible functions washed its fingers of Syria, leaving it to the US to cope with Iran and the endgame of that battle.

The best missteps began in 2015 with the ill-conceived battle in Yemen, adopted final 12 months by a blockade that didn’t ostracize Qatar after which a weekslong detention of the prime minister of Lebanon that failed to reduce his reliance on Hezbollah. All had been clumsy makes an attempt to make different Arabs afraid to cope with Iran and its allies. All had the alternative impact, with the area’s principal gamers — America’s mates amongst them — seeing Saudi Arabia as a higher menace than Iran.

The Khashoggi affair has been a watershed occasion. It introduced into sharp aid the weak point on the core of Mr. Trump’s technique, even because it weakened the crown prince himself, together with help for his partnership with America. The power of Saudi Arabia to assist Israel include Iran and supply political cowl for a last cope with the Palestinians now seems far-fetched. Israel’s hand has been weakened, whereas Turkey — which additionally desires higher regional affect and has shared Iran’s issues concerning the budding alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia — has gained stature.

It’s now clear that Saudi Arabia will be unable to guide a regional coalition to pressure Iran out of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq after which Yemen. Until Mr. Trump plans to ship massive numbers of troops to do this, after which have them keep on to ensure Iranian affect doesn’t return, he can hope for regional stability solely by specializing in first bringing the Center East’s wars to an finish. Then he must put aside his excessive hopes that “most stress” can efficiently cope with Iran on regional points. Accepting these truths wouldn’t eradicate Iran’s affect, nevertheless it may set limits on it and supply time for the Arab world to get better and rebuild — which finally is the easiest way to test Iranian energy.

As for Iran, it doesn’t must flex its muscle mass. It simply wants to attend for the Trump administration to totally admire the steadiness of energy within the Center East. As Mr. Trump’s mirage of an Arab order evaporates, a stark actuality emerges: There is no such thing as a credible Arab problem to Iran’s regional affect, neither is there any prospect of decreasing it with American threats and bluster.

Vali R. Nasr is the dean of the Johns Hopkins College of Superior Worldwide Research in Washington.

No Liberal Rallies Yet for the Children of Yemen

By PAUL STREET

Hundreds of thousands of people showed up across the United States at more than 600 gatherings three weeks ago. They came out to protest Donald Trump‘s “zero tolerance” immigration policy in highly choreographed, Democratic Party-affiliated “Families Belong Together” rallies and marches. Liberal celebrities marched and spoke. Local, state, and federal Democratic Party politicians and office-holders gave passionate speeches denouncing Trump’s separation of Central American migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border.

Marchers carried signs expressing their concern for children and families. Here are some of the messages written on the posters displayed at these gatherings:

“We care”

“I Raise my Voice Not so I can Shout but So that Those Without a Voice Can be Heard”

“Do All Lives Still Matter?”

“What Would Mr. Rogers Say?”

“Compassion”

(The issue that sparked this remarkable outpouring has already been pushed off the front pages and the cable news headlines by the resurgent RussiaGate story, brought to new intensity by Trump’s “spectacular debacle” alongside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. It is a victim of the all-powerful “now we see you, now we don’t” U.S. news cycle – this even as nearly two-thirds of the migrant children criminally separated have yet to be reunited with their parents and as evidence emerges that the Trump administration intended for the family separations to be permanent.)

“Emaciated Babies”: 50,000 Yemeni Children May Have Died in 2017

We have yet to learn of any large and widespread U.S. demonstrations on behalf of the children and families of Yemen, where the U.S. is deeply complicit in the creation of a situation that “looks,” in the words of the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, “like the Apocalypse.” UNICEF reported last year that a child dies from preventable causes on the average of once every 10 minutes in Yemen.

As the Associated Press (AP) reported last May, roughly 3 million Yemeni women and children are “acutely malnourished; another 400,000 children are fighting for their lives.” Further:

“Nearly a third of Yemen’s population — 8.4 million of its 29 million people — rely completely on food aid or else they would starve. That number grew by a quarter over the past year…Aid agencies warn that parts of Yemen could soon start to see widespread death from famine. More and more people are reliant on aid that is already failing to reach people. …It is unknown how many have died, since authorities are not able to track cases. Save the Children late last year estimated that 50,000 children may have died in 2017 of extreme hunger or disease (emphasis added), given that up to 30 percent of children with untreated cases of severe acute malnutrition die.”

The AP told the heartbreaking story of Umm Mizrah and her children, tragic drops in the bucket of what could become one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of the last half-century:

“The young mother stepped onto the scale for the doctor. Even with all her black robes on, she weighed only 84 pounds …The doctor’s office is covered with dozens of pictures of emaciated babies who have come through Al-Sadaqa Hospital in Aden …Mothers like Umm Mizrah…skip meals, sleep to escape the gnawing in their stomachs. They hide bony faces and emaciated bodies in voluminous black abaya robes and veils…The doctor asked the mother to get back on the scale holding her son, Mizrah. At 17 months, he was 5.8 kilograms (12.8 pounds) — around half the normal weight for his age. He showed all the signs of ‘severe acute malnutrition,’ the most dire stage of hunger. His legs and feet were swollen, he wasn’t getting enough protein. When the doctor pressed a finger into the skin of his feet, the indentation lingered.”

Things have gotten worse in the last two and half months. According to Lisa Grande, head of the UN humanitarian effort in Yemen, “8.5 million people that we describe as being pre-famine… when they wake up in the morning, they have no idea if they will eat that day…by the end of this year, another 10 million Yemenis will be in that situation.”

Two and a half weeks ago, special PBS correspondent Jane Ferguson related the plight of Maimona Shaghadar, who “suffers the agony of starvation in silence. No longer able to walk or talk, at 11 years old, little Maimona’s emaciated body weighs just 24 pounds…Every day,” a nurse told Ferguson in a remote Yemen hospital, medical personnel “see these sorts of cases.”

Cholera, a prominent 19th-century disease, has become epidemic there, thanks to the collapse of water sanitation. Cholera has already killed thousands of Yemeni civilians, children especially, and a million Yemenis are currently infected. Yemen is now home to what Ferguson calls “the worst cholera outbreak in modern history. Now every time the rains comes, people fall ill.”

“American Made”

The cause? In “mainstream” U.S. media, the Yemeni children and families suffering this near “apocalypse” are victims of a three-year-old war between Yemen’s Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels who hold the country’s north, and a Saudi Arabian-led coalition, armed and backed by the United States. But there is little evidence of significant Iranian involvement in Yemen. The desperately poor nation’s “civil war” is a remarkably one-sided affair in which the world’s only Superpower (the United States) has been providing critical support for what amounts to the crucifixion of millions of innocent children and families. Combined with a vicious economic blockade, the US-Saudi coalition’s relentless bombing campaign has collapsed Yemen’s economy, leaving two-thirds of the population to depend outside on food aid for survival. The air onslaughts have devastated much of Yemen’s basic infrastructure so that more than half the population lacks access to safe drinking water – the key cause of the cholera epidemic. In a recent trip deep into Yemen’s countryside, Ferguson found a Doctors Without Borders cholera treatment center that had been crushed into rubble by a U.S.-Saudi airstrike the day before – an obvious war crime. “It was just about to open its doors to patients,” Ferguson reports.

Ferguson spoke to Dr. Ali Al Motaa, a Yemeni college professor who did his doctorate in the US. “The missiles that kill us,” Motaa said, “American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks, Abrams, American-made. You are saying to me, where is America? America is the whole thing.”

By Ferguson’s account, from deep inside rebel-controlled territory:

“The aerial bombing campaign has not managed to dislodge the rebels, but has hit weddings, hospitals and homes. The U.S. military supports the Saudi coalition with logistics and intelligence. The United States it also sells the Saudis and coalition partners many of the bombs they drop on Yemen. In the mountains outside the capital, we gained exclusive access to the site where the Houthis store unexploded American-made bombs, like this 2000-pound Mark 84 bomb made in Garland, Texas. It landed in the middle of the street in the capital, we are told.”

That was before he U.S.-Saudi forces, with the Trump administration’s approval, decided to launch an offensive against the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, through which almost all the food and medicine coming into Houthi-held Yemen passes. As Al Jazeera reported three days ago, the UN is warning that “the humanitarian crisis in Yemen is worsening as tens of thousands of families are displaced by the Saudi-UAE coalition offensive to retake the strategic port city….the relentless air raids and lack of aid are making an already dire humanitarian crisis even worse for the civilians who live in the region….tens of thousands of families have been displaced from Hodeidah as a result of the fierce fighting.

The U.S. is involved in direct as well as indirect assault on Yemen. Yemen was home to the first known U.S. drone attack outside Afghanistan in 2002. Hundreds of U.S. drone and other airstrikes have targeted Yemen since 2009.

Trump drew his first military blood in Yemen. U.S. Navy special forces carried out a raid—planned by the Obama administration and handed off to the incoming Trump team—that killed 25 civilians, including 10 children in the mountainous Yakla region of Yemen’s Al Bayda province. One of the children killed was an 8-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, daughter of the Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed on Barack Obama’s orders in a September 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen. Nawar’s older brother, 16-year-old Abdulrahman, was killed in a second Obama-commanded drone strike soon afterward.

Trump’s continuation of the U.S. slaughter of al-Awlaki’s children was consistent with his campaign claim that he would kill the relatives of terrorist suspects—a war crime. “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families; when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump pronounced on Fox News in December 2015.

A PBS NewsHour report earlier this month describes the Yemen tragedy as a “man-made” catastrophe. A more historically specific characterization would be “Empire-made” or “Washington-made.” As Bill Van Auken accurately reported on the World Socialist Web Site five weeks ago:

“This total war against an entire population…would be impossible without the uninterrupted support—military and political—of US imperialism since its outset…The US, together with its main NATO allies the UK and France, has supplied the planes, warships, bombs, missiles and shells used to devastate Yemen and slaughter its people. In his eight years in office, President Barack Obama presided over some $115 billion in arms sales to the monarchical dictatorship in Riyadh. The Trump administration, which has sought to forge an anti-Iran axis with Saudi Arabia, the other reactionary Gulf oil sheikhdoms and Israel, has touted arms deals with Riyadh that potentially would amount to $110 billion.”

“The Pentagon has given direct and indispensable aid to the Saudi-led onslaught, providing midair refueling for the planes that bomb Yemeni civilians, staffing a joint command center in Riyadh with US intelligence and logistics officers and reinforcing the Saudi-UAE blockade of the country with American warships. Recently, US Green Berets have been deployed with Saudi ground forces to assist in their anti-Yemen operations. Under the banner of the ‘war on terror,’ the Pentagon is waging its own air war in Yemen, conducting at least 130 air and drone strikes in 2017, quadruple the number in 2016…The Trump administration gave the go-ahead for the current siege of Hodeidah Pentagon officials have reported that US officers are helping to select targets in the port city.”

Historical Continuities

The Trump administration’s funding and equipping of the savage war on Yemen shares three key characteristics with the “zero tolerance” immigration policy that Trump was recently forced to (partially and haltingly) rescind. First, it unconscionably uses innocent children and families as hostages and pawns in the advance of White House policy goals.

Second, it is richly consistent with U.S. policy stretching far back in history (see this on the long U.S. record of family separation and thison the long U.S. history of directly and indirectly attacking and killing children and other civilians in foreign nations).

Third, it is consistent with Barack Obama’s record. The Obama administration backed the Saudi-led Arab assault on Yemen. It also (as few marching against Trump’s border policy seem to know or care) responded to Central American migration and asylum-seeking with a policy of aggressive deterrence and detention – a policy that included the caging of children.

Why No Mass Marches for Yemeni Children?

Clearly the murder of tens of thousands of (Yemeni) children is a bigger crime than the undoubted transgression of traumatically if (hopefully temporarily) separating 2300 Central American children form their migrant parents. Why don’t hundreds of thousands of U.S.-Americans march on behalf of Yemeni children and families killed, maimed, starved, sickened, and otherwise placed at grave risk by Washington and its Arab allies?

Differences of geographical proximity and familiarity are part of the explanation. Equally if not more significant: the dominant U.S media’s systematic under-reporting of U.S, imperial aggression in the Middle East; that media’s portrayal of is the Yemen war as a regional Sunni-Shia and Saudi-Iranian conflict in which the U.S. is only peripherally involved; the Yemeni victims’ status as Muslim Others who are linked in the dominant U.S. media and politics culture with the officially U.S,- and Israel-demonized state of Iran (a nation that all too unmentionably looks like a model of democracy, social justice, and women’s rights in comparison to its regional arch-enemy and Washington’s “good friend” the absolutist and arch-reactionary state of Saudi Arabia). For these and other reasons, the Democratic Party establishment sees no political advantage in confronting Trump on U.S. Yemen policy, a policy in which both reigning U.S. political parties are deeply complicit.

Indomitable Yemenis Turning Bab al-Mandeb Into a Real Gateway of Tears for the Saudi-UAE Coalition

Yemen, or more properly the patriotic people of that war torn country who hate to be under the thumbnail of the US and have over the past three years held their ground against the war machine of the heavily Saudi-UAE coalition, inflicting heavy losses on the aggressors, are worthy of salutation.
Their recent daring raid on the UAE occupied port of Mokha near the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait that wiped out a military base of the aggressors, including the killing of the regional UAE commander, once again proved their indomitable spirit.

At the same time, the Yemenis struck with missiles and sank an advanced UAE naval craft with all soldiers on board, thereby thwarting an attempt to land troops near the besieged port of Hodeidah. This was 16th ship of the coalition to be targeted and the 14th to be sunk.

With meagre resources, shortage of food and medicine due to the air, sea and land blockade, deprived of modern public amenities because of destruction of the infrastructure by the unabated Saudi air strikes, step-motherly treatment by the UN which acting as a tool of the US wants to impose the regional hegemony of Riyadh upon them, and in the face of intense propaganda on the international scale that brands these heroic defenders of their homelands as ‘rebels’, the Yemeni people led by the popular Ansarallah Movement have proved their indomitable spirit to the whole world.

They are neither warmongers nor saboteurs of peace, yet the World Body is unwilling to listen to their just demands for the independence of Yemen and formation of a broad-based national government representing the various tribes and religious groups of the land. Instead the UN repeats in
parrot-like fashion the Saudi taught mantra of the fugitive Mansour Hadi being the ‘internationally-recognized president’, little realizing that this is a questionable term, when the vast majority of the people, even in southern Yemen, have never granted him national recognition.

So far over 20,000 Yemenis have lost their life, hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes, and millions are facing starvation and epidemic diseases, but the Saudi-UAE led aggression continues against them with the full backing of the US, the UK, France and the illegal Zionist
entity, all of whom supply the invaders of Yemen with lethal state-of-the-art military technology.

When the Yemeni defenders retaliate with short and long range missiles on the military-industrial installations of the aggressors, especially of Saudi, then a hue and cry is raised that the Ansarallah are committing war crimes and the Islamic Republic of Iran is supplying them missiles and drones.

Strange logic indeed! When the Saudis have destroyed almost the entire infrastructure of Yemen, are daily killing innocent men, women, and children, and are preventing the flow of food and medicine, yet these brutalities are not considered war crimes.

More strange is Iran’s alleged supply of arms and ammunitions to blockaded Yemen – as if the Ansarallah have no right to procure weapons from international markets although they do not need it in view of their wellstacked arsenals – while there seems to be nothing wrong with the pouring in of deadly weapons into the over-stocked arsenals of the aggressors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

If Iran were to actually supply military technology to the Ansarallah, the Saudi-UAE aggressors would not only have been defeated and driven out of Yemen, but the Yemenis would have liberated their Saudi-occupied northern provinces of Asir, Najran, and Jizan, which the Wahhabis had seized
in 1934.

With the Saudi-UAE aggressors doing a slow, face saving retreat after their failed offensive on Hodeida, the UN, ought to end its delusion of taking charge of the Hodeida port and should instead try to salvage its credibility by negotiating the complete withdrawal of the aggressors from Yemen,
so that the different Yemeni factions can get together to form a broad-based national government.

Then only can peace return to Yemen, since, as said at the beginning of this column, the Yemeni people hate any foreign meddling in their internal affairs, whether it is from Saudi, UAE, or the Americans.

In view of this fact, recently the Head of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council, Mahdi al-Mashart, called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to play a mediating role for a peaceful end to the crisis in order to save the Red Sea and the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait from turning into an American Lake
as the Saudis and Emiratis are trying to do.

In the meantime, the Ansarallah are determined to defeat the designs of the aggressors by turning the Bab al-Mandeb into a real Gateway of Tears and the Red Sea a crimson-blood waterway for the Saudis, the Emiratis and the Americans.

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 Kayhan Int’l