The siege of Hodeidah, Washington’s war crime in Yemen
15 June 2018
The siege of Yemen’s Red Sea port of Hodeidah launched by Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led forces at dawn on Wednesday could cost the lives of some quarter of a million people in the crowded city itself, according to a UN estimate, while threatening to kill millions more across the country through hunger and disease.
The US, together with its main NATO allies the UK and France, has supplied the planes, warships, bombs, missiles and shells used to devastate Yemen and slaughter its people. In his eight years in office, President Barack Obama presided over some $115 billion in arms sales to the monarchical dictatorship in Riyadh. The Trump administration, which has sought to forge an anti-Iran axis with Saudi Arabia, the other reactionary Gulf oil sheikhdoms and Israel, has touted arms deals with Riyadh that potentially would amount to $110 billion.
Yemen is emblematic of the world situation 30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union unleashed a period of continuous war and unrestrained imperialist violence.
Based on the legal principles and criteria employed in the Nuremberg trials that sent the surviving leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich to the gallows or prison, there are many in Washington who should today be facing prosecution and the fate of life in prison or worse for the crimes committed in Yemen.
This includes not just Trump and those in his administration directly involved in the Yemen atrocities—Pompeo, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Nikki Haley and other top officials in the military and intelligence apparatus—but also their predecessors, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Ashton Carter, Susan Rice and others responsible for initiating the US support for the Saudi-led war.
