US President Joe Biden will be traveling to Saudi Arabia later this month to visit with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A principal aim of the trip, which will include meetings with other Arab leaders and a trip to Israel, will be to strengthen broader support for the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine.
The New York Times, in its article on the subject, commented that it “represents the triumph of realpolitik over moral outrage, according to foreign policy experts.” On the part of the Times and the “foreign policy experts,” this was a polite way of addressing the undeniable hypocrisy of US claims to be defending “democracy” in Ukraine while courting one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world.
It remains to be seen whether Biden will broach the subject of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was brutally murdered on the orders of bin Salman in 2018, or if he will ask where Khashoggi’s dismembered body is located. It is even less likely that Biden will take the occasion to express his “moral outrage” over the execution of 81 prisoners on March 12, mainly political opponents of the blood-drenched Saudi regime.
The Biden administration has accused Russia of “war crimes” and even “genocide” in Ukraine, which, in the 100 days since the invasion on February 24 has killed an estimated 4,200 civilians, according to the United Nations. If the term “genocide” can be applied to a war taking place now, however, it would be the US-backed Saudi war against Yemen, which began in 2015 under the Obama administration.
Calculations of the casualties from the systematic bombardment and starvation of the impoverished country vary but are presently at least 400,000. However, the United Nations Development Report issued a report in November 2021, seven months ago, that estimated 377,000 people had died. This is somewhat more than one percent of Yemen’s population of 30 million.
The UNDP estimated that more than 260,000 of those killed were children under the age of five, largely through hunger and disease produced by a Saudi blockade backed by the UAE and the United States. The report also estimated that the death toll will rise to 1.3 million by 2030, with 70 percent killed from the catastrophic social and economic impact of the war. The number of people living in extreme poverty is expected to rise to 22 million by 2030.
A separate report issued by the UN Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in March found that 538,000 children in Yemen are already severely malnourished, but this is expected to soar to 2.2 million by the end of the year, in part due to sharply rising food prices throughout the world. UNICEF also estimated that more than 10,000 children have been directly killed or injured by bombs and other military actions since 2015.
The war has been characterized by repeated attacks on civilian infrastructure by the Saudi-led coalition. On January 21 of this year, an airstrike (reportedly using laser-guided missiles supplied by Raytheon) killed at least 82 and injured 266 at a detention center housing African migrants in Saada. The attack followed strikes against civilian buildings in the capitol of Sanaa, including against a water treatment center that cut off 120,000 people from clean drinking water.
There was no condemnation in the US media at the time of Saudi “war crimes” against Yemen, nor were their howls of protest from the pseudo-left backers of US imperialism over the war crime. Two-and-a-half months later, however, a missile strike on a Ukrainian train station that killed 50—blamed, dubiously, on Russia—was seized on to demand a major intensification of US military support for Ukraine. This is “genocide,” Biden declared.
When he came to power in January 2021, Biden said that he would make the Saudi regime “pay the price,” particularly for the murder of Khashoggi, and that his administration would “make them in fact the pariah that they are.” He…
Read More: Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia exposes the hypocrisy of the imperialist war against Russia