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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/25/2018 6:20:21 PM
Info

Syrian army starts attacking Turkish military convoy as illegally enters northern Latakia

Massive Turkish Army convoy heads to Syrian border
A large Turkish military convoy was seen entering the northern countryside of the Latakia Governorate this afternoon, which is a violation of the Astana agreement.

According to a military report from Latakia, the Turkish military entered the Jabal Al-Akrad region to establish a new observation post.

Turkey is not permitted to enter the Latakia Governorate and they had recently agreed to not enter the province during the Astana Peace Conference.

At the same time, another Turkish military convoy was seen heading towards the southwestern countryside of Idlib, where they are planning to reinforce their observation post in Ishtabraq.

Comment: The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has begun attacking the northern countryside of the Latakia Governorate, following the entrance of the Turkish military into the Jabal Al-Akrad region.
According to a military source in Latakia, the Syrian Army fired several missiles towards the jihadist positions in Jabal Al-Tuffahiyah, scoring several direct hits in the process.

The Turkish military is still present in the Jabal Al-Akrad region, despite the Syrian Army's latest attack.


(sott.net)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/25/2018 6:30:43 PM

Gold Seal

Iran in The Crosshairs as The Empire Enters Its Mad Dog Days

trump iran wall
Mike Pompeo's bellicose rhetoric against Tehran leaves no doubt that Washington has embraced the status of international renegade.

Pompeo's speech, delivered in his capacity as secretary of state, evinced a blatant disregard for the integrity of international treaties and respect for international law. It also ensures that the last vestiges of credibility enjoyed by the US has now been shredded in the eyes of a world grown weary - weary of a Trump administration which, in its caprice and continual threats, is more redolent of a New York mafia crime family than a respectable and responsible government.

With Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - better known as the Iran nuclear deal - his administration has embarked on the path of conflict with Iran in conjunction with regional allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Together they comprise an axis of aggression that imperils the stability of the region, with potentially grave consequences for the rest of the world given the succour such a regional conflict would give to extremism and global terrorism.

It also sets a dangerous precedent when it comes to arriving at a peaceful resolution to the on-going crisis in Ukraine and ensuring a successful outcome to the inchoate process of peace and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula.

The Empire enters its mad dog days

Thus the dire consequences of the untrammelled power of what is an imperial hegemon in Washington have never been more manifest, with its drive to dominate and dictate on pain of war reflective of an empire desperate to arrest a decline, entering its mad dog days in the process.

Let us be clear: the Trump administration's decision to withdraw from the JCPOA has nothing to do with Iran's compliance, which has been impeccable, and everything to do with Washington's hegemonic agenda towards the region - a hegemonic agenda which precedes Trump.

In the way of this agenda are Iran, Syria and Hezbollah - along with Russia - which, if not on a formal basis certainly on a de factobasis, comprise an axis of anti-hegemony that needs to be broken. It is for this and no other reason that Trump, Netanyahu, and bin Salman are intent on forcing the issue with Iran, regardless of the likely catastrophic results.

They have lost in Syria, where the drive to topple the Assad government has been thwarted thanks in no small part to Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah - standing with the Syrian people and Syrian Arab Army - and in response they are intent on settling accounts.

Whither the transatlantic alliance

Another casualty of Trump's demarche against Iran is the transatlantic alliance between Washington and its various European allies, considered by its proponents to be the unbreakable and irreplaceable fulcrum of democracy in our time.

The insouciance with which the Trump administration has been willing to disregard the stance of France, Germany and the UK on the Iran deal is revelatory; proof-positive that rather than any kind of alliance between friends and partners, the true nature of America's relationship to Europe and the EU is akin to the one that existed between Rome and its various satellites and client states during the halcyon days of another empire - which made the mistake of believing its power and existence was eternal.

This particular aspect of the crisis, involving the prospect of US sanctions being levelled not only against Iran but also British, French and German companies operating in Iran, is reflective of the extent to which neocon nostrums are in the driving seat of US foreign policy, with any lingering façade of propriety dropped in favor of raw imperialism.

Now more than ever the wheels have come off Europe's slavish attachment to the supposed virtues of unipolarity, with the likes of Emmanuel Macron - the very embodiment of a confected liberal centrist, a leader for whom the word 'opportunism' was invented - left dangling like the proverbial flunkey after being kicked to the kerb by his lord and master.

The grievous reality of Europe's hideous lack of independence from Washington - independence of the type that once minded Charles De Gaulle to declaim, "Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the fate of the world" - has been laid bare. It presents Europe with a test. Does it wilt in the face of the Trump administration's imperial arrogance and bellicosity? Or does it awaken and emerge, finally, from beneath Washington's feet to play a positive and progressive role in world affairs?

Here it is hard to imagine leaders of the questionable calibre of Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron existing anywhere else other than beneath the feet of Washington, with Macron's earlier boast of wielding influence over Trump when it comes to Syria now returning to haunt him. The reality is that French President Emmanuel Macron carries about as much weight in Washington as a fly's wing.

Europe's choice - unipolarity or multipolarity

Crisis is opportunity, they tell us, and this particular crisis presents the opportunity for a new alignment in Europe, forged on the understanding that the destabilizing factor in Europe is not and has never been Russia; that it is and has always been the United States. Economically, culturally, and politically, Europe's identity has been progressively subsumed into a US identity, with its regressive and shallow paean to the cult of the individual, unfettered capitalism, and might is right.

Therefore the choice Europe faces is clear. It can either remain tethered to the mast of the sinking ship of unipolarity, or it can join Russia, China and the rest of the world in shaping a multipolar alternative, rooted not in the caprice of a president in Washington but instead in the principles set out in the UN Charter - specifically respect for national sovereignty and international law.

Returning to Iran, which now finds itself firmly in the crosshairs of regime change for no other reason that it refuses to bow to the writ of Washington, there is no longer any hiding place when it comes to taking sides. If those countries threatened by this eruption of US aggression do not hang together they will hang separately.

Hegemony demands its response in the shape of anti-hegemony. The future of generations as yet unborn depends on nothing less.
(sott.net)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/26/2018 9:49:12 AM
Here’s why there are so many coyotes and why they are spreading so fast


Scientists have created a comprehensive range history of coyotes to determine where they came from and how they spread across North America and Central America.

For eons, coyotes roamed what is now the western United States, with its wide-open plains. Then came European settlers, who cut down forests for farms and ranches in a steady east-west march. Along the way, they killed large predators such as pumas and wolves to protect livestock and for their own safety.

The predators they obliterated were mortal enemies of the coyote, holding them in check, a new study in the journal ZooKeys says. As mountain lions and wolf packs disappeared from the landscape, coyotes took advantage, starting a wide expansion eastward at the turn of the last century into deforested land that continues today.

Coyotes are newly established in every state and several Canadian provinces and are rapidly moving south of Mexico into Central America, the study released Tuesday says. They have even been spotted by camera traps in Panama. They are in the District’s Rock Creek Park and New York’s Central Park, and they have been known to attack household pets and, on very rare occasions, people. Their rapid expansion into North Carolina in the past decade is a major reason a program to rehabilitate critically endangered red wolves there is on the brink of failure.

Coyotes are animals federal wildlife managers and state game officials love to hate, marshaling armies of hunters wielding guns, poison and leg traps to kill them. But the current study adds to evidence that people unleashed coyotes with programs that wiped out their bigger, stronger competitors.

“The north extension into Canada and northeast moved faster than the southern one,” said Roland Kays, a research associate professor at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, both in Raleigh, and an author of the paper. “It goes down through Mexico. It’s all open country for the most part.”

Coyotes have been around forever. Today’s species originated from ancestors that lived alongside saber-tooth tigers, mastodons and dire wolves.


Red wolves at the North Carolina Museum of Life Science in Durham. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Kays and James Hody, a North Carolina State graduate student during the research, mapped the historic range of coyotes using archaeological and fossil records. Then they plotted their range expansion across North America from 1900 to 2016 using museum specimens, peer-reviewed reports and game department records. Over the course of the study, the authors reviewed more than 12,500 records covering 10,000 years.

For reasons biologists do not quite understand, coyotes prefer open land over forest. It could be that bigger predators that kill them over territory and competition for food could better sneak up on them in forests, Kays theorized. But now, cameras have caught coyotes in forests where the apex predators have largely been removed, opening the prospect that coyotes could continue to move into territories where they have never been, such as into South America.

Unlike mountain lions, wolves and bears that were hunted to near-extinction in state-sponsored predator-control programs, coyotes do not give in easily, Kays said. “Coyotes are the ultimate American survivor. They have endured persecution all over the place. They are sneaky enough. They eat whatever they can find — insects, smaller mammals, garbage,” he said.

Stanley D. Gehrt, an Ohio State University professor and wildlife ecologist who runs the Urban Coyote Research Project, which studies coyotes in the Chicago area, said in a recent interview that coyotes “are extremely flexible and adaptable to different kinds of environments … they’re generalists for sure, so generalists tend to do pretty well in cities, but they also benefit once they move into cities.

“Their primary source of mortality in rural areas is now removed, and that was people. You might wonder: How can that be removed? That’s because you don’t have hunting and trapping occurring in the cities. The cities actually act as a kind of refuge for coyotes once they get established.”

Coyotes do not breed like rats, but they could hold their own in a contest. It is an animal that, when threatened, somehow reacts by making more coyotes, becoming stealthier, nearly impossible to find even as their numbers grow.


A coyote photographed by a motion-activated camera along the Los Angeles River. (National Park Service)

The attitude of game officials in the 1930s, the researchers said, was to get rid of the wolves and then deal with coyotes. “But you can’t get rid of coyotes,” Kays said. “It doesn’t work. The one thing that will reduce coyote numbers are wolves.

“In many ways, wolves are more easily managed than coyotes,” he said. “They don’t breed as fast. You have to manage their behavior. A bold coyote is a dangerous coyote because they attack humans.”

Gehrt said cities and towns recently colonized by coyotes often contact him for advice. “Their first inclination, at least it used to be, [was] ‘We want to get rid of them, so how do we get rid of them?'” Gehrt said. “Just to be clear, we’re not in the business of protecting coyotes or defending them or anything; we provide the best science that we can. What our science tells us is that you’re not going to be very successful at trying to remove them permanently.” The better approach is to advise residents to keep food — trash, cat kibble — out of coyotes’ reach, he said, and to keep pets inside.

Another problem wrought by killing animals that contained and killed coyotes is that the larger gray wolf, left without mates, turned to another species, perhaps the first waves of eastbound coyotes, and hybridized. That happened in the case of red wolves, which dominated the East Coast, from Pennsylvania to Florida to Texas, until hunting left a few stragglers in Louisiana and Texas. (Fearing red wolves would disappear forever, federal wildlife officials removed the last few to start a captive breeding program.) The first wave of coyotes, also lacking mates, turned to a smaller animal: dogs.

“Wolves and coyotes don’t breed, except where they are really, really rare,” Kays said. Now scientists are looking at what will happen as a new wave of coyotes continue south, where they are little studied so far. “The mystery is Central America. No one has tested them for dog, but they look doggish.”

Karin Brulliard contributed to this report.


(The Washington Post)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/26/2018 10:12:23 AM
Cheeseburger

The Meat-Guilt Industry: The Quest For The Perfect Veggie Burger Can't Remove The Taste of Lies

veggie burger

Whatever this dry hockey puck is missing in flavour is more than made up for by the benefits of self-righteous virtue-signaling when eating it. Smug is the new satiety
Exploiting guilt has probably been used as a manipulative technique for driving behavior since humans evolved the ability to feel emotions. Most of us are thoroughly conditioned to do whatever is necessary to reduce feelings of guilt, and the reality-creators who decide what is and is not acceptable are as adept as an Italian mother at exploiting this fact. Global warming, identity politics, smoking, being overweight - by establishing through repetitive conditioning what is considered acceptable, and thoroughly admonishing those who don't conform to such behavior, the actions of the populace at large are controlled via emotional manipulation.

People are heavily guilt-tripped into correct behavior via diet. A lot of this comes from advertising, which is manipulative by nature, but it's also coming from most diet-related 'news' items in the mainstream media. These days the party line is essentially that meat is bad for you, bad for the environment, bad for the planet - and is unspeakably cruel on top of that. The closer you are to hardcore vegan, the better you are as a person.

See this manipulative meme as an example:
meat guilt

Rock-solid logic

An article recently published in New Scientist is typical of modern dietary propaganda. While framed as an exploration into how far food science has come in mimicking an actual burger through hyper-processed plant extracts, it serves as further fodder for manipulating people into eliminating the healthiest components of their diet (which are meat-based).

While vegan activists will accept nothing less than worldwide conformity to their enforced dietary utopia, the food industry has apparently opted to target a more modest market. Rather than going after non-meat eaters, they're going for the market that has already been guilt-tripped into eating less meat. While vegan is still the absolute highest status one can achieve on the self-righteous dietary hierarchy, the flexitarian is the next rung down on the ladder - a person who is flexible enough to only eat meat sometimes, and enjoy vegetarian meals at other times. Rather than ruin your health full-time, it seems at least partly acceptable to the diet dictocrats that you ruin it part-time.

The arguments put forward for curbing meat consumption usually come in three different flavors:
  1. The health argument - eating meat is bad for you, will clog your arteries, give you cancer, diabetes, ruin your credit rating, etc.
  2. The ethical argument - eating animals is cruel (never mind the fact that the fate of pretty much all prey animals on the planet is to get eaten by something; if you do it, it's cruel).
  3. The environmental argument - eating meat is bad for the environment because greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint and land use and a bunch of other settled science.
The New Scientist article first establishes that the author is one of us - a meat eater. Maybe even a more extreme version of us, because he's a meat lover.
I LOVE meat. I love the smell of it cooking, the sound of the sizzle. I love the fat dropping onto the coals beneath a barbecue, the deep-pink "give" of a medium-rare steak, the smoke, the blood. I particularly love eating burgers in the US, where the act of griddling meat is an art form that has been perfected into juicy, salty, fatty heaven.
Meat, am I right? If I conjure up enough appetizing imagery to show you my love, you'll identify with me. I'm your meat brother. We're spirit siblings in carnal indulgence.

burger bbq grill

I get the one in the middle.
Now I'll hit you with the guilt...
I am painfully aware that I should reduce how much meat I consume. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock graze on a quarter of our planet's ice-free land while another huge swathe is used to grow fodder. The greenhouse gas emissions associated with the industry are vast, around 15 per cent of the total from human activity. Raising animals for meat also guzzles water and energy.
While our meat-loving bond is surely strong, I'm here to tell you, spirit sibling, that we're actually paving the road to hell. Much like the destructiveness of a heroin problem, our love of our addiction is taking us down a dark path to personal and planetary destruction.

The paragraph quoted above is basically the New Scientist piece's argument for why reducing meat consumption is the right thing to do: 'because climate change' (née global warming). The author, Niall Firth, doesn't actually say 'climate change' or 'global warming' - but he doesn't have to. Bringing up how much land livestock take up and greenhouse gas emissions, we're left to make the connection ourselves. And because we've been primed since 2006 to believe we're guilty of planetcide every time we flip a light-switch, tying veganism to an already established guilt-trip is a very effective strategy.

In responding to a piece critical of sustainable farming in the New York Times for Grist back in 2012, Joel Salatin, the owner-operator of Polyface Farm, an organic grass-fed farm serving thousands of clients, makes some very good points:
Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we'll all perish. I assume he's figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.
The problem is that those making the case that meat-eating hurts the environment consistently conflate meat consumption with factory farming (CAFOs). They are not the same thing, as Joel Salatin has repeatedly shown. As has Lierre Keith in her must-readThe Vegetarian Myth. Yes, factory farming is not good for the environment, but to say that all meat eating supports and depends on this type of farming is incorrect. Farming that mimics how grazing animals naturally interact with the environment is good for the environment - in so many ways that humans will likely never be able to engineer from scratch. The same is true for monoculture farming versus polycultures - the former exploits the environment, the latter builds and protects it (and it's not without irony that the vegan diet essentially depends on monocrop farming).

Again from Salatin:
[O]ne of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing.
And here's a talk by Zimbabwean environmentalist Allan Savory about how managed grazing animals can turn deserts into wetlands:


Meat farming, when done properly, is good for the environment. Yet when confronted with facts, vegans inevitably fall back to the ethical argument, saying there's no such thing as ethical farming since eating meat is inherently cruel. This argument is ridiculous from the outset - obviously an animal living in an ideal environment, cared for by providing it with its ideal diet and surroundings is less cruel than one that is raised painfully in confinement. The only substantial difference between an ethically farmed animal versus one in the wild is: who ends up eating it at the end of its life? One could even argue the pampered life of the farm animal involves less overall suffering (though I'm not sure how one would actually measure that).

So once we take a real look at the arguments behind why we should all be eating less meat, the New Scientist article is exposed for what it is: an advertisement for food industry players trying to exploit a lie to create a market for their science project. It's the same tactic being used by the lab-grown meat ventures (ironically referred to as 'clean meat'): convince people there's a problem that needs fixing; make those people feel guilty for causing said problem; then make money from your proposed solution. In the process you justify the existence of your false-assumption-based science, get loosh from like-minded investors who feel guilty enough to throw money at the non-problem (yes, Bill Gates, we all see you're doing your part), revel in the self-satisfied smugness that you're doing something that matters, making a difference, making the world better for our children and getting richer in the process. Everybody wins!

The article quotes one franken-burger maker as saying:
"This [burger] isn't aimed at vegans," says van der Goot. "Meat analogues are meant for meat-eating people who feel they should do something but don't know how. It's easier if you have a product to help."
I can't tell you how many times I've thought to myself: "if only I had a product that would help me behave in a way that conforms to prescribed pseudo-solutions to non-problems, my life would be complete. I care about this. I really do. I just can't act until I have a product. Sorry."

The article focuses on a particular company called Impossible Burger, and I'll just summarize the scientific gymnastics they've gone through to try to imitate the look, texture, taste and aroma of real meat:
  • genetically engineer yeast to produce leghaemoglobin, a close equivalent to haem iron found in meat
  • replace the natural fat composition of meat with coconut oil
  • isolate wheat and potato proteins and manipulate them to try to mimic the texture of meat
  • add yeast extract and soy protein to impart "more umami flavours"
  • add in some isolated vitamin supplements to replace the natural vitamin content of meat, making it more resemble actual food
  • bind the whole thing together with plant gums
And while it all sounds delicious, the author confesses to feeling like there's a ways to go before your average carnivore will be convinced.

Here's another current attempt at faking meat, out of Wageningen University in the Netherlands:
Really winning over carnivores will require something that splits and breaks apart like a prime cut of meat. His technique starts with the usual suspects: soy and gluten protein powders, to which food colouring is added to give them a more appealing hue. This mixture is then pumped with water into a specialised piece of equipment called a Couette cell, consisting of two cylinders, one of which rotates inside the other under slight pressure. This exerts a shear force on the proteins that causes them to elongate into fibres and wrap around one another.
fake meat production

Are you gonna eat that? Cuz I didn't have any breakfast, so...
This is not food. The fact that they're trying to convince you that it is, and that it's preferable to eating actual food that your body has genetically selected to eat, is a HUGE red flag. Perhaps the most audacious part of the article (for me, anyway) is when the author actually delves into the health implications. Unsurprisingly, the author resorts to the usual mainstream reductionist markers for what makes something 'healthy', and is surprised to find that the Impossible Burger isn't much 'healthier'. Here's a graphic of how it measures up:

impossible burger nutrition
© Impossible Foods; USDA
Yes, because cholesterol, calories, saturated fat and salt are what's relevant to how healthy something is. Just ignore the gluten, soy, plant gums, 'natural' flavours, GMOs and the overall hyper-processing these ingredients have to go through to become a 'magic steak'. They are concentrating entirely on the wrong things, which is unsurprising since these are the established markers for determining 'healthy food'. The fact that this product apparently makes it through digestive tracts is a miracle. Maybe it should be called the 'Impossible to Digest Burger'. Eating the box the burger comes in would probably be less nutritionally detrimental than the burger itself.

While we're gauging the nutritional value of vegan fake food, here are the ingredients listed for the Impossible Burger. See if you can spot any actual food:
Water, Textured Wheat Protein, Coconut Oil, Potato Protein, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Leghemoglobin (soy), Yeast Extract, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Konjac Gum, Xanthan Gum, Thiamin (Vitamin B1), Zinc, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12.
Don't be fooled by its mundane appearance: the humble veggie burger is the culmination point of everything that's wrong with what the mainstream's reality-creators believe about the world. Nutrition - wrong. Environment - wrong. Morals and ethics - wrong. Eating something you actually want to eat - wrong. Even our New Scientist author says - with some resignation - that only for the sake of his conscience, he'll make the sacrifice to eat these abominations. It's the apex of doing nothing but contributing to the problem while living under the complete delusion that you're helping. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect embodied in simulacrum.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that these fake meat purveyors are willingly deceiving the public, but they're essentially exploiting a market spawned from the lie we're all being fed. This is why veggie burgers taste like lies. Saving the planet does not require fake food masquerading as what we're designed to eat. What's required is the exact opposite of that: getting back on track, using our brains to figure out how to raise our food animals properly and to stop trying to reinvent what nature has already provided for us in all its perfection. Going further down the path of trying to make our food "better through science" just takes us further away from what our food is supposed to be.


(sott.net)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/26/2018 10:52:36 AM
Light Sabers

Saudi Arabia and Western Allies Continue War on Poverty-Stricken Yemen; Yemen Fights Back

yemen protest march 2018
© Reuters
Yemenis attend a protest to mark the third anniversary of the Saudi-led war on Yemen, in Sana'a, Yemen on March 26th, 2018
March 26th this year marked the third anniversary of the US/UK/Saudi war on Yemen. So far, the Saudis and their allies have been unable to win the war. The resistance from the Yemeni people and army to the aggression of Saudi Arabia and its US and UK allies, has been remarkably strong.

On the anniversary this year, tens of thousands of Yemeni citizens gathered in Sana'a to protest against the western-backed Saudi war. Hussain Al-Mousawy, a political analyst from Beirut, remarked on PressTV's 'The Debate':
For those who know history, Sana'a is one of the only cities in the world that was never ever conquered. It's close to impossible to take over the city. It's been 3 years, 36 months... I think we've entered the 37th month now of this war, Saudi's are locked in a quagmire in Yemen. They're not able to do anything, basically because the Yemenis have shown strong resilience, they've stood beside their army, their leadership... they've really sent a message to the whole world that if you stand resilient and if you are on the right side of the war, you can be able to succeed.
Since the war started Yemen has not hesitated to fire back at Saudi Arabia. The latest missile to hit a military base run by Saudi Arabia, the al-Anad air base - which is a former US special operations forces facility - was fired on May 17th. Two days before, the King Faisal military base in Saudi Arabia's southwestern region of Jizan was also hit with another short-range Badr-1 ballistic missile fired by the Yemeni army. Shortly before this latest strike, a short-range Zelzal-2 missile was fired at a gathering of Saudi-backed mercenaries in the al-Ghayl district in northwestern Yemen. These attacks are just a few examples of the many attacks that Yemen has carried out over the past 3 years.

In an attempt to save face and downplay the strength of Yemeni resistance, Saudi Arabia and its allies have claimed in the past that they shot down ballistic missiles fired from Yemen, yet such claims are very suspect. An article published in the New York Times in December 2017 analyzed the effectiveness of Saudi missile defense. The authors wrote that, while President Trump claimed their "system knocked the missile [that was fired at Riyadh's airport] out of the air", a research team concluded that the missile actually nearly hit its target. In fact: "The warhead detonated so close to the domestic terminal that customers jumped out of their seats."

The conclusion of the authors of the article was that Houthis "have grown powerful enough to strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of their years-long war."

This is a positive sign overall for the war-torn country. It should be added that it is not only the steadfastness of the Yemeni people and the skills and courage of the Yemeni army and the Houthis that have allowed Yemen to hold their own against Saudi Arabia and the USA, but also the support Yemen has received from Iran, not to mention the Soviet-era missiles they have been using. Just today, a Soviet era R-27T air-to-air missile was fired from the ground at a Saudi (US?) jet with the jet apparently taking a direct hit. And this may just be the beginning. Early last month, Saleh al-Samad, the head of the Houthis' political council, remarked that the group is ready to buy weapons from any country willing to sell them, whether it is Russia or Iran, as weapons from both of these countries are affordable.

Two weeks after this statement, a US MQ-9 Reaper drone fired a missile into Samad's residence in the Red Sea port city of Hudaydah, killing him. Note that it was a US drone. His death led to Yemen officials suggesting "Americans planned and then executed this intricate operation". In today's world, asking for assistance from Iran or Russia may put a bullseye on your back.

With regard to Iran providing arms to Yemen, the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said the following on December 14th, 2017:
We're also taking a hard look at Iran's ballistic missile program, its arms exports, and its support for terrorists, proxy fighters, and dictators. [...] Most telling, the report makes a convincing case that Iran is illegally providing the Houthi militants in Yemen with dangerous weapons. The report provides devastating evidence of missiles, conventional arms, and explosive boats of Iranian origin used by the rebels in Yemen - all of which violate UN resolutions.
This is a peculiar comment made by the ambassador of a country that has been actively supporting real terrorists in the Middle East and Libya as it pursues its global campaign of 'regime change' for 'geostrategic' reasons. If Iran (and Russia) had not supplied Yemen with weapons, either in the past or today, Yemen would likely have been overrun by Saudi and US forces long before now, with the civilian death toll and destruction much more severe than it has been to date.

Sadly, that doesn't mean the situation in Yemen can be described as tolerable. An increasing number of airstrikes carried out by Saudi Arabia (directed by US forces) have been purposefully targeting civilian gatherings, including weddings, busy market places, hospitals and schools. Last month, a wedding party was hit by a Saudi-US airstrike in northern Yemen killing at least 20 civilians, including the bride, with 45 (severely) wounded, 30 of them children.

The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement in late March that:
  • the militairy campaign against Yemen led by Saudi Arabia, the US, and the UK has killed and injured over 600,000 civilians, including more than a quarter of a million children.
  • airstrikes conducted by Saudi Arabia have caused at least 38,500 deaths.
  • 2,949 children and women, and 8,979 men have been wounded or maimed as a result of the airstrikes.
  • Saudi Arabia has caused the death of an additional 296,834 people indirectly.
babies yemen incubator
© Reuters
Babies lie in an incubator at the child care unit of a hospital in Sana’a, Yemen, on March 20, 2018.
In addition, due to the sea, land and air blockade of Yemen, hundreds of thousands of children have died due to severe malnutrition, and nearly 20,000 civilians have died as they were prevented from traveling abroad for medical treatment. It is this brutal siege of Yemen that the US and the UK have been actively supporting for over 3 years. As a result, a major humanitarian crisis is unfolding, with the country facing the world's worst famine in decades.

Thankfully, Russia has been delivering humanitarian aid to Yemen (several times last year). Yemeni ambassador to Russia, Ahmed Salem Wahishi, told Sputnik in an interview: "The Yemeni government is thankful for Russia's political and humanitarian support for the Yemeni people. We look forward to enhancing its role in achieving peace in Yemen." Iran also has been offering humanitarian aid on a continuous basis, however the blockades in place have made delivery difficult. But after the Houthi's missile attack on Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and allies eased a three-week blockade imposed on Yemeni ports and airports in November. Reuters reports that the 'Saudi-led coalition' supposedly will give $1.5 billion in humanitarian aid for Yemen. The question remains whether that investment will actually reach the people in need.

map yemen saudi arabia iran
If we look at the current state of the situation in the Middle East and consider that (1) Saudi Arabia and its Western allies are losing jihadi mercenaries in Syria, and thus their 7 year long proxy war in Syria, (2) that Iraq is developing closer ties to Iran (in particular after this month's Iraqi elections where Shia strongman Moqtada al Sadr won), and with Iran being Iraq's largest trading partner (3) and considering the fact that Yemen has been fighting back in the ways that it has been able to, it's bad news for Saudi Arabia and western 'bringers of democracy and freedom' when it comes to gaining influence in this geopolitical area.

In short, it looks like the winds of change are blowing strongly through the Middle East. If the EU manages to hold its nerve against the threat of US sanctions on Iran (and the EU of course for doing business with Iran), then it's likely that the US/Saudi alliance in the Middle East will see its influence in the region wane even further. This, in turn, may lead to more support for Yemen in its war with Saudi Arabia and more pressure on Saudi Arabia and allies for their brutal aggression against the Yemeni people.

While it is difficult to say if an end of the war in Yemen (or at least a complete lifting of the blockade) is likely in the near future, a combination of the defeat of the US/Saudi 'regime change' plans in Syria, more Iranian and Russian influence in the region, continued support from both of those countries for the Yemeni army and Houthis, and the resilience of the Yemeni people themselves, may allow for a measure of hope that there will be a positive outcome for Yemen in its long war with Saudi Arabia and the USA/UK.

Comment: See also:

(sott.net)


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