The geopolitical situation across the world continues to deteriorate to a very worrisome degree.

The New York Times reported the following earlier today:

WASHINGTON — An American warship stationed off the coast of Yemen fired cruise missiles on Thursday at radar installations that the Pentagon said had been used by Yemeni insurgents to target another American warship in two missile attacks in the last four days. The strikes against the Houthi rebels marked the first time the United States has become involved militarily in the civil war between the Houthis, an indigenous Shiite group with loose connections to Iran, and the Yememi government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations. The strikes were approved by President Obama, said Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, who warned of more to come if American ships were fired upon again. “These limited self-defense strikes were conducted to protect our personnel, our ships and our freedom of navigation in this important maritime passageway,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “The United States will respond to any further threat to our ships and commercial traffic.” Until Thursday, the Obama administration had tried to navigate a treacherous course in Yemen, publicly pushing for a peace deal while quietly providing military support to a Saudi Arabia-led bombing campaign against the rebels since last year. Yet the main goal of the administration has often appeared to be keeping the United States from being dragged too deeply into a conflict that has shown little signs of abating, and instead continues to grow deadlier.

Really? You could’ve fooled me.

That changed in the past four days with two separate missile attacks on an American destroyer, the Mason, that was sailing off the coast of Yemen in the southern end of the Red Sea. In both the first attack, which took place on Sunday, and the second one on Wednesday evening, missiles were fired from areas under Houthi control.

Oh please. Let’s not act as if our navy ships are just sitting there on the coast handing out candy to maritime wanderers. As I noted in a post earlier this week, U.S. Government May Be Guilty of War Crimes Due to Support for Saudi War in Yemen:

The Obama administration went ahead with a $1.3 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last year despite warnings from some officials that the United States could be implicated in war crimes for supporting a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, according to government documents and the accounts of current and former officials. U.S. government lawyers ultimately did not reach a conclusion on whether U.S. support for the campaign would make the United States a “co-belligerent” in the war under international law, four current and former officials said. That finding would have obligated Washington to investigate allegations of war crimes in Yemen and would have raised a legal risk that U.S. military personnel could be subject to prosecution,at least in theory. Since March 2015, Washington has authorized more than $22.2 billion in weapons sales to Riyadh, much of it yet to be delivered. That includes a $1.29 billion sale of precision munitions announced in November 2015 and specifically meant to replenish stocks used in Yemen. U.S. refueling and logistical support of Riyadh’s air force – even more than the arms sales – risked making the United States a party to the Yemen conflict under international law, three officials said.

Now back to the NYT.

This American role has drawn criticism from human rights groups who condemn the campaign as reckless. More than 4,000 civilians have been killed since the bombing began, according to the United Nations’ top human rights official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein. That number includes at least 140 people who were killed in an airstrike on a funeral ceremony last weekend in the Yemeni capital, Sana. The strike prompted the administration to promise a review of the American military assistance to the Saudis “so as to better align with U.S. principles, values and interests.”

Quite the coincidence that within just a few days of increased war crime concerns, the U.S. military suddenly found an excuse to escalate its involvement. How convenient.

Before Thursday’s attack, Secretary of State John Kerry pushed for a peace deal in Yemen, arguing that the United States could be an honest broker because it was not directly involved in the Saudi-led bombing campaign. The military response could now make that a more difficult position to take.

Just great, knee-fucking deep in another Middle Eastern war.

Peter Salisbury, a Yemen expert at Chatham House, a London policy institute, said in an interview conducted hours before the American strikes that “if they do intervene, it deepens the case that the Americans are party to the conflict.” How the rebels might have obtained the missiles was not clear. The Houthis, who are from northern Yemen, have seized ample amounts of military hardware in their two-year campaign to seize control of the country, and they are also believed to have received substantial aid from Iran, possibly including advanced weaponry. American intelligence officials believe that the Houthis receive significantly less support from Iran than the Saudis and other Persian Gulf nations have charged. The Saudi campaign has failed to dislodge the Houthis from Sana. Much of Yemen is now on the brink of famine, and reports of civilians’ being killed in airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition have become routine. In August, the aid organization Doctors Without Borders said it was withdrawing its personnel from the country after the coalition bombed several of its medical facilities. Despite international condemnation of the campaign, the White House pushed ahead this year with a $1.15 billion arms deal for Saudi Arabia that includes tanks and other heavy military equipment. A Senate resolution in September to block the sale failed, but 26 senators voted for it, signaling growing congressional concern about the Saudi alliance. “We are complicit and actively involved with war in Yemen,” Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who worked to block the arms deal, said at the time.“There’s been no debate in Congress, really no debate in the public sphere over whether or not we should be at war in Yemen.”

Typical imperial insanity.

Meanwhile, here’s some of what the AP had to say about the recent developments.

The strike on the funeral in the capital, Sanaa, killed some 140 people and wounded more than 600. That bombing, among the deadliest of the war, likely sparked the rebels to launch more ballistic missiles in Saudi Arabia and target the U.S. warships in the Red Sea. Human rights groups have expressed outrage over the deaths and accused the U.S. of complicity, leading the White House to say it was conducting a “review” to ensure U.S. cooperation with longtime partner Saudi Arabia is in line with “U.S. principles, values and interests.” Meanwhile, an international human rights group, Human Rights Watch, said Thursday that the funeral bombing constitutes an apparent war crime and that the remnants of missiles found at the site of the attack showed that they were American-made. It said a disproportionate number of the victims were civilians when the coalition carried out two airstrikes. An international investigation is needed into the “atrocity,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for the rights group. She said the attack on the funeral joins a long list of abuses by the coalition. Analysts with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy called the Houthi missile fire “a surprisingly aggressive move,” but stressed there were limits to Iran’s control of the rebels.

Yes, surprising is one way to put it. Again, I find it extremely convenient that the U.S. government suddenly found an excuse to escalate involvement in this quagmire just as it appeared policy might be driven toward rational change.

Unfortunately, it’s not just in Yemen and Syria where we see dangerous geopolitical escalation, it’s also the cyberwar realm. While the mainstream media parrots the U.S. government narrative on this issue (as usual), TechDirt just published a great article on the topic, Obama Promises ‘Proportional’ Response To Russian Hacking, Ignores That We Started The Fight:

We’ve noted several times how launching cyberwar (or real war) on Russia over the recent spike in hack attacks is a notably idiotic idea. One, the United States effectively wrote the book on hacking other countries causing all manner of harm (hello, Stuxnet), making the narrative that we’re somehow defending our honor from shady international operatives foundationally incorrect. And two, any hacker worth his or her salt either doesn’t leave footprints advertising their presence, or may conduct false flag operations raising the risk of attacking the wrong party. After significant pressure from intelligence industry saber rattlers and the cybersecurity firms that profit from cyber-hysteria, President Obama this week proudly proclaimed that the U.S. government would be launching a “proportional” response to Russia’s recent slate of hacking attacks: “We obviously will ensure that a U.S. response is proportional. It is unlikely that our response would be announced in advanced. It’s certainly possible that the president could choose response options that we never announce,” Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. “The president has talked before about the significant capabilities that the U.S. government has to both defend our systems in the United States but also carry out offensive operations in other countries,” he added. “There are a range of responses that are available to the president and he will consider a response that’s proportional.” Again though, the very idea that the United States would be “responding” is fundamentally incorrect. We’ve been engaged in nation state hacking and election fiddling for decades, happily hacking the planet for almost as long as the internet has existed. We use submarines as underwater hacking platforms, the U.S. government and its laundry list of contractors routinely hacking and fiddling with international elections and destroying reputations when and if it’s convenient to our global business interests. Our behavior in 1970s South America giving tech support to Operation Condor is the dictionary definition of villainy. Yet somehow, once countries began hacking us back, we responded with indignant and hypocritical pouting and hand-wringing. But the reality is we are not some unique, special snowflake on the moral high ground in this equation: we’ve historically been the bully, and nationalism all too often blinds us to this fact. Long a nation driven to war by the weakest of supporting evidence, hacking presents those in power with a wonderful, nebulous new enemy, useful in justifying awful legislation, increased domestic surveillance authority, and any other bad idea that can be shoe-horned into the “because… cybersecurity” narrative. And as we’re witnessing in great detail, hacking has played a starring role in this nightmarish election, with Donald Trump giving every indication he intends to only ramp up nation state hacking as a core tenet of his idiocracy, and Hillary Clinton lumping Russia, hackers, and WikiLeaks into one giant, amorphous and villainous amoeba to help distract us from what leaked information might actually say about the sorry state of the republic.

If the American public continues to be passive in the face of increased media and U.S. government warmongering, we will face unimaginably negative consequences.

For more, see:

U.S. Government May Be Guilty of War Crimes Due to Support for Saudi War in Yemen

Things Are Going From Bad to Worse – Iraqi PM Warns of ‘Regional War’

The Situation in Syria is Very, Very Dangerous

Japanese Government Shifts Further Toward Authoritarianism and Militarism

More Troubling Evidence That Hillary Clinton Will Start WW3

More Troubling Evidence That Hillary Clinton Will Start WW3 – Part 2

In Liberty,

Michael Krieger



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