24.03.2022
A tale of two wars
As the western powers furiously denounce Russian aggression, they continue to aid and abet the Saudi war in Yemen, writes Paul Demarty
It is not easy, nowadays, to spend much time in the company of the bourgeois media. It has become a vast tornado of unhinged war propaganda, with scarcely any let-up. It seems quite united in demanding the United States escalate its operations in Ukraine, even to the point of provoking direct war with Russia (even those who merely support Joe Biden’s restraint on no-fly zones and the like are sometimes assumed to have suspect allegiances).
In the meantime, of course, there is another war in progress, a couple of thousand miles from Ukraine, which barely hit the front page even before Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ over his south-western border. That is the civil war in Yemen between Saudi-backed government forces and Houthi rebels, which has been ongoing nearly as long as the low-intensity conflict in eastern Ukraine, but with far more severe consequences. The death toll, including from otherwise avoidable famines and outbreaks of disease, is close to 377,000 people. Over three million Yemenis have been displaced. The tragedy has briefly made it into major news cycles as a sideshow: in America in the scandal triggered by the gruesome murder of Jamaal Khashoggi; and in this country the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United football club. The Saudi angle is pertinent, of course, because Saudi Arabia has been an active participant in the conflict since 2015.
So presumably, then, we should have heard no end of hand-wringing about our two countries’ close and corrupt ties with the Saudi monarchy, as it conducts this abysmal crime. It is unseemly to do business with mega-rich individuals associated with governments that commit war crimes, we are told, as politicians puff themselves up to inflict sanctions on Russian billionaires and scramble to cover the tracks of their hand-in-glove mutual relationships. Yet, with regard to the Saudi elite and Yemen, there is nothing: a discreet, embarrassed silence hangs over the whole affair. Roman Abramovich has had Chelsea seized from him; but Newcastle will remain forever the prize possession of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS, as he is often referred to).
There are various explanations for this, some truer than others. It has been argued that the difference in coverage is an effect of racism; and there is certainly something to that. In the early days of the Ukraine conflict, many TV journalists were caught out proclaiming their shock that such things were possible in a ‘civilised’ country: in other words, nothing better is to be expected from the Arabs, or for that matter the participants of various African wars currently in train. Now, as in the glory days of empire, ‘wogs don’t count’.
The most important reason, however, is the geopolitical one. The transactional corruption of western-Saudi relations - Newcastle United, fast-track passports, the stupendously corrupt al-Yamamah UK arms deal with BAE Systems (that was not prosecuted on the orders of then prime minister Tony Blair) - are epiphenomena of a strategic alliance apparently impervious to interruption by any outrage. It mattered not that more or less every perpetrator of terrorist atrocities on American and British soil, including naturally the 9/11 attacks, were at most three steps removed from the Saudi elite or else Saudi money. Why should it matter that they kill Yemenis? The United States needs control of the global oil taps, and cannot have it without a working relationship with the Saudis, who have some of the world’s largest reserves.
So long as that fact is true, MBS has a great deal of leeway in his own backyard. And, more than that, he does it with our enthusiastic assistance. British and American arms firms have made a tidy profit out of those 377,000 deaths. UK military advisors are deeply involved in the operation. The whole thing, from any morally consistent point of view, stinks.
The stink reaches far enough, to be sure, that occasionally a few weasel words are called for from our glorious political class. Boris Johnson recently made a trip to Riyadh to ask MBS to increase oil production; his visit coincided with a wave of executions, with 81 people - largely Shia dissidents - having been beheaded on March 12. (three more suffered the same fate while Johnson was in the country). These executions did move at least sections of the press to condemn the rather bad optics of begging for favours from this repellent crew (no mentions of Yemen, mind); Johnson insisted that he had raised the question of human rights - a rather pathetic endeavour, given that he was in no position to negotiate. We suspect, in the end, that it will be enough; but we cannot deny a certain grim amusement that, so far, MBS has declined to save the political bacon of Biden and Johnson by tapping into Saudi reserves, no matter how much they plead for mercy.
Connections
This sort of argument is frequently dismissed as ‘whataboutery’ - the dubious practice of trying to deflect attention from one issue at hand to another. It is true, in a limited sense, that the antics of MBS in Yemen, and the west’s criminal complicity in his crimes, reflect neither well nor badly on Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. From a wholly abstract point of view, these are two independent moral variables.
Yet the accusation is foolish for two reasons. One was argued by the philosopher and writer, Ben Burgis, in the American left magazine Current Affairs: the west condemns Putin by appealing to a particular moral standard and, if it fails to apply that standard equally to friends and enemies, then critique of its hypocrisy is well founded.1 It is perhaps demonstrated most succinctly by the moment, a couple of weeks ago, when Condoleezza Rice was seen nodding solemnly in agreement to the proposition that “invading another country is a crime”. It is no fallacy to object to such creatures taking the moral high ground in this supercilious way.
The other reason is that, of course, these two wars do not actually exist in total abstraction from each other. The short-term links are the most obvious: why are Johnson and Biden going cap in hand to MBS? Because they need oil. Why do they need oil? Because they have gone to economic war with Russia, which is one of the few other producers on a similar scale, and whose sudden relative economic isolation and the associated uncertainty has sent Brent crude prices through the roof.
Moreover, the situation in Yemen may be about to get a lot worse - some NGOs estimate that up to 400,000 children are at medium-term risk of death from famine and malnutrition. Why? Because Yemen is one of the many countries in the Middle East and north Africa dependent on Russian wheat imports. The two wars have more or less independent origin stories, but are tangled together, as geopolitical crises often are.
The immediate, as it were, random links - as if Putin and MBS were characters in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, Magnolia - are not the most serious ones. The war in Ukraine is ultimately the outcome of a three-decade effort on the part of the US to strategically encircle Russia, by bringing its new found proxies into Nato and into economic alliances like the European Union. Like the cosy deal with Saudi Arabia, American strategic aggression against Russia has the aim of - by controlling the energy supply - exercising veto power on the ability of any country to wage conventional warfare, still very much a fossil-fuelled affair. The west stands by in Yemen for exactly the same reason it foams at the mouth about Putin’s purportedly genocidal aims. They are, in a certain sense, the same war: the war of American power against its own decline.
As a final insult to those killed and put to flight by these two conflicts, it is extremely possible that it will all be, even from this strategic perspective, quite pointless. Indeed, the progress of these wars tends to foreshadow that the mode of warfare controlled by the oil taps is perhaps enjoying its twilight years. The Houthis - despite very much more modest support from the Iranians and others than the Saudis and the west give the Yemeni government - have stayed in the fight, and succeeded in attacking the Saudi oil industry with simple drone attacks. The Russians, meanwhile, have had endless trouble with their long tank columns being attacked by drones and infantrymen armed with modern, but basically cheap, portable anti-tank weapons. The same Turkish drones employed by the Ukrainians made the Nagorno-Karabakh war of last year a cakewalk for the Azeri dictatorship by obliterating the Armenians’ artillery pieces in the early part of the conflict.
Then, perhaps, the centre of gravity of western hypocrisy will shift elsewhere, to the sources of the minerals and components of the new wave of effective weapons - the lithium mines of South America, and who knows what else. In such a scenario, Russia will still be a vastly wealthy player, and still a problem for American strategists. MBS may then be left behind to hang himself with his own hubris; and the great weapons of an earlier age - aircraft carriers, heavy tanks and attack helicopters - could be left to rust in abandoned backlots and naval yards.
paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk