Empire Bombs Yemen to Protect Israel’s Genocide

After years of backing Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen, the U.S and U.K. bombed the poorest country in the Middle East for trying to stop a genocide. This is the U.S. empire.

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

Listen to Tim Foley reading this article. 

The U.S and U.K. have reportedly struck over a dozen sites in Yemen using Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets, backed by logistical support from Australia, Canada, Bahrain and the Netherlands. 

U.S. President Joe Biden, in a statement, asserts that the strikes against “targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels” are a “direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.” 

What Biden does not mention in his statement about his administration’s “response” to Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea is that those Red Sea attacks are themselves a response to Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza. 

Also unmentioned is the that the strikes took place after the first day of proceedings in the International Court of Justice in which Israel stands accused by South Africa of committing a genocide in Gaza.

So the U.S and the U.K. just bombed the poorest country in the Middle East for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power. 

The Houthis, formally known as Ansarallah, threatened ahead of the attack to fiercely retaliate against any strikes from the U.S and its allies. Abdulmalik al-Houthi, who leads the Houthi movement, said that the response to any American attack “will be greater than” a recent Houthi offensive which used dozens of drones and several missiles.

“We, the Yemeni people, are not among those who are afraid of America,” al-Houthi said in a televised speech. “We are comfortable with a direct confrontation with the Americans.”

An unnamed U.S official who informed Huffington Post’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed about the imminent strikes on Yemen shortly before they occurred complained that the airstrikes “will not solve the problem” and that the approach “doesn’t add up to a cohesive strategy.” 

Ahmed has previously reported that behind the scenes, officials in this administration have been getting increasingly nervous about the risk of Biden igniting a wider war in the middle east. This latest escalation, along with the Houthi pledge to retaliate, adds a lot of weight to this concern. [Some U.S. lawmakers and rights groups have condemned the strikes as unconstitutional.] 

And all for what? To protect Israel’s ability to conduct a months-long massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. 

This is what the U.S empire is. This is what it has always been about. 

These people are showing us exactly who they are. 

We should probably believe them.

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This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.