The US-Led Genocide and Destruction of Yemen
David William Pear
Photo: WhatsuPic, “Expanded War, Hunger, Disease, Death in Yemen. No Big Deal to US”.
“Only God can save our children”, say Yemeni fathers and mothers as they can do nothing but watch their children die, try to comfort them in their final agonizing hours, and pray for God to spare them from death. The fathers and mothers watch and pray, as one by another their children die from cholera, dehydration and starvation.
Where is God? He cannot get through the total US blockade of Yemen to save the children. A cholera epidemic is a man-made disaster. Since 2015 the cholera epidemic has been spread by biological warfare against Yemen. US bombs dropped by Saudi pilots destroyed Yemen’s public water and sewage systems. The parts, chemicals and fuel to operate Yemen’s water purification and sewage plants are blockaded. Potable water, cholera vaccine, and even individual water purification tablets cannot get in. The resulting cholera epidemic was predictable.
Photo from Bln Ghaleb’s in Stop the War on Yemen Group
The sewage from non-working treatment plants overflows into streams that run onto agricultural land, thus contaminating vegetables before they go to market. Sewage flows into the cities, residential areas and the refugee camps. Flies swarm over the sewage and spread cholera everywhere. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders; hospitals, clinics and disaster relief organizations, and human rights workers have been deliberately bombed.
The US dominated United Nations adds a fig leaf of legality to the blockade, and a one-sided weapons embargo against Yemen. To ask why there is no UN arms embargo against Saudi Arabia is, of course, a rhetorical question.
The UN wrings its hands about a humanitarian crisis, and the worst cholera epidemic in human history. The UN does nothing to stop the US-led Saudi genocide and destruction of Yemen, and it puts out knowingly phony underreported numbers of the civilian deaths.
The former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley threw a temper tantrum when the UN dared to even voice mild criticism against the US, when it moved its embassy to Jerusalem. She spoke of the UN “disrespecting” the US, and she threatened financial retaliation against the UN and countries that voted contrary to US wishes. The UN is not an honest broker, because it is dominated and fears the US displeasure.
President Donald Trump cut funding to humanitarian UN agencies, did not try to stop Israel from gunning down thousands of unarmed Palestinians, withdrew the US from the UN Human Rights Council, and thumbed his nose at the UN International Court of Justice. Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said that the US plans on withdrawing from more treaties that are the foundation of international law.
In other words, Bolton is confirming that the US is a rogue state; it makes a mockery of the United Nations. From the beginning of the Bush-era War on Terror, the US showed contempt for the Geneva Conventions. Obama too violated customary international law with impunity. Obama assassinated US citizens, droned Afghan wedding parties and funerals, and destroyed Libya. He invaded Syria in an illegal war of aggression. Obama was really good at killing. He allegedly said so himself.
Purposely causing a cholera epidemic is biological warfare. Yemen is not an unprecedented case of US use of biological-chemical warfare. During the 1950’s Korean War the US was accused convincingly of biological warfare. In the Vietnam-American War the US sprayed millions of gallons of Agent Orange, which poisoned the soil, rivers and people. Agent Orange, 50 years later is still “causing miscarriages, skin diseases, cancers, birth defects, and congenital malformations”.
Photo: The Independent, “US planes drop Agent Orange in 1966.
The US contaminated the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East with so-called depleted uranium. Depleted uranium can cause cancer, birth defects, and as yet other unknown health effects. The US knows it. It has put out a health warning to US Iraq war veterans.
In 1995, Madeleine Albright was interview by Lesley Stahl on the TV show “60 Minutes”. That interview should live in infamy in a hall of shame for eternity. Stahl asked Albright if the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children caused by US sanctions was “worth it”. Albright’s answer was, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” (Whoever the “we” is, Albright did not elaborate.) It is now known that “we” purposely used biological warfare to kill those 500,000 Iraqi children.
How many more children did Albright, the Bill Clinton administration and “we” continue to kill because “we” thought it was “worth it”? Hundreds of thousands, according to a study of the partially declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document “IRAQ WATER TREATMENT VULNERABILITIES” [emphasis in original]. The partially declassified document was discovered in 1998 on an official website of the Military Health System. In 2001 the Association of Genocide Scholars released the study referred to above: The Role of “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others.
During the 1991 First Gulf War the US purposely targeted all of the water purification plants and sanitation works in Iraq, which is itself a war crime. The “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” document produced by the US Department of Defense and implemented in 1991, was continued under President Bill Clinton. Even after Albright’s admission on “60 Minutes” that the US sanctions regime had killed 500,000 Iraqi children, “we” continued the draconian embargo of water purification equipment.
The Department of Defense and Madeleine Albright’s “we” knew that without potable water that the rate of waterborne diseases, such as cholera, would sicken and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Depriving an entire population of the essentials of life is genocide, and it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Degrading of the water supply to knowingly cause epidemics, such as cholera, is biological warfare.
Economic sanctions and trade embargos are barbaric siege warfare against civilian populations. There is no way to pretty them up as surgically targeting a regime or being humanitarian. Now think about the millions of people of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Burma and, Côte d’Ivoire that are suffering under a US embargo today.
The “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” document reveals the diabolical intention of a sanctions regime, even when authorized by the UN. It is for these and other reasons that The International Committee of the Red Cross has often raised concerns, including concerns about UN authorized sanctions regimes. Not even the UN has the authority to violate the Geneva Conventions, and the UN oversteps its authority when it does so.
The US has also overstepped the UN’s authorization by imposing a total blockade of Yemen. Just as predictably as in Iraq, children are dying in Yemen from cholera. Tens of thousands of civilians have died from starvation, disease and the lack of medicine. Twenty million human beings are starving to death in a famine caused by the US, and its proxy, the so-called Saudi coalition.
For three years, starting with the Obama administration the US has been passing Saudi Arabia the bombs, ammunition, fuel, and most importantly it is the US military at the command and control center of the war on Yemen. Other war-profiteering countries, such as the UK, EU countries, and Canada have their hands dripping with the blood and cholera infected feces of Yemeni children, too.
Photo: Nora Al-Alwaki, an American citizen killed by Navy SEALs when they raided her Yemeni village on January 29, 2017.
US Special Forces, Seal Team 6, and the CIA carry out night raids and assignations, such as the one that killed 8 year old Nora, pictured above. She was an American citizen who lived with her grandparents in a Yemeni village.
Nora was the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was the first known American citizen to be executed by the US without due process. A week later his 16 year old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was assassinated by a US drone. Barack Obama carried out those killings in 2011.
It was also Obama that planned the raid in which Nora was killed on Trump’s orders, January 29, 2017. When Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibb was asked why 16 year old Abdurahman was killed, his answer was that his crime was that he “should have had a more responsible father”. Was that Nora’s “crime” too?
The war against Yemen is another dirty war just like Iraq, Libya and Syria. It is an ‘all but in name’ a US genocide-scale slaughter of civilians and the destruction of a country. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its so-called coalition are the US proxy that pays for the bombs and drops them. It is the US that picks out the targets, back at the command and control center.
Most of the ground fighting inside Yemen is caused by an invasion of US, Saudi and UAE sponsored Salafists terrorists, mujahideen, al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, and Blackwater (rebranded Academi) US, Somalia and South American mercenaries. Saudi-backed terrorists are attacking in the north, while UAE-backed terrorist attack in the south. Saudi-backed terrorists are fighting UAE terrorists. Saudi Arabia has put a blockade on Qatar, in a squabble over Yemen.
The de facto government of Yemen is the leadership of the Houthi Movement, named after its charismatic founder Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi. The Houthi Movement is backed by Yemen’s military units, security forces and a broad base of the Yemeni people, including many Sunnis. That is not to say that Yemenis do not have many differences. They do, but when their common self-interests are at stake, they do come together, despite their differences.
There are some internal groups opposed to the Houthi Movement and they are collaborating with the Saudi and UAE terrorist groups, but this is not a Sunni vs. Shia war. Nor is the war a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as the corporate mainstream media monopoly would have the US public believe.
The Zaydi Shia that makes up about 42% of Yemen’s population is closer to Sunni Islam than they are to the Shia branch of Islam in Iran. The Zaidi-led Houthi Movement “have not called for restoring the imamate in Yemen, and religious grievances have not been a major factor in the war”, according to Al Jazeera. Rather, the Houthi Movement has been primarily economic, political and regional in nature.
There is a separatist movement in what was once South Yemen, which until 1990 was a separate communist country: The Democratic Republic of Yemen. Before unification North Yemen was the Yemen Arab Republic. In the power struggle that followed unification the south lost power and patronage. The UAE is backing a southern separatist group, the Southern Transitional Council, which also opposes Hadi and Saudi Arabia. As mentioned, Saudi backed terrorists are fighting UAE-backed terrorists.
The US, KSA and the UN try to pass off the “internationally recognized legitimate government of Yemen” as if it were Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. Hadi was the president of an interim government of Yemen from 2012 to 2014. Hadi fraudulently overstayed his term when it expired in 2014.
Hadi was forcefully removed from office by the Houthi Movement, and a broad base uprising of the Yemeni people. Hadi resigned his office and fled to Saudi Arabia. The US, KSA and the UN use Hadi as a figurehead to add a fig leaf of legality to the illegal US-led war of aggression against Yemen.
Photo: Press TV, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley briefs the media in front of remains of what is said to be a Yemeni missile’
There is little if any evidence that Iran is providing the Houthi Movement with weapons, materials or fighters. Look at the map. How would Iran be able to get massive supplies of weapons past the total US blockade, even if it wanted to. Iran has its hands full with its (legal) support of its ally Syria. Iran is struggling with its own economic crisis caused by the illegal US economic sanctions regime, re-imposed by the Trump administration.
When the US was pressed for hard evidence to back up its allegations that Iran was involved in Yemen, the best that the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley could do was come up with a few missile parts. The UN dismissed Haley’s show as having “no evidence as to the identity of the broker or supplier.” Iran has denied involvement in Yemen, and rejected the US’s claims as unfounded, and Iran further added:
These accusations seek also to cover up for the Saudi war crimes in Yemen, with the US complicity, and divert attention from the stalemate war of aggression against the Yemenis.”
Yemenis, regardless of religion, region or tribe are fiercely nationalistic, and they are nobody’s puppet. They resent attempts by foreign invaders to dominate them. Yemen, like Afghanistan, is a graveyard where empires come to die. The British and the Egyptians learned it in the 1960’s and now the Saudis and the UAE are learning it the hard way.
The US is like a zombie empire that never dies in an empire graveyard. Instead when faced with humiliation and defeat, the US totally destroys its antagonist from the air, as it did Iraq, Libya and Syria. The US shows no mercy for the civilian population. The US destroys civilian infrastructure, blockades food, water and medicine. It targets the people with cluster bombs and white phosphorus; and the US poisons their water, soil and air with biological, chemical and radioactive weapons.
Photo, from the sleuthjournal.com
As with Iraq, Libya, and Syria and with so many other small countries that the US declared to be its enemy, Yemen poses no threat to the US national security. So why does the US destroy small countries, and why is the US destroying Yemen?
In the 1990’s with the collapse of the USSR, the US set out to build an empire to dominate the world, and it made no secret of it. The US plan for world domination has gone by different names, such as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Full Spectrum Dominance, the Indispensable Nation, American Exceptionalism, New World Order, and more subtly the role of US World Leadership.
Whatever name US world domination goes by, it is all the same. The US considers itself above international law, customary moral behavior and believes it alone has the right to pursue whatever it thinks is in its self-interest politically, militarily and financially. If the US were a person, it would be diagnosed as a psychopath, with no conscience, no empathy, and no remorse; aggressive, narcissistic and a serial mass murderer.
Yemen is often scripted by the corporate-government mainstream media as “the poorest country in the Middle East”, as if it has no wealth that anybody could possibly want. The people of Yemen are poor, but Yemen has oil, pipeline routes, gold, minerals, agriculture, fishing, state owned enterprises, desirable real estate, finance, and its geography gives Yemen great potential for tourism.
Yemen’s 30 million people are both a potential source of cheap labor and a potential market for the products of US global corporations. Yemen is strategically located at the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, through which 1.4 million barrels of oil pass every day. For millennium Yemen was a center for trade.
The US covets Yemen’s wealth and its strategic location as part of the neoliberal New World Order. The US vision of the New World Order is a world dominated by US global corporations, US financial institutions and wealthy US family dynasties.
US foreign policy is shaped by special interests, monopolies and their political action committees (PACS), such as those of weapons manufacturers, financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and agri-business. Foreign countries such as Israel and Saudi Arabia also have powerful lobbies that can manipulate US foreign policy to their advantage. US foreign policy has little to do with the interests of the average US citizen.
Yemen is the southern neighbor to the KSA, and the Saudis want a corrupt, compliant and passive government in Yemen. The KSA has expanded its border to encroach on Yemen’s northern borderlands, which is the birthplace of the Houthi Movement. The Saudi dynasty also fears an independent Yemeni people that might influence the oppressed people of the Saudi Dynasty. The KSA is a powder keg for an uprising of the people, they are ready to explode.
The KSA uses extremist Wahhabi Islam as a political subterfuge to recruit jihadist, terrorists, and to spread Saudi influence throughout West Asia, Africa and beyond. International terrorism has been a joint venture of the US, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states. All the GCC states: KSA, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait are theocratic monarchies. That says volumes about US values for democracy and human rights.
The US has a long history of coveting the wealth of Yemen. In the mid-1980s the Bush family and their Texas oil buddies at Hunt Oil invested in Yemen’s oil-rich Marib Shabwa basin. Bush obtained for Hunt Oil the rights for future exploration. Deviously, the former director of the CIA and then Vice President Bush arranged for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to finance the Bush-Hunt investments in Yemen. A few years later Bush “repaid” Saddam’s loan with Shock and Awe.
Photo One World: George H. W. Bush and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh
The war that started in 2015 is to protect US investments of global corporations, neoliberalism and the vision of a New World Order. The people of Yemen have been starch opponents of neoliberalism, and like their old world order. They rebelled against the 33 year rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh for selling out Yemen to neoliberalism, and then the people rebelled against the interim government of Hadi for his fire-sale privatization scheming with neoliberal empire.
The US beneficiaries of neoliberalism were not happy when their benefactor Hadi was deposed by the Houthi Movement. Nor was Saudi Arabia, which has been trying to exploit Yemen for decades. The vultures of the other GCC countries are circling Yemen in the hope of picking at its corpse too.
The US is providing the GCC with the Shock and Awe to kill the prey, and the US does not care if it kills 22 million people in the process of looting Yemen. It is the US that is providing the bombs. The Saudi-led coalition of GCC countries are just the delivery boys.
To summarize, there is no civil war in Yemen. Iran is made the scapegoat for a US-led illegal war of aggression. Saudi Arabia and its coalition of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states are headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The GCC states are made up of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. They are all monarchies. The US hopes to walk off with Yemen’s main prizes, and the KSA, UAE and Qatar are fighting each other over the crumbs. The lives of 22 million Yemeni people are hanging by a thread, because of a US blockade of food, water and medicine. The US is the cause of the worst cholera epidemic in history. It is biological warfare and genocide.
Originally published in The Greanville Post
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I listened to the lying, poisonous, scumbag BBC Radio 4 on Yemen today.
If I had a pound for every time they parrotted “Iranian backed”, “Iranian backed Houthis”, “Iran this,” “Iran that,” I’d be a rich man.
They just seem to have woken up to the fact that a war’s been going on in Yemen for the past 3 years.
Surprisingly, they have just upped the MSM’s casualty figures for Yemen, “10,000 dead” (it’s been “10,000 dead” for the past 3 years) to 56,000. Unlike Syria, where the death toll is regularly inflated by the MSM, 250,000, 300,000, 400,000, 500,000, 550,000.
The powers that be seem to have decided that the war in Yemen is lost and they want to close it down. Bin Salman thought it would only last a few weeks. Now they are bogged down in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria with no end in sight. It’s like the destabilisation of Syria – the Fraudian and the rest of the Zionist MSM lost no opportunity to tell us how that evil tyrant Assad couldn’t possibly last more than a few months then those nice moderate rebels would take over and Shady Wahabia and the Gulf Dictatorships could build that nice oil pipeline through Syria. Things don’t always work out according to the Power Point presentation.
Maybe they just want to clear the decks for the Big Event – the attack on Iran.
Anyone with half a brain cell could have told Bin Salman that his adventure in Yemen would end in tears.
The Yemenis are a hell of a lot tougher than the limp wristed, workshy Shadies. I know a soldier who served out there when it was the British colony of Aden in the 1960s. Even then, there were 4 guns for every man, woman and child in the country. The Yemenis were warrior tribesmen who would no sooner go out without their rifle than they would without their trousers. They eat the Shadies (or their Pakistani mercenaries, the Shadies don’t do any of their own fighting) for breakfast, no matter how many fancy toys they buy from the Orange Baboon in the White House.
It was the same in the 1960s when Yemen became independent. Nasser sent 70,000 Egyptian troops to fight there in their civil war, and they achieved precisely zilch. With half the Egyptian army hundreds of miles away, Israel grabbed the opportunity to start the 1967 war and steal the rest of Palestine that they hadn’t been able to steal in 1948.
Uncle $cam not invited to decisive meeting on postwar Syria.
http://thesaker.is/russia-will-decide-the-fate-of-syria-without-america/
And after Syria, Yemen.
I have been struck by the difference between the reporting and outpouring of grief at the senseless killing of 6 Jewish Americans by a racist white supremicist. Each person who died was recognised and mourned and the grief of their friends and family recorded. Whereas the thousands killed in Yemen and those Palestinians killed by Israeli snipers and the grief of the families of victims were not noted and not interviewed. The killings of Palestinians and the killings of Gemini people are reported briefly and in the tone of someone describing the loss of sheep in a flood.
The media is a total disgrace in their disdain for the lives of Palestinians and Yemenis.
To NOT count Jewish lives as more valuable than those of ‘two-legged animals’ is the very essence of really existing ‘antisemitism’. And they make no bones about it.
Oops not Gemini people but Yemini people in my above post.
very lucid and well-explained unpretentious article esp on the weaponisation of water,the omission of ref to the destruction of Gaddafis Great Water Project, a monstrous war crime where pilots should be prosecuted, notwithstanding
Thank you for the info on Gaddafi’s Great Water Project which was destroyed by the US with “depleted” uranium tipped bombs. Water, food and disease are the old fashioned but most deadly weapons of war. The US literally has it down to a science.
While I have no evidence, so it was not mentioned in the article, it would not surprise me if the US spiked the water supply with cholera, as well as destroying the capability of making it potable. I became interested in the US history of biological warfare from my study of the Korean War.
Jeff Brown of the website China Rising took the initiative of putting together a Bioweapon Truth Commission and Global Online Library (BWTC-GOL) which I participated in. You can find more info at https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/06/25/bioweapon-truth-commission-and-global-online-library-bwtc-gol-www-bioweapontruth-com/
While to this day the US has denied the use of biological warfare, the contrary evidence make it almost irrefutable that it has. I have not written any articles on it, but as I said I did participate in a lot of the research. Other members of the group have written some excellent articles.
As I mention in the above article, to knowingly and purposely cause the conditions for cholera epidemics is biological and germ warfare. Those that are victimized the most are civilians.
Anyone watching this two-minute video, titled ”Saudi Arabia Is A British Creation”, is advised to keep a bucket handy for the appearances of the Preposterous Prince, Charles, and the repulsive Tony Blair:
My comment on the status of Yemeni crying… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioDbcYnCHFM
Powerful companion piece in Saker Vineyard on theme, Death of one WaPo hack gets more MSM coverage than the massacre] of 50,000 Yemeni children.
Very well written, succinct and most informative. Deserves wider publicity. Just a pity such things have to be written.
Why is USUKisrael interested in Yemen? They’ve been messing with it for a long time. Aden is in Yemen. It was a British colony until 1963. The Jewish “British East India Company” was there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_of_Aden#Jews_in_Aden
If I was CEO of a predatory US corporation I would probably be agitating for endless war in the Middle East.
Why?
Well, its extremely profitable.
No senior western political or industrial figure has ever been punished by law no matter how many atrocities are committed.
The general public are unable to see the pattern of US belligerence despite America spending almost as much as the rest of the world put together on weapons, or the fact they have around 800 military bases in 70 countries.
No doubt western indifference to the plight of Yemenese not to mention Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, etc, etc is one of the reason the likes of Tony Blair is still being paid millions (by the Saudis, no less) for his lucrative ‘advisory’ work.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180906-tony-blair-confirms-receiving-millions-in-donation-from-saudi/
Talking of the former Middle East peace envoy, hasn’t it been a little while since one of Tony’s regular columns in the Guardian warning Labour voters about dangerous extremists like, err Jeremy Corbyn?
Now ‘Ari, you would not have made the grade to be CEO of a predatory US company. For that you need to have had your conscience removed and have no human empathy. That is surely not you.
Quick definition of a psychopath – somebody capable of horrendous acts yet still sleeps soundly at night.
Judging by this clip there are some very damaged people out there which for us is a huge problem once they obtain positions of power.
Harry,
I’ve just had to fight the urge to put my fist through the screen of my laptop as I listened to that CIA prick who was talking to John Pilger. What happens to these people to strip them of their basic humanity?
Earlier today, I was reading about the atrocities carried out by Chiang Kai-shek, a man who was admired by certain people within the U.S. power structure. The same people who were more than happy to help Hitler to power.
I sometimes question whether these people are, in fact, human beings, such is their derangement and their depravity. They are truly sick.
I’ll say one thing for Duane Clarridge (senior ops manager for the CIA in Latin America) he makes absolutely no attempt to disguise the naked ambitions of the US, nor the use of dirty tactics (up to, and including, extra-judicial slaying of elected heads of government) providing they are are necessary to fulfil certain geopolitical aspirations – perhaps Obama and Hillary were secret admirers, but I digress.
Anyway, I was reminded of Rob Newman’s ‘History of oil’ when he talks about a book he found skip diving in Kentish town.
The book called ‘Marching to the drums’ is an old account of British militray tactics written (in Newman’s opinion) with a refreshing honesty, candour and lack of hypocrisy.
Rob goes onto contrast this form of expression with that of today’s corporate media or political class because of the absolute taboo they have against any of them ever openly admitting the real strategic or economic reasons for war (from 1:40).
‘History of oil’ is a splendid tour de force in my opinion.
Yes, Harry, I’m sure Clinton and Obama are admirers of people like Clarridge. The kind of sicko who does their dirty work for them.
And you’re right about ”History of Oil.” An excellent work. I’m keen to read the book you mention, too.
On that subject, I only recently became aware of the work of Michael Ruppert. A very intelligent man with a lot to tell us. It’s a crying shame that he’s no longer with us.
I had sleepless nights for weeks after ‘Collapse’
Yeah, it’s scary shit (at the same time as being necessary viewing, of course). I think I might watch it again, this evening.
Adoption studies support this being hereditary. It associates with success but there was a time in my youth when it was negatively selected for, in positions of leadership and responsibility. Even in the US. But no longer. Kissinger was a watershed in my opinion. Public value/virtue signalling has changed, even philanthropy has been gamed.
I am not sure it is genetic, I think the brain’s plasticity means that exposure of children to narcissistic and/or psychopathic parents means their brains do not experience empathy and may experience sadism growing up.
I experienced no empathy growing up, but I did experience high quality empathy from an elder male and some older women in my late teens to mid twenties.
If things were purely genetic, I should have become a hateful psychopath too.
I repeatedly met really awful behaviour whilst being told to ‘be ambitious’ so I tend to suggest that ambition requires sacrifice of empathy and decency in order to succeed in being ambitious, at least in many areas of life.
In particular I was told to embrace American action in Iraq II or face being liquidated. I left the company employing the purveyor of that message within months.
War has always been fantastically profitable for a tiny handful of people and a disaster for everybody else.
England fought the Hundred Years’ War (actually the 116 Years’ War) in France from 1337-1453.
France was totally devastated and impoverished as both armies lived off the land and carried out scorched earth policies. Peasants were reduced to starvation, beggary and banditry. The vast majority of people in England derived no benefit from it and were squeezed for taxes to pay for it all, leading to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.
But a handful of the aristocracy and mercenary captains grew fat on all the loot and wanted it to carry on forever – which it very nearly did.
The wars in the Middle East have already cost the US $6 trillion. They have cost the people who live there far more. But these wars aren’t intended to be won – they are intended to go on for ever. If the US actually won one of these wars like WW2, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and all their stooges in Congress and the Neocon think tanks, would go into mourning.
Where are the blessed White Helmets in Yemen where one really needs them to raise awareness among the liberal gentry who write for the Guardian?
Reading this very detailed and illuminating report D.W. Pear says, “If the US were a person, it would be diagnosed as a psychopath, with no conscience, no empathy, and no remorse; aggressive, narcissistic and a serial mass murderer.”
Succinctly put, exceptionally psychopathic.
If there was any Real justice on this Planet, every United States President, plus UK Prime Ministers, in fact the vast majority of Western leaders would be sitting in jail cells in The Hague. And yes, I already know how effective and ‘unbiased’ the ICC is. Heard many describe it as a kangaroo court. What has been done to Yemen is beyond outrageous. It is a monstrous crime, with the full support and backing of allegedly civilised Western nations, such as Deputy Sherriff Australia; another subservient lapdog for the Empire. And as for the deliberate distortions of the equally disgusting mainstream media, who always preface things as the ‘Iranian backed Houthis’ while censoring the direct involvement of the United States, UK, and others in this slaughterhouse. All these scum whore themselves as mouthpieces for Imperialism, for the worst Rogue states in the World. They have absolutely no conscience.
Following an order by George W Bush when he was POTUS, no US citizen will ever be put on trial for war crimes in the Hague.
The US/UK dispense “justice” on a global scale, making sure that they never face true justice.
Well clearly those US rogues wanted for trial should be taken out by death squads.
Until going the Hague is seen as the best option, no US actor will go there…
You have to have a black face to be a war criminal.
The US has no business in Yemen, or in any of the 150-odd countries in which it has military bases. Any similarity to what the founding fathers of America envisioned is now very largely in name only. What a legacy they leave.
Why can’t some Saudi royals be the motor of this imperialism? American neo-liberal interest in Yemen is too far fetched. They want to dominate the khat market? Its oil is drying up.
Neoliberal greed has no limit. The ones that profit from wars are not the ones that pay for them. I am not an “it’s all about oil” person, but a few billion barrels here at $66 each and a few billion barrels there start to add up. That is just the known oil reserves. Who knows how much is off shore in the Gulf of Arden? And then there is the unknown mineral wealth that has not been explored too. Add the geopolitics, weapons sales, and private contractors, etc.
Agree with you totally David about Neoliberal greed having no limit. Also agree with numerous commenters using the word ‘pyschopath’ to describe those running this racket. Greed, Power, Control.