Debra Sweet | August 26, 2016
When people living in the U.S. express disbelief, or shock, that the U.S. is involved in overt wars & secret ops in 7 Muslim countries, because Obama “wouldn’t do that,” tell them about Yemen.
1. Saudi Arabia’s ongoing air war on Yemen, the poorest country in the region, has killed thousands. On August 15, they bombed another Doctors Without Borders hospital. But the bombing of hospital has been relentless, according to The Intercept:
For the Saudi coalition, bombing medical facilities has become business as usual. In October, the coalition bombed an MSF-supported hospital in Yemen’s Haydan district, destroying the only emergency medical facility serving 200,000 people. (Doctors Without Borders is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF.) In December, airstrikes destroyed an MSF clinic in Taiz while doctors were treating the wounded from a nearby Saudi airstrike in a park. And in January, the coalition destroyed a hospital in Razeh district, killing five people — and killing an ambulance driver working for MSF later that month.
Those strikes have been widely reported because they targeted a prominent Western charity, but the coalition has likely carried out far more attacks on Yemeni-run hospitals. During the first eight months of the war, between March and November 2015, the International Red Cross received hundreds of reports on attacks on health facilities throughout the country.
- The Obama administration got 200 Republicans and enough Democrats to vote with them to defeat a measure that would have banned the sale of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia.
A Republican speaking on behalf of cluster bombs, said of the Pentagon’s response to the ban: “They advise us that it would stigmatize cluster munitions, which are legitimate weapons with clear military utility.”
Cluster munitions are large shell casings that scatter hundreds or thousands of miniature explosives over large areas – often the size of several football fields. Some of the bomblets fail to explode on impact, leaving mine-like explosives that kill civilians and destroy farmland decades after a conflict ends.
What Nobel Peace President would ban a weapon like that?