Islamist groups are being activated and supplied by the Western-backed Saudi coalition to help prosecute the counterinsurgency war against the rebels. The rebel Popular Committees are calling for a pluralist democratic government in Yemen, which would mark a dramatic change from decades of Western and Saudi-backed dictatorships in the country.
Britain is complicit with Obama’s war – selling Saudi Arabia deadly weapons like Washington. Days earlier, Oxfam CEO Mark Goldring said Yemen “descended into a humanitarian disaster putting its people at risk of famine, and the UK is materially involved through its export of arms and military support to the bombing campaign.”
All one needs to know about the intellectual caliber of the Obama administration is that it is still pondering whether to persist in “ignoring” Russian President Vladimir Putin, or invest in a real partnership to solve the Syrian geopolitical/humanitarian drama. After all, when in doubt between diplomacy or chaos, the Beltway weapon of choice still veers towards the simplistic group think uniting neocons and neoliberalcons: regime change.
While the Guardian and Observer market themselves as caring about justice and equality, but do nothing to bring them about apart from promoting tinkering with the present, hugely unjust, global neoliberal order, Corbyn’s rhetoric suggests that the apple cart needs upending.
The official Western narrative, pushed by the Anglo-American and EU mainstream media since 2011, has almost invariably claimed Russian intransigence on the issue of Assad. That narrative is now in tatters.
Angered by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and his support for Algerian independence, Britain and France enlisted Israel in a plot to regain control of the canal and simultaneously destroy Nasser and any pan-Arab nationalists who might succeed him.
The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.
‘All of the media, left, all the way to the right side of the spectrum, have been marching in lock-step with their attacks on Corbyn. Even the Guardian…ranging from smear pieces to guilt by association; it’s been awful to see.’
The prime minister’s statement was unprecedented. For the first time in modern history, outside of war, the head of government not only admitted, but boasted, that he had authorised the murder of British citizens.
Yet his disclosure—sinister in all its legal and political ramifications—drew no response, much less protest, from those assembled.
The overarching framework, Chomsky points out, is the so-called Clinton Doctrine, named after former US president Bill Clinton. The doctrine asserts that United States is entitled to the ‘unilateral use of military power’ to ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources’. This entitlement is dressed up as alleged ‘security’ or ‘humanitarian’ concerns.
So the state, with its neo-con “opposition” and media closely in step with its neo-con government, seamlessly adopts a new power to kill its own subjects based on secret intelligence and secret legal advice, and a very weird definition of “imminent” that even its author admits to be outside current legal understanding.
If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side issue. It is the issue.
