Beorhtnoth wrote: ↑Sun May 16, 2021 7:43 pm
N.E. Brigand wrote: ↑Sun May 16, 2021 6:07 pm
I'm sure there must be some coverage with that perspective, particuarly on conservative outlets like Fox News, but I expect many Americans, perhaps a majority of Americans, don't even realize that there's a war in Yemen, much less that one side is backed by Iran and the other is backed by Saudi Arabia. And among American media, Saudi Arabia is reviled for its leader('s son) having ordered the execution and corpse mutilation of a U.S. journalist.
And speaking of conflicts most Americans haven't heard of:
Six months into northern Ethiopia’s shadow war, its atrocities are becoming harder to hide (
Telegraph)
At this time, what's happening in Tigray is probably worse than what's happening in Palestine, but there's been almost no coverage here.
Fox News isn't transmitted in the UK...
Also, not sure you present the war in Yemen accurately. You seem to imply a grand chess game between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran has near zero input in Yemen. Look at a map!
As Saudi Arabia is so reviled, what sanctions are in place? Does US media demand sanctions, or is thjat reserved for "designated enemies" like Venezuela?
Ethiopia. Not quite the same pertinence as Yemen, in which the US is actively supporting Saudi Arabia's assault on the Yemeni people, is it?
It is pretty funny that one of the very first people to get a Covid vaccination in the UK once it was approved -- even before the Queen -- was the owner of Fox News.
I despise the governments of both Saudi Arabia and Iran, but if I had to pick which nation to support, I'd choose Iran, which appears to have a freer society. Women have been treated far better there than in Saudi Arabia, for instance. (Plus there were number of superb films made in Iran. But there were also some fine films and other art produced in the Soviet Union under Stalin, one of the most bloodthirsty leaders ever.) But to say that Iran has "near zero input in Yemen" on the grounds that Saudi Arabia is closer to Yemen strikes me as akin to claiming that the U.S. had no influence on affairs in Vietnam or that the U.S.S.R. had no influence on affairs in Cuba. However, I agree with you that the malign influence of Saudi Arabia in Yemen far outstrips what Iran has been doing there. And I was pleased that the Biden administration in February announced an end to U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's offensive in Yemen, and disturbed by this report in April:
"The US may still be helping Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war after all." (
Vox)
The U.S. continues to provide Saudi Arabia with defensive support, and there is some fuzziness to what constitutes defense and what constitutes offense. My personal inclinations are that we should stop that too. But I can believe that the U.S. has -- or that honest people working in the U.S. government believes the U.S. has -- valid reasons to continue supporting the Saudi government. Sometimes there are no right choices. U.S. policy from northern Africa to central Asia does look like a series of disasters. Barack Obama took a lot of heat from U.S. conservatives for failing to support the Green Movement in Iran in 2009. My view at the time was that he feared that if the U.S. government explicitly supported those protesters, that would actually drive the general public in Iran more firmly into the hands of its autocratic leadership. Later Obama was attacked by U.S. conservatives for more vocally supporting the Arab Spring, for intervening in the Libyan uprising to protect the rebels there from Gaddafi's forces (which led to the Libyan government being overthrown), and then for not trying to remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria.
If Obama stayed out Libya, there would have been no Benghazi attack and Hillary Clinton would probably now be in her second term as president. A good argument for the U.S. to intervene less! On the other hand, by mostly letting the Taliban do as they wished in Afghanistan, Bill Clinton and George Bush made 9/11 possible.