
The Tragedy of Saudi Arabia’s War - dsr12
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/26/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-war-yemen.html
======
raverbashing
Between the financing of Wahhabism around the world (and the liberal reaction
of western governments to this), the liberal purchases of weapons and oil
exports, it seems like the world is in bed with the devil.

------
tim333
I'm hoping that after the bad press over killing Khashoggi, the US tells the
Saudis to back off on the Yemen war. They are really the only people in a
position to do much.

~~~
thefounder
And what are the saudits supposed to do with the 100 billions worth of
weapons?

~~~
selestify
That's their problem. They shouldn't be making it anyone else's problem.

~~~
flycaliguy
It’s also problematic for the arms dealers.

------
ssvss
I found the following reddit discussions to provide more detailed perspective
of this war.

View from a Saudi Arabian,
[https://www.reddit.com/r/saudiarabia/comments/8wnbzl/](https://www.reddit.com/r/saudiarabia/comments/8wnbzl/)

View of an independent security analyst,
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/8qyip8/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/8qyip8/)

------
walrus01
In 30 years from now, the US, Canada and UK selling billions of dollars of
military equipment, support and training to the saudi regime will be seen as
morally equivalent to when the US dropped thousands of tonnes of munitions on
Cambodia. Or the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, My Lai massacre, etc.

Worthy of war crimes prosecution in The Hague.

How hard is it, really, to take a principled stand and say that the most
technologically advanced products of the NATO military-industrial complex
should only be sold to similarly democratic countries? The Netherlands or
Italy wants to buy some current generation air superiority fighters, gps
guided bombs or surface to air missiles, sure. Saudi Arabia? Nope. Pakistan?
No way. The Erdogan government in Turkey? Negatory.

In the particular case of the saudis' war against the Houthis, the US doesn't
give a fuck, because you know who supports the Houthis? Iran. Anyone who's
spent time researching the history and reasons for the last 50 years for the
poor relationship between the US and Iran will immediately understand why.
Basically, it's "fuck Iran, they've got what was coming to them".

It's a proxy war where they're using US munitions to attack things the US
can't politically stomach attacking directly. If the Saudis started open
warfare against Hezbollah (again, Iranian supported), I'm sure the US and UK
would be just as keen to look the other way.

~~~
langitbiru
Pakistan and Turkey are democratic countries. Just saying. But I get what you
meant.

Anyway, I don't have a simple solution to this complex problem. Should US sell
weapons to India? China?

~~~
godelmachine
India has proved itself to be a politically and militarily responsible country
unlike its western neighbour, which floundered embarrassingly at even basic
human rights.

------
howlingfantods
Why is this article, which was the top ranked link on my list when I
commented, no longer even in the top 200? What was the rationale for the mods
(or algorithm) to censor this?

~~~
tim333
HN guidelines:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups...

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

The mods routinely put a penalty score on stuff that doesn't fit that.

------
flashgordon
I dont mean to be defeatist. What can I actually do (as a guy with no voice -
literally due to visa issues) to help here beyond just sending aid (which I am
not sure is even getting there). Sending aid still feels like "here's some
money so I am no longer guilty"! Any ideas?

------
codelord
I always wondered why Germans in the 2nd world war didn't do anything to stop
Hitler from committing genocide against the jews and others. But now I
understand. Perhaps the biggest genocide of this century is happening now in
Yemen. Not only we aren't trying to stop it, but we are sponsoring it and
profiting from it. History will not be kind to us.

~~~
raverbashing
They didn't because most of them didn't know the details/the scale of what was
happening and the extermination on the camps was only "discovered" after the
camps were broken up by the opposing armies (depending on the camp)

"Discovered" because there were some reports of it, by one or two people, but
I'm not sure how seriously they were taken.

I guess people concluded/knew some of this was happening, but the breakup of
the camps was important for validation of the story.

(Edited given the responses)

~~~
Tomte
That's the usual apology of the 60s through 80s, but it's simply not true.

Cardinal von Galen openly preached from the pulpit about the destruction of
"unworthy life" (the T4 program) in 1941.

Concentration camp inmates often weren't strictly confined to some walled-off
camp, but had to go to work brigade actions all over the countryside, where
they had limited contact to the populace, who quite often slipped them a bit
of bread or so.

Even when no such work was happening around the populace, it was an open
secret. You simply cannot keep a lid on it when tens of thousands of Germans
saw something keeping watch over the inmates, delivering goods to the camps,
requesting slave labor from the camps, actually building the ovens, conducting
trains to the camps, or with soldiers returning from the eastern front.

~~~
raverbashing
There was some knowledge, but it seems it wasn't so widespread. Also the
Sonderkommandos were "rotated" (hint: they weren't relocated or fired) with
some frequency

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6b1z61/did_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6b1z61/did_the_german_people_know_about_the_holocaust/)

------
cribbles
Saudi Arabia's artificial famine in Yemen has been subject to a worldwide
media blockade for well over a year.[1][2] This has taken the shape of
systematic under-reporting, preposterously low accounts of the death toll -
usually treating the hundred of millions of children dead from famine as
collateral damage, or avoiding the subject entirely - whitewashing of the
motivations of the conflict and obscuring of its trajectory.

As Gary Brecher pointed out earlier this year, it's not that these stories
don't sell. Mainstream news media was rife with accounts of starvation in war-
torn Syria in years past:

> But the hundreds of thousands of verified, real famine and epidemic cases in
> Yemen get very little coverage. There’s nothing subtle about why not. The
> Syrian Sunni jihadis were de facto allies of the US/UK/Saudi/Israel/UAE
> bloc. So their suffering needed to be amplified. The Shia Yemenis can be
> slandered with one word: “Iran.” Anything touched by Iran, for Anglo media,
> is inherently evil, and anything done to those so tainted needs no further
> justification. The “Houthi,” i.e. the Shia of NW Yemen, are allegedly
> puppets or proxies for Iran, the Shia Mister Big of journalistic
> imagination, and therefore legitimate targets for even the nastiest war of
> extermination (such as by hunger and disease).

Now, at this late date, we have the New York Times's first real reckoning with
Saudi Arabia's crimes. Not only that: there's meta-reporting on the story's
traffic on Facebook[3], a self-lauding post about the NYT's audacity in
shedding light on the tragedy[4], and an op-ed from Bernie Sanders[5]. All in
the course of a few days!

What changed?

Consider this rare moment of introspection from the New York Times: "The
tragedy in Yemen did not grow out of a natural disaster. It is a slow-motion
crisis brought on by leaders of other countries who are willing to tolerate
extraordinary suffering by civilians to advance political agendas. And yet
somehow the vast catastrophe has failed to catch the world’s attention as much
as the murder of a single man, the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi,
in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul."

From a Saudi standpoint, there was nothing out of the ordinary about
Khashoggi's murder. The Saudi Arabian legal system is not codified and has no
system of judicial precedent; royal decree trumps the system as a whole (so
long as it putatively follows Sharia Law); capital and corporal punishment are
both common - beheading and flogging in particular. Freedom of speech and
press are anathema.

From a worldwide media standpoint, Khashoggi's kidnapping murder was
exceptional. He was one of their own. With his murder, the Saudis broke the
devil's bargain they had maintained with worldwide media for years - the one
that had (bafflingly) cast MBS as a great reformer and Saudi Arabia as an
emerging Silicon Valley of the middle east. The question now is whether this
contract can be rehabilitated - and if so, how.

The social dynamics of the reporting on this tragedy should serve as a warning
to all of us. Stories like the OP don't get published in a vacuum.

[1] [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/war-nerd-anglo-
ameri...](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/war-nerd-anglo-american-
medias-complicity-yemens-genocide.html)

[2] [https://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/11/yemen-having-lost-
the-...](https://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/11/yemen-having-lost-the-war-
saudis-try-genocide-.html)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/business/facebook-
blocks-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/business/facebook-blocks-nyt-
yemen.html)

[4] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/reader-center/yemen-
photo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/reader-center/yemen-photos-
starvation.html)

[5] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/bernie-sanders-
sa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/bernie-sanders-saudi-arabia-
war-yemen.html)

~~~
DuskStar
> preposterously low accounts of the death toll - usually treating the hundred
> of millions of children dead from famine as collateral damage

Quick google puts the population of Yemen at about 28 million. This
immediately makes me suspect everything else in your comment is exaggerated or
false.

~~~
cribbles
Yeah, big typo there - should have said hundreds of thousands (as indicated in
the sources cited, including the OP) - but too late to edit now :)

I'm not sure even World War II had a death toll that high.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
50 Millions

