By Robert Inlakesh, Al Mayadeen English.
17 Jan., 2024
Illustrated by Zeinab Al-Hajj: Al Mayadeen English
The US Biden administration started its term in office with the pledge to end the 7-year-long war on Yemen, stating that it was prepared to force Saudi Arabia into concluding a deal with the Ansar Allah movement, yet it instead opted for pursuing an Israeli-Saudi deal. It now pursues a policy on behalf of the Zionist entity, which has Washington taking Riyadh’s place as the primary invader of the Arab world’s poorest nation.
In February of 2021, US President Joe Biden removed Ansar Allah from the State Department’s “Registered Terrorist’ group lists, following international condemnation of the move to prescribe them as such in the 11th hour of the former Trump administration. In his first foreign policy address to the American public, the US President pledged to pursue an end to the devastating war on Yemen and to make this a priority of his government.
However, during the first year of Joe Biden’s term in office, the war on Yemen only escalated and the pledges to end weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia were reneged on. The conduct of the Biden administration toward Yemen in 2021 led to US Senator Bernie Sanders threatening to take action himself to see an end to the war and crippling blockade, which had led to the deaths of roughly 400,000 Yemenis.
Come early 2022, the Ansar Allah movement announced a number of strikes on strategic targets in the United Arab Emirates, followed by drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia. These attacks proved the military capabilities, possessed by the Sanaa-based Yemeni government, to be a major threat to both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, quickly leading to UN intervention in the form of meaningful peace talks. The United Nations managed to broker a temporary ceasefire between the Saudi-led coalition and Ansar Allah, which ended up being extended over the span of nearly two years now; with some smaller confrontations breaking out in between.
Although the Biden administration tried to take credit for the ceasefire in Yemen, it had no real meaningful role in facilitating these discussions. It was likely the fact that the UN-mediated talks between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Sanaa-based government were proving effective at preventing an escalation of violence that the US regime believed it was safe to leave the issue to the side altogether. In light of this grave miscalculation, the Biden administration sought to foster another agreement, a normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity.
American arrogance and their belief that the Palestinian cause for liberation was no longer a meaningful item on the West Asia agenda, in addition to the blind belief that the Yemeni issue had been pacified, led to one of the worst foreign policy debacles in US history. Although Saudi Arabia clearly entertained the normalization of ties with the Zionist regime, it also sought reassurance. Riyadh wanted a US-Saudi security pact, which would have essentially meant that the American army would be dragged into any war in which the Saudis were attacked. The reason behind this request from the Saudi Kingdom is simple: they realized that a few thousand American soldiers and US air defense systems could not deter or defend them in the case of regional escalation; the most likely being with Yemen.
When the Palestinian Resistance launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, the entire American regional agenda aimed at preserving its hegemony collapsed to dust. The vision of a “new Middle East” that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke about at the United Nations General Assembly in September dissipated before their very eyes. The US quickly came to realize that sidelining and belittling the suffering Palestinians, who had for two years been reviving armed groups to resist occupation in the West Bank, was a massive strategic blunder.
And then came the real whole US baggage in the region, all coming to bite it at a time when it reacted by aiding and abetting the Israelis in committing genocide against the people of Gaza. Hezbollah, the Iraqi Resistance, and Yemen’s Ansar Allah all sprung into action. In fact, it has been Yemen that has played perhaps the most pivotal role in the war, outside of the territory of occupied Palestine. The people who had been blockaded and starved for seven years, having suffered what was – until the aftermath of “Israel’s” attack on Gaza – the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, decided to flip the table on the US empire and enforce its own blockade against the Israelis, in reaction to the US-Israeli policy starving the people of Gaza.
Yemen’s government in Sanaa, headed by the Ansar Allah movement, decided that they would rather sacrifice themselves than watch Gaza suffer in silence. This selfless act of courage has now led to a direct US assault on Yemen, which the Western corporate media has attempted to distort the nature of. The Yemeni forces have only targeted shipping connected with or headed to the Zionist entity, not international shipping that passes through the Red Sea – the majority of the ships head through the Suez Canal and do not dock in occupied Palestine. Therefore, the US aggression against Yemen has nothing to do with international shipping and protecting trade and has everything to do with ensuring the Israelis pay no economic price for their genocide in Gaza.
Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US-led mission that entails using European and Commonwealth nations to allow trade to the Zionist Entity through the Red Sea, has proven a catastrophic failure. The Western Imperialists were embarrassed by the withdrawal of nations such as France from their multi-national naval coalition, along with the US inability to recruit any Arab nation other than Bahrain, in addition to the fact that US and UK naval vessels have not ended the Ansar Allah blockade on the Zionists. On top of this, the US and UK, which are the only ones who have taken real action, did so without a UN mandate and without popular demand, nor consultation with either the congress or parliament.
When the US-UK joint attack on Yemen’s territory was launched, using precision-guided missiles against over 70 locations throughout the country, this act of war against Yemen was not approved by the US Congress or British Parliament either. This act of aggression led to the death of Yemeni soldiers, following the murder of 10 Yemeni navy sailors by US missile strikes on their vessels in the Red Sea. While no civilians on any of the ships that Yemen’s forces have intercepted or struck have been killed, the US and UK were set on seeking blood in defense of the Zionist entity’s economy. So, in order to make products cheaper for the Israelis and prevent further damage to their economy, the US and UK governments were prepared to commit acts of war against another country, when diplomacy was an option. These are also costs that are placed on American and British taxpayers, who are now paying for acts of aggression against the most economically disadvantaged Arab nation.
Now that their precision-guided missile attack has failed, as has their Operation Prosperity Guardian, the American empire looks weaker than ever. This should be the time when it decides that diplomacy and forcing its genocidal ally to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza are the next rational steps, but this being the United States, they are opting for further escalation. Instead of ending the war on Yemen, Joe Biden seeks to return Ansar Allah, or what he calls “the Houthi rebels”, to the State Department’s “terrorist” lists. Not only has the Biden administration gone back on its promise to end the war in Yemen, but it has decided to take the role of Saudi Arabia and become the aggressor, while Riyadh now calls for them to be calm.
The barbarity of the racist imperialists knows no bounds. They have tried to hide this fascist mentality, but it has been exposed before the entire world. The US and UK thought that by using people of color, who bow down to the ideology and strategy of their ethnocentric overlords, they could fool everyone into believing that they had changed and shaken off their colonial and genocidal pasts. The masks have all fallen, and using black and brown faces to forward a racist agenda will not work any longer. The reality here is that the British, American, and Israeli “elites” are insulted that the “wretched of the earth”, the “inferior races”, the inhabitants of “the jungle”, have risen and spat in their faces.
The two worst humanitarian crises on earth exist in Yemen and Gaza, and the Western empire’s narcissistic racist rulers used to laugh at them as they suffered in silence. Today, Gaza and Yemen are fighting back, defying all the odds; they are screaming give me liberty or give me death and the genocidal lunatics who run the current Western “rules-based order” are not able to defeat them. It is as if an act of divine intervention has occurred, that the people of Gaza and Yemen, “the wretched of the heart,” those who nobody even wanted to pay attention to, are resisting with every ounce of their existence and carrying the slogan, Allah will suffice. No movie script or novel written could possibly match the epic struggles of these peoples, which put the whole so-called “civilized” world to shame. Now, we see who the people of civilization are, now we see who the people of etiquette are, the people of God, the believers, the moral, and the just.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al Mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
