U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley. Credit: Flickr/Creative Commons/U.S. Mission Photo/Eric Bridiers

Haley’s fixation on Iranian missiles continues:

Last week, the United Nations published a report with news a lot of people don’t want to hear. A panel of experts found that Iran is violating a United Nations weapons embargo — specifically, that missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels into Saudi Arabia last year were made in Iran.

Haley’s preoccupation with this missile issue is out of all proportion to its importance in the ongoing war on Yemen. She refers to the massive humanitarian crisis that affects the vast majority of Yemenis, and even mentions that the coalition blockade has worsened conditions, but she doesn’t consider that situation to be the urgent one that demands an international response. Of course, she represents the government that has helped to make Yemen’s humanitarian crisis possible through its unflagging support for the coalition intervention, so she waxes indignant about missiles while U.S.-refueled coalition planes routinely kill civilians. If readers were relying on Haley to inform them about coalition crimes in Yemen, they would never know that they happened.

It speaks volumes about the administration’s absurd Iran obsession that the alleged Iranian violation of an embargo warrants U.S. scrutiny and condemnation while Haley ignores the far more numerous and egregious violations of international law by the Saudis and their allies over the last three years. Haley says that the alleged Iranian missiles have “come close to hitting civilian targets,” but she has nothing to say about the hundreds and hundreds of coalition attacks that have hit civilian targets through both indiscriminate and deliberate bombing. Her comments on the humanitarian crisis are made in passing. She doesn’t say anything about the more than eight million people being starved by the coalition blockade with U.S. backing, and she never mentions the record-setting cholera epidemic that flourished in the conditions created by the coalition’s war and blockade. Just as it was last fall, her real concern is to get more punitive measures enacted against Iran and to distract attention from the culpability of the coalition and its patrons for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It is particularly galling that Haley poses as a concerned observer interested in resolving the conflict when the U.S. is actively backing belligerent states that have done most of the damage to the country. If the Trump administration were genuinely interested in opposing what is being done to the people of Yemen, it could stop helping the coalition as it wrecks and starves Yemen. The U.S. should suspend all military assistance to coalition governments and bring pressure to bear on the actual war criminals that have done so much to destroy the country. Each day that the U.S. continues to arm and refuel coalition planes is more proof that the administration isn’t interested in that and prefers using the red herring of Iranian involvement as an excuse to perpetuate our involvement an atrocious war.