By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
United Arab Emirates (UAE) offers official version in Arab "Pravda"
The National is an English language publication owned and operated by Abu Dhabi Media, the government-run media organization of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE. There is no press freedom in the UAE. Government media report the government point of view, which rarely includes criticism of the government.
On March 26, the first anniversary of the UAE's unprovoked attack on Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Arab states, the UAE's official media published a document about the carnage in Yemen illustrative of George Orwell's observation: "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself." The truth about the war in Yemen is a largely unreported secret. The UAE officially hides that truth from itself in an editorial in The National (which follows in its entirety, section by section) -- it begins with the headline:
"After a year in Yemen, our resolve is firm"
After a year in Yemen, the SU/Saudi coalition has managed to the region's poorest country to almost unthinkable condition, where some 20 million Yemenis -- about 80% of the population -- need humanitarian assistance. In a country both under attack and on the verge of mass famine, what does "our resolve is firm" really mean if not continued crimes against humanity? The UAE editorial's first sentence has no discernible meaning at all:
The start one year ago of Operation Decisive Storm comes as a reminder of the importance of the war in Yemen.
The anniversary of an aggression -- that the Saudis proclaimed would be brief and decisive -- is important mostly for it's irony. An official Saudi press release of March 25, 2015, quoted the Saudi ambassador to the US saying: "The operation will be limited in nature, and designed to protect the people of Yemen and its legitimate government from a takeover by the Houthis. A violent extremist militia." By then the "legitimate" government of Yemen had fled to the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Not only has more than a year of US/Saudi-led war failed to achieve any significant military success, it has produced collateral damage on a massive scale, making the country of 25 million people perhaps the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. This reality makes a mockery of the UAE editorial's next assertion:
The UAE joined the Saudi-led coalition campaign driven by its commitment and dedication to maintaining security and establishing peace in the region.
This is, almost literally, Orwellian in its "war is peace" mindset. From the start, the US/Saudi aggression has violated international law and committed war crimes against Yemeni civilians, using cluster bombs made in the USA (and sold to the Saudis with US taxpayer subsidies). The recently-released US State Department annual human rights report on Saudi Arabia for 2015 soft-pedals the allies' slaughter of civilians in Yemen, and omits Saudi-dropped US cluster bombs entirely (perhaps because their lingering impact killing children over years and decades is deucedly hard to assess accurately, whereas profits can be tallied almost immediately). The full despicability of the Obama administration's position on these inhumanities is revealed in its official unwillingness to speak on the record about the blatant hypocrisy of its morally indefensible defense of the murder of civilians for profit, as reported in The Intercept:
"A State Department spokesperson, who would only comment on background, pointed out that the U.S. has called on both sides of the conflict to protect civilians. He also claimed that the use of cluster munitions is not a human rights violation because the United States has not signed the ban on cluster munitions."
The State Department spokesperson did not acknowledge that only one side bombs civilians (in schools, hospitals, markets, and homes) with US-made planes dropping US-made munitions. This follows a years-long US campaign in Yemen to kill civilians with US-made drones (still in use from outside the country).
Yemen is drawn as a coherent state on maps, but most of the Yemeni-Saudi border has never been officially defined. Yemen has an ancient culture in the western part of the country, but it has never been a coherent state. The Saudis and Yemenis have engaged in sporadic, armed conflict for decades. In particular the Saudis and the Houthis have fought over northwest Yemen and neighboring southwest Saudi Arabia, which is home to a large Houthi population. Security in the region is not directly threatened by the Yemeni civil war. For any Arab state to talk like the UAE of establishing "peace in the region" is fundamentally hilarious.
The UAE has long been a source of support for the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh), as have Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait -- all part of the coalition waging war on Yemen. Editorially, the UAE cloaks itself in the mantle of state legitimacy:
The coalition responded to the call by Yemen's president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi to restore his internationally recognised government to power.
To call the Hadi government "internationally recognized" is to fudge the reality that the Hadi government has only limited recognition among Yemenis. Hadi came to power through what US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power called, somewhat falsely, the "peaceful, inclusive, and consensus-driven political transition under the leadership of the legitimate President of Yemen, Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi." One problem with this US formulation is that Hadi's "legitimacy" derives from his being installed as president by an international diplomatic coup, followed by his election in a race in which he was the sole candidate. Essentially, there is no legitimate government of Yemen and has not been for decades at least. The present war of aggression by outside powers intervening in a multifaceted civil war relies for its justification on a variety of dishonest fictions. The Houthis are a sub-group of the Shi'ite Zaidis, who number about eight million in Yemen. The Zaidis governed northwest Yemen for 1,000 years, until 1962. The UAE editorial invents a different historical identity:
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