08.17.16
America’s Wehrmacht
One of the toadies of America’s global Wehrmacht, Saudi Arabia, bombed a potato chip factory in Yemen last week. Today they bombed a hospital, This on top of bombing supermarkets, aid organizations, cement factories and civilians — with American support.
We provide the training, the bombers, the bombs, the targeting and refueling.
The bombing campaign is considered a war crime by various organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders.
The civil war, in which American weapons have cratered Yemen is all because the Houthi tribe kicked out the US and Saudi-backed government, forcing it to flee offshore. The Houthis occupy the capital, Sana, and the bombing hasn’t changed their minds, just created another humanitarian crisis, another rubble-ized Middle Eastern country and more atrocities. (The other big driver is Saudi Arabia’s hot war with anyone seen as proxies of Iran, in this case, the Houthis. Secondarily, we enable and support them in it.)
In any case, nothing can be allowed to escape the technological gaze of our military targeting systems, not even potato chip factories.
And today even the New York Times couldn’t stand by anymore:
A hospital associated with Doctors Without Borders. A school. A potato chip factory. Under international law, those facilities in Yemen are not legitimate military targets. Yet all were bombed in recent days by warplanes belonging to a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, killing more than 40 civilians.
The United States is complicit in this carnage…
Given the civilian casualties, further American support for this war is indefensible. As [a Connecticut politican] told CNN on Tuesday: “There’s an American imprint on every civilian life lost in Yemen.???
Without the United States Air Force as a refueling linchpin for the Saudis, the bombing campaign in Yemen would collapse.
As of Aug. 8, “we’ve flown 1,144 aerial refueling sorties totaling approximately 9,793 flying hours and providing 40,535,200 pounds of fuel to 5,525 receiving aircraft,??? Dougherty told Air Force Times in an email Monday. The latest statistics show sorties in support of the Saudi-led coalition against Yemeni rebels have increased roughly 61 percent since AFCENT last provided data in February …
Drily, the Air Force paper describes a vicious cycle of bombing.
The bombing campaign against the Houthis “dislodged” them from some areas, creating a “vacuum” in which alleged operations of al Qaeda were said to have increased. This has resulted in another bombing campaign over Yemen, one conducted directly by America’s Wehrmacht. In addition to the black bag operations conducted in a fractured country on the ground.
Historically, think Guernica, only with far more might, as it’s now obvious we have our own Condor Legion and a variety of Operation Rugens.
Technically, I should probably call it America’s Luftwaffe. But when you get down to it, globally the US military is a joint operation. The biggest arm of the Third Reich’s military was the army, the Heer. Operationally, at high tide, it reached from deep inside the old Soviet Union to the Atlantic, south to North Africa, to the islands of Greece and north to the Arctic Circle.
The Wehrmacht, while generally thought of in the US as the army of the Third Reich (entertainment, you see), encompassed all the service arms: the Kriegsmarine, the Luftwaffe, the regular army, and the Waffen SS. Because the German army was, by far, the dominant service, its command organization, OKH, or Oberkommando das Heer, was frequently in conflict with the joint command staff, OKW, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.
Therefore, in terms of understanding, America’s Wehrmacht is apt.
And I will continue to ram home the point. Americans, all of us, have no more say in the matters of their military than citizens of the Third Reich did. It’s a fact.