Yemen
– The New Enemy: America Now Gone Lower Down The Scale
11 January 2010By Christopher King
Things
surely must get better. It’s bad enough blowing up
Afghans in their mud brick houses in one of the
poorest countries of the world. We have now gone lower
down the scale. Our Chiefs of Defence Staff who can’t
read the Nuremberg Principles and our politicians who
don’t want them to, are probably going to bomb what is
probably the very poorest country in the world. The
United States and Saudi Arabia are already doing it.
It’s an appalling thing to do, but since they don’t
have nuclear armed submarines, intercontinental
missiles, supersonic bombers and fighters, the latest
tanks etc., their retaliation was to send a misguided,
probably troubled young man with a bomb in his
underwear back the other way on a commercial flight.
Both the aggression and the retaliation are horrifying
but we should note that it’s not the Yemenis (or
Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis or Iranians) who are
occupying the U.S. or UK and shooting and bombing our
citizens.
Gordon Brown has grasped the self-publicity
opportunity to call a summit to ponder our new enemy
and its threat to the world as he calls it. Will
compassion for these poor tribesmen and their
under-nourished children move him to propose an
immediate programme of agricultural aid? Perhaps he
wants UNICEF to implement a crash child-health
project? Will village-level technology projects be his
big idea? One may hope.
Now, call me pessimistic, but I suspect that these are
not what he has in mind. Unhappily, his record, like
that of his predecessor, is of slavish pimping for the
U.S. and cheering its reflex to bomb and shoot
everything in sight if there’s a problem. After his
present wars, crashing the UK economy, pressing a
trillion pounds on our greedy bankers and plunging us,
our children and grandchildren into decades of debt,
Mr Brown clearly needs suggestions.
Already, the direct costs of the last attacks on the
Yemenis’ mud or rough stone houses have cost the
Saudis and U.S. millions of pounds. We will also take
counter-measures: full-body scanners at airports,
training and personnel to operate them, additional
security of various sorts and probably another war.
Then there’s more delay and inconvenience to
travellers which will have enormous time costs for the
indefinite future. Costs will be billions of pounds
over the next few years. Many billions. My suggestion:
“Scrap all this.”
Gordon must surely have realized by now that the
bomb-everything-and everyone method of nation-building
is gaining few hearts and minds. Here’s a better idea:
Send the security police over to Oxfam and threaten
the director with terrorist charges unless he gets
together a comprehensive village-level development
plan for Yemen by the time of the summit. This is a
constructive use of terrorist legislation that will
also keep the security police happy. Budget about a
billion a year for five years.
At the conference, pass the hat around. Get Oxfam and
other development agencies that can actually deliver
aid to buy, ship and distribute equipment, supplies
and training to Yemen. Cement and window glass are
useful. One can build houses with them and compared
with cash bribes they are very difficult to convert to
weapons. Don’t give anyone in Yemen any money – if not
spent on arms it just goes into bank accounts.
I suppose that our present aid to Yemen is either cash
or arms. This should also go to village and town
economic and health programmes. Tell the Yemeni
government that they need to get their funds by way of
taxes. Send someone to explain that it’s part of
democracy since they should get money from and listen
to their taxpayers, not foreign governments. They
won’t know that Gordon doesn’t do it himself.
Present the project to the Yemenis as a cost-saving
exercise, that it’s too expensive to bomb them. In no
circumstances say that it’s for humanitarian reasons
because they won’t believe it, will think that they’ll
be bombed imminently and will target our embassies,
etc. It will work because Yemeni men will be kept busy
building houses and irrigation channels etc rather
than shooting each other and plotting means of sending
bombs around the world. They will have something to
lose, which they haven’t at the moment and their wives
will have something to complain about if they don’t
fix the house.
No more of this Al-Qaeda nonsense either.
This is obviously the best means of aggressively
neutralizing the Yemenis, as I think the expression
goes. Think about it. For the cost of an air ticket
and using a misguided young man with a handful of
explosive that the U.S. gave to Iranian dissidents,
the Yemenis have instantly involved Europe and the
U.S. in spending billions of pounds, dollars or euros
that we can’t afford because of Gordon’s and his U.S.
friends’ economic incompetence and banking scams. It’s
a lost cause.
It could be arranged that President Obama’s friends’
companies supply the equipment to be sent to the
Yemenis which lets them still feel clever about
profiteering and that they’re getting their money’s
worth from their political donations. When it’s seen
to work, or even if it doesn’t, General McChrystal can
plagiarize the plan and roll it out in Afghanistan as
his next strategy. It has a better chance of getting
that gas pipeline built than the present one.
Nor need the CIA worry about job cuts. They could
teach American accented English and build their
databases by getting their students to inform on each
other, their friends and families. It’s a more
credible cover story than pretending to be a
development agency while sitting behind barbed wire
and blast barriers, organizing drone attacks on
Pakistani villages. Much more useful too.
Speaking of the CIA in Afghanistan, the Zionist
Murdoch’s London Times describes one of the eight
agents who ran the drone programme and were killed in
a suicide bomb attack as “a gentle man”. Another was a
“middle-aged mother of three”. Their families will
surely feel their loss as much as Iraqi or Afghan
families do from losing the 700 people that these
agents killed with drone attacks last year. And there
we have the contradiction that runs through all this
conflict. Who truly were this gentle man and
middle-aged mother of three, who were part of a secret
organization that specializes in murder and torture,
part of an invasion force in a foreign country,
carrying out assassinations and on the word of
informers, killing men, women and children?
It is the contradiction of ordinary, likeable people
who love their families carrying out appalling mass
murder beyond inhumanity, that they do not recognize
for what it is.
That is the image that Gordon should bear in mind
during his summit. He should remember what his father
told him: Love your enemies. Gordon thinks that he
knows better than his father but he doesn’t.
-- Christopher King is a retired consultant and
lecturer. He lives in London, UK. This article
appeared in Redress Information & Analysis.
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