US Efforts to Use Yemen War Defeat to Advance Iran Policy
The US claims Iran is using Yemen’s conflict as a proxy in its struggle to dominate the region without a shred of UN-endorsed evidence. A day after the UN secretary general said the evidence collected from the sight of a Yemeni missile strike in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah has failed to corroborate Iran’s involvement, the US envoy stepped forward on Thursday to renew the same old claim that Iran supplies missiles to the resistance movement of Ansarullah (Houthis) in Yemen!
Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, showed reporters in Washington parts of a short-range ballistic missile launched by Yemeni fighters into Saudi Arabia on November 4. Of course, a United Nations Security Council-appointed panel has already said in a confidential memo that it has seen no evidence to support Saudi-American claims that missiles have been transferred to Yemen’s Houthi fighters by external sources. The panel made the conclusion in a confidential assessment sent to Security Council diplomats on November 10. But as Ambassador Haley made it clear in Washington, the show must go on.
With over 15,000 people dead in the Saudi-led war against Yemen and millions facing starvation because of the US-backed naval blockade, the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington is looking to act: against Iran!
Iran has little to nothing to do with the Yemen war, of course, but the house of King Salman and their American-Zionist friends on the Capitol Hill have managed to push the narrative that Tehran is backing the resistance movement of Ansarullah (Houthis) with missiles and that they have had military contacts before and after the Saudi invasion.
That the United Nations and the rest of the international civil society are not eating up the Saudi allegations is beyond dispute. However, that hasn’t stopped the American warmongers from pushing a bill that threatens to impose further sanctions against Iran even though they are not arming Ansarullah. This is one of a series of new “target Iran” bills moving through Congress and it demands a closer look:
A- The latest Iran bashing at the Congress is not new. There are several other bills that are attempting to threaten Iran for having a legal missile defence program and upgrading it, and also for trying to buy civilian airplanes for commercial airline travel.
B- Riyadh and Washington are both in the know that they are at the end of their rope in Yemen. They failed to affect regime change and their hopes of civil war after Ali Abdullah Saleh’s death have been dashed too. Ansarullah and the pro-Saleh General People’s Congress have reached a deal on continuing to work together against Riyadh and its allies, and this is bad news for the invaders as it marked the end of their plot to weaken the Yemen resistance through internal discord.
C- Washington is desperate to take the focus off itself, hence international criticism, that it has been aiding and abetting the Saudis and various terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria for so long, including ISIL and Al-Qaeda. According to the field investigators for Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an international organization funded by the European Union that documents weapons trafficking in war zones, American rocket-propelled grenades, IEDs, AK-47-style rifles, mortars, rockets, and tens of thousands of other weapons found their way into Iraq and Syria and in the hands of ISIL and other terrorist groups with a helping hand from the CIA. Leo Bradley, a retired US Army colonel who once led the fight against IEDs in Afghanistan, says CAR serves as a useful, if perhaps accidental, back door for US officials to publicly discuss these findings that are otherwise classified.
D- This new report on how ISIL built its arsenal highlights how the US munitions, allegedly intended for Syrian militants, actually ended up intentionally in the hands of terrorist groups. This has nothing to do with weaknesses in the oversight and regulation of America’s covert arms programs. The real customer appears to have been the CIA and it was part of the spy agency’s top-secret operation to arm Qaeda-allied proxies in Syria to fight the forces of Syrian government and allies. This is not aberration, of course, because the same weapons also ended up in the hands of ISIL fighters in Iraq.
E- It doesn’t take a lot of effort to show how the CIA weapons provided to Nusra Front and Jaysh al-Nasr in Syria also ended up across the Iraqi border in ISIL hands. As confessed by many former Syrian opposition figures, the Qaeda-allied rebels, America’s favourite terrorists, were vetted to the best of the CIA’s ability. They say these US-backed terror proxies were cautioned that every time they fired a weapon, they had to bring back the empty casings to prove they had in fact fired it rather than stolen or traded it.
Against the backdrop of all this and more, the warmongers are also under immense pressure and criticism to come clean about their own domestic human rights issues. For instance, when this week activists accused Emirati officials of refusing to address criticism of the UAE’s human rights record, they simply stormed out of a UN organized meeting with civil society groups. Rights groups presented Emirati officials with evidence of abuses happening in the country at the UN Universal Periodical Review pre-session in the Swiss city of Geneva on Wednesday. The evidence included the arbitrary arrest of political dissidents, torture of prisoners and restrictions on freedom of speech.
Add to this a host of war crimes committed in Yemen war by the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and you get the idea why the frustrated invaders are so desperate for a scapegoat and a way out.