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Throughout his campaign, Joe Biden railed against Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy, claiming it weakened the United States and left the world in disarray.

He pledged to reverse this decline and recover the damage Trump did to America’s reputation. While Donald Trump called to make America Great Again, Biden seeks to Make the American Empire Great Again.

Among the president-elect’s pledges is to end the so-called forever wars – the decades-long imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq that began under the Bush administration.

Yet Biden – a fervent supporter of those wars – will task ending them to the most neoconservative elements of the Democratic party and ideologues of permanent war.

Michele Flournoy and Tony Blinken sit atop Biden’s thousands-strong foreign policy brain trust and have played central roles in every U.S. war going back to the Clinton administration.

In the Trump era, they’ve cashed in, founding Westexec Advisors – a corporate consulting firm that has become home for Obama administration officials awaiting a return to government.

Flournoy is Biden’s leading pick for secretary of defense and Blinken is expected to be national security advisor.

Biden’s foxes guard the henhouse

Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks of the military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the Pentagon and hawkish think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons companies, and oil giants.

Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996 Quadrinellial Defense Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military’s doctrine of permanent war – what it called “full spectrum dominance.”

Flournoy called for “unilateral use of military power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”

As Bush administration officials lied to the world about Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD’s, Flournoy remarked that “In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary’s [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States.”

Tony Blinken was a top advisor to then-Senate foreign relations committee chair Joe Biden, who played a key role in shoring up support among the Democrat-controlled Senate for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq.

As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors of a paper titled “Progressive Internationalism” that called for a “smarter and better” style of permanent war. The paper chastised the anti-war left and stated that  “Democrats will maintain the world’s most capable and technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using it to defend our interests anywhere in the world.”

With Bush winning a second term, Flournoy advocated for more troop deployments from the sidelines.

In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to “increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.”

In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what would become one of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless war across the globe: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms manufacturers, oil giants, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big banks.

Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under secretary of defense for policy, the position considered the “brains” of the Pentagon.

She was keenly aware that the public was wary of more quagmires. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, she crafted a new concept of warfare that would expand the permanent war state while giving the appearance of a drawdown.

Flournoy wrote that “unmanned systems hold great promise” – a reference to the CIA’s drone assassination program.

This was the Obama-era military doctrine of hybrid war. It called for the U.S. to be able to simultaneously wage war on numerous fronts through secret warfare, clandestine weapons transfers to proxies, drone strikes, and cyber-attacks – all buttressed with propaganda campaigns targeting the American public through the internet and corporate news media.

Architects of America’s Hybrid wars

Flournoy continued to champion the endless wars that began in the Bush-era and was a key architect of Obama’s disastrous troop surge in Afghanistan. As U.S. soldiers returned in body bags and insurgent attacks and suicide bombings increased some 65% from 2009 and 2010, she deceived the Senate Armed Services Committee, claiming that the U.S. was beginning to turn the tide against the Taliban.

Even with her lie that the U.S. and Afghan government were starting to beat the Taliban back, Flournoy assured the senate that the U.S. would have to remain in Afghanistan long into the future.

Ten years later – as the Afghan death toll passed 150,000 – Flournoy continued to argue against a U.S. withdrawal.

That’s the person Joe Biden has tasked with ending the forever war in Afghanistan. But in Biden’s own words, he’ll “bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan” implying some number of American troops will remain, and the forever war will be just that. Michele Flournoy explained that even if a political settlement were reached, the U.S. would maintain a presence.

In 2011, the Obama-era doctrine of smart and sophisticated warfare was unveiled in the NATO regime-change war on Libya.

Moammar Gaddafi – the former adversary who sought warm relations with the U.S. and had given up his nuclear weapons program  – was deposed and sodomized with a bayonet.

Flournoy, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and corporate media were in lockstep as they waged an extensive propaganda campaign to deceive the U.S. public that Gadaffi’s soldiers were on a Viagra-fueled rape and murder spree that demanded a U.S. intervention.

All of this was based on a report from Al Jazeera – the media outlet owned by the Qatari monarchy that was arming extremist militias to overthrow the government.

Yet an investigation by the United Nations called the rape claims “hysteria.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found no credible evidence of even a single rape.

Even after Libya was descended into strife and the deception of Gadaffi’s forces committing rape was debunked, Michele Flournoy stood by her support for the war.

Tony Blinken, then Obama’s deputy national security advisor, also pushed for regime change in Libya. He became Obama’s point man on Syria, pushed to arm the so-called “moderate rebels” that fought alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, and designed the red line strategy to trigger a full-on U.S. intervention. Syria, he told the public, wasn’t anything like the other wars the U.S. had waging for more than a decade.

Despite Blinken’s promises that it would be a short affair, the war on Syria is now in its ninth year. An estimated half a million people have been killed as a result and the country is facing famine,

Largely thanks to the policy of using “wheat to apply pressure” – a recommendation of Flournoy and Blinken’s CNAS think tank.

When the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Syria based on mere accusations of a chemical attack, Tony Blinken praised the bombing, claiming Assad had used the weapon of mass destruction sarin. Yet there was no evidence for this claim, something even then-secretary of Defense James Mattis admitted.

While jihadist mercenaries armed with U..S-supplied weapons took over large swaths of Syria, Tony Blinken played a central role in a coup d’etat in Ukraine that saw a pro-Russia government overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated color revolution with neo-fascist elements agitating on the ground.

At the time, he was ambivalent about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, instead opting for economic pressure.

Since then, fascist militias have been incorporated into Ukraine’s armed forces. And Tony Blinken urged Trump to send them deadly weapons – something Obama had declined to do.

Trump obliged.

The Third Offset

While the U.S. fuelled wars in Syria and Ukraine, the Pentagon announced a major shift called the Third Offset strategy – a reference to the cold war era strategies the U.S. used to maintain its military supremacy over the Soviet Union.

The Third Offset strategy shifted the focus from counterinsurgency and the war on terror to great power competition against China and Russia, seeking to ensure that the U.S. could win a war against China in Asia. It called for a technological revolution in warfighting capabilities, development of futuristic and autonomous weapons, swarms of undersea and airborne drones, hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, machine-enhanced soldiers, and artificial intelligence making unimaginably complex battlefield decisions at speeds incomprehensible to the human mind. All of this would be predicated on the Pentagon deepening its relationship with Silicon Valley giants that it birthed decades before: Google and Facebook.

The author of the Third Offset, former undersecretary of defense Robert Work, is a partner of Flournoy and Blinken’s at WestExec Advisors. And Flournoy has been a leading proponent of this dangerous new escalation.

In June, Flournoy published a lengthy commentary laying out her strategy called “Sharpening the U.S. Military’s Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration”.

She warned that the United States is losing its military technological advantage and reversing that must be the Pentagon’s priority. Without it, Flournoy warned that the U.S. might not be able to defeat China in Asia.

While Flournoy has called for ramping up U.S. military presence and exercises with allied forces in the region, she went so far as to call for the U.S. to increase its destructive capabilities so much that it could launch a blitzkrieg style-attack that would wipe out the entire Chinese navy and all civilian merchant ships in the South China Sea. Not only a blatant war crime but a direct attack on a nuclear power that would spell the third world war.

At the same time, Biden has announced he’ll take an even more aggressive and confrontational stance against Russia, a position Flournoy shares.

As for ending the forever wars, Tony Blinken says not so fast.

The end of forever wars?

So Biden will end the forever wars, but not really end them. Secret wars that the public doesn’t even know the U.S. is involved in – those are here to stay.

In fact, leaving teams of special forces in place throughout the Middle East is part and parcel of the Pentagon’s shift away from counterinsurgency and towards great power competition.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy explains that “Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities” and the U.S. will “consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach.”

As for the catastrophic war on Yemen, Biden has said he’ll end U.S. support, but in 2019, Michele Flournoy argued against ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Biden pledged he will rejoin the Iran deal as a starting point for new negotiations. However, Trump’s withdrawal from the deal discredited the Iranian reformists who seek engagement with the west and empowered the principlists who see the JCPOA as a deal with the devil.

In Latin America, Biden will revive the so-called anti-corruption campaigns that were used as a cover to oust the popular social democrat Brazilian president Lula da Silva.

His Venezuela policy will be almost identical to Trump’s – sanctions and regime change.

In Central America, Biden has proposed a 4 billion dollar package to support corrupt right-wing governments and neoliberal privatization projects that create even more destabilization and send vulnerable masses fleeing north to the United States.

Behind their rhetoric, Biden, Flournoy, and Blinken will seek nothing less than global supremacy, escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race that risks the destruction of humanity. That’s what Joe Biden calls “decency” and “normalcy.”

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News

Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000.

The post How Joe Biden Plans to Make The American Empire Great Again appeared first on MintPress News.

Despite presenting itself as a force for good and peace in the Middle East, the United States sells at least five times as much weaponry to Saudi Arabia than aid it donates to Yemen. The State Department constantly portrays itself as a humanitarian superpower with the welfare of the Yemeni people as its highest priority, yet figures released from the United Nations and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) show that since the war in Yemen began, the U.S. government has given $2.56 billion in aid to the country, but sold over $13 billion in high-tech weapons to Saudi Arabia, the leader of the coalition prosecuting a relentless onslaught against the country.

Figures like these are always debatable. What constitutes legitimate “aid” is a question everyone would answer differently. Furthermore, the $13 billion figure does not include the enormous weapons deal Saudi Arabia signed with Donald Trump in 2017, which will reportedly see the Kingdom purchase $350 billion over ten years.

SIPRI is skeptical of the size of these numbers, but if they prove to be correct, once the orders begin arriving, they will make the paltry aid donations seem like small change by comparison. Sales include all manner of military equipment, from radar and transport systems to F-15 fighter jets, TOW missiles, Abrams tanks, and Paladin howitzers.

While the Saudis pay in petrodollars, Yemenis pay in blood. Four years ago, the Saudi Air Force bombed a well-attended funeral in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. It was a bright, clear day. The Saudis used a “double tap” airstrike to ensure maximum carnage. 240 people were killed, and like with the 2018 Saudi attack on a school bus that killed 40 children, the bombs that did the damage were 500-pound (227 kilogram) MK 82’s, built and supplied by Lockheed Martin, America’s largest weapons contractor.

“Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent. The world’s wealthiest nations cannot continue to put profits above the Yemeni people,” said Muhsin Siddiquey, Oxfam’s Yemen Country Director.

Already the region’s poorest nation, Yemen has been utterly devastated by the six-year conflict. The United Nations estimates that 14 million people — over half the country’s population — are at risk of famine, and 20.5 million need help accessing drinkable water. 80% of the population, it calculates, needs some form of humanitarian assistance. The Saudi-led coalition, which includes the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, has deliberately attacked soft targets like hospitals and water facilities, carrying out the equivalent of one strike against such buildings every ten days since the fighting began.

“The fact that the United Nations, faced with such enormous human, environmental and migration devastation around the world, has said for several years now that Yemen is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, that says it all. This war has devastated what was already the poorest country in the Arab world. Not only the direct bombing — of funerals, of weddings — but the blockading and bombing of the ports. Yemen is a country very dependent on imported food, basic medicines, everything. So when the ports are closed down, people move close to starvation very quickly,” Phyllis Bennis, Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and an expert on the Middle East, told MintPress.

A malnourished girl receives treatment at a feeding center at Al-Sabeen hospital in Sanaa, Yemen. Nov. 3, 2020. Hani Mohammed | AP

In addition to supplying the weapons, the U.S. (and many of its European allies) train Saudi forces, have provided critical military infrastructure and logistical support, and even refueled Saudi bombers in the air and provided targeting guidance to help Saudi forces find their marks more efficiently. On top of that, the U.S. has shielded Riyadh from international censure by defending it at bodies like the United Nations. In essence, the U.S. is involved in every area of the Yemen conflict, doing everything up to pulling the trigger itself.

“The U.S. must end its support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and instead prioritize the people across Yemen fighting to survive,” Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s Humanitarian Policy Lead told MintPress in a statement.

The U.S. has paused much of its aid to the most vulnerable Yemenis, while it continues to provide weapons that fuel the deadly conflict. Congress and the American people have made it clear that they do not want any part in this. We continue to call for the U.S., the international community and all parties to the conflict to push for peace, and we will hold the incoming Biden administration to its pledge to do its part.”

The United States has a long history of mistreating Yemen. In 1990, the administration of George H.W. Bush wanted a unanimous United Nations agreement to rubber-stamp its attack on Iraq. Yemen, newly appointed to the Security Council, refused to go along with the resolution (as did Cuba). Just minutes after it voted against the U.S. plan, a senior American diplomat told the Yemeni representative, on a hot mic, “That was the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast.” Within hours, all U.S. aid (a $70 million program) to the country was stopped. 800,000 Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi Arabia, and the country had difficulties securing loans with international financial institutions. Thus, as Bennis said, “The U.S. refusal to take Yemen and Yemenis seriously goes back a very long way.”

Saudi Arabia has proven to be one of the United States’ most loyal allies in the region over the past 50 years — and its enforcer. In return for keeping the oil money flowing into the United States, Washington has been willing to defend the country’s abysmal human rights record, and even to overlook the assassination of journalists like the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi. Andrew Feinstein, an arms industry expert and author of “The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade,” explained to MintPress that,

The U.S. has allied itself with Saudi Arabia, despite it being one of the world’s most corrupt countries and worst human rights abusers, at home and abroad, for two primary reasons: oil and the U.S. right’s desire for regime change in Iran. This is despite the reality that Saudi is the primary ideological supporter of, financier and, weaponizer of the most extreme Islamist groups.”

A Houthi man inspects an unexploded US-made cluster bomb in Sanaa, Yemen, 2016. Hani Mohammed | AP

Under Trump, the United States has sharply increased its military support to Saudi Arabia, signing a number of weapons deals that put the lie to any idea that he was an anti-war president. Overall, SIPRI calculates that the U.S. accounted for 36% of global weapons sales between 2015 and 2019, a large increase over the previous five years. Saudi Arabia is by far America’s best customer, and America is the Kingdom’s most important supplier, accounting for three-quarters of all purchases. In 2019, this included 59,000 guided bombs, most of which were destined to be dropped on soft targets in Yemen. As Bennis noted, “The Saudis buy more arms from the U.S. than any other country in the world, so it is embedded in the very fabric of the military industrial complex here.” Furthermore, many of Washington’s other best customers are also Middle Eastern dictatorships also bombing Yemen.

Saudi Arabia will be hosting the G20 summit this weekend, a meeting of the 20 most powerful nations in the world. Remarkably, for a country where women cannot travel or get married without permission from a man, the Saudi government has chosen “female empowerment” as the theme of this year’s meeting. And while the G20 is being urged to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its role in Yemen, that possibility seems doubtful, seeing as G20 arms exports to Riyadh are three times what they give to Yemen in aid.

With an impending change of administration in the White House, there is some talk that a Biden administration will reverse direction on Yemen. Bennis, however, was skeptical of how profound a change Biden will implement:

There may be a rather abrupt change. The question, for me, is how deep it will be. Biden has made a commitment on his statement of intention on foreign affairs to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi War on Yemen. How that gets defined is the question. There will be some symbolic moves very quickly after he is inaugurated, hopefully in the first days or weeks of the new administration. The big question is will he actually stop the massive arms sales of basics- the F-15s and F-16s, the bombers and bombs, the drones, the ammunition and equipment that is responsible for so much death and destruction in Yemen. Is he prepared to do that? I’m hopeful but not terribly optimistic.”

This is the view echoed by Yemenis on the ground who spoke to MintPress. Ibrahim Abdulkareem, who lost his infant child when a Saudi warplane dropped a U.S.-made bomb on his home in Sanaa in 2015, said that Biden’s statement of intention on foreign affairs was not good enough: ”I am not optimistic that Biden will stop supplying [Saudi leader Mohammed] Bin Salman with bombs like the ones that killed my daughter,” he stated. In international affairs, money talks. And the U.S. is making a lot of it from this war.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

The post Shocking New Figures Show How Just Much the US is Fueling the Violence in Yemen appeared first on MintPress News.

Riyadh: Coalition forces intercepted and destroyed a bomb-laden drone launched deliberately by the terrorist Houthi militia to target civilians and civilian buildings in the Southern Region of Saudi Arabia.

The downing of the drone was announced by General Turki Al Malki, official spokesman for the Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen.

Abu Dhabi: The UAE has strongly condemned the cowardly terrorist shooting attack targeting Emirates Red Crescent medical staff working in mobile healthcare clinics in the Yemeni city of Taiz.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said in a statement that the targeting of humanitarian workers is a flagrant violation of international norms and conventions, which provide special protection for aid and rescue workers.

The Ministry stressed that such hostile acts impede relief operations and hinder humanitarian access in Yemen, which may aggravate the plight of the people and worsen their conditions.

MoFAIC also underscored the UAE’s utter condemnation of such criminal acts and full rejection of all forms of violence and terrorism aimed at undermining security and stability in contravention of religious and human values and principles.

It also expressed appreciation for the humanitarian efforts made by the ERC in Yemen and other countries to alleviate the burden of the needy and the suffering.

The United States government is about to finally take the overdue decision to designate the Iran-backed Al Houthi militia in Yemen as a terrorist organisation. According to the American magazine Foreign Policy, the plan to put the militia on the terror list has been decided despite the objection of the United Nations.

The Trump administration had been mulling this decision for some time, but it delayed to give the UN-sponsored talks a chance. However, the recent escalation of attacks by Al Houthis on Saudi Arabia’s civilian population and facilities in the southern border areas shows that neither the militia nor its masters in Tehran are the least interested in peace.

The UN has so far failed to produce any tangible results in the ongoing talks due to the failure of Al Houthis to honour their promises at the negotiation table. The deal in the handover of Al Hodeida port to UN supervisors, signed last year, has yet to be implemented by the group.

Iran, which had recently admitted its military support to the Al Houthis, who overthrew the legitimate government in Yemen in September 2014, seem to be intent on prolonging the conflict for political gains. By continuing the war into the new year, when Joe Biden officially takes over the reins of the White House, Tehran thinks it will have another bargaining chip in its arsenal as they go into what many expect to be new talks to renew American commitment to the nuclear deal, which the Trump administration exited in 2018.

Therefore, Iran, through its Al Houthi proxy, has been intensifying the terror attacks on Saudi Arabia. Dozens of explosive-laden drones and ballistic missiles have been unleashed on the kingdom in November. While Riyadh and the Arab coalition has been exercising utmost restraint to help the UN continue its talks and allow critical humanitarian aid into the war-ravaged country, Al Houthis and their sponsors in Tehran, are hindering all international efforts to end the conflict.

One clear example of Iran’s efforts to sabotage any political settlement is the recent appointment of an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) official, Hassan Erlou, as its new ‘ambassador’ in Sana’a. Military experts suggest that he will serve as the new military adviser to the Al Houthi militia, hence the recent escalation of attacks on the kingdom.

The US move to designate Al Houthis as a terrorist organisation is the right one, and the UN must admit that its naïveté and continuing appeasement of the terrorist group have only prolonged the suffering of millions of impoverished Yemenis held hostage by Al Houthis to accommodate Iran’s regional designs.

Most Yemenis have little hope that the new White House will end the blockade and the devastating war in their country, which is now nearing the end of its sixth year. Nor are they hopeful that the announcement that U.S. support for the Saudi military intervention in Yemen could end during Biden’s presidential term will materialize into action after he is sworn into office on January 20, 2021.

Ibrahim Abdulkareem, who lost his 11-month-old daughter, Zainab when a Saudi warplane dropped an American-made bomb on his home in Sana`a in 2015, told MintPress that Biden’s statement is not good news to him, ”I am not optimistic that Biden will stop supplying Bin Salman with bombs like the ones that killed my daughter,” he said. Like Ibrahim, Yemeni civilians are losing their loved ones, homes, and infrastructure to American weapons supplied to the Saudi Coalition in droves, and there is little hope that president-elect Biden will end support, including the supply of weapons and military equipment, to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The Iranian boogeyman

In fact, officials in both Sana’a and Aden – the respective seats of power for the opposing sides in Yemen’s war – see little chance that Biden will take action to end the conflict given the current geopolitical reality in the Middle East. That reality includes the fever of normalization with Israel sweeping across Arab governments, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are no exception. Closely related is the ongoing obsession from concurrent U.S. administrations with trying to contain so-called “Iranian influence” in the Middle East and linking the war in Yemen with that effort.

Yemeni politicians have called on Biden to change how the White House views the conflict and to stop treating it as a proxy war with Iran over influence. Unfortunately, it has been reduced down to that binary argument, with U.S. officials on both sides of the aisle blaming the entire affair on Iran, reductively claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy, and framing the entire conflict in an Iran-centric geopolitical context – and not the true context of foreign aggression and a battle to control the strategic areas and some of the region’s most lucrative untapped oil and gas reserves.

American support

Most Yemenis view American support for the Saudi-led coalition not only as fueling the fighting but also view the American government as a party to serious war crimes in their country, directly at fault for the devastating humanitarian crisis they now face. Yemen is on the verge of yet another countdown to catastrophe as it faces a devastating famine within a few short months according to a recent report by the UN issued on Wednesday. That famine, in large part, stems not only from the Saud-led war and blockade, but from drastic cuts to humanitarian food and aid programs implemented by President Trump.

Since March 2015, when the war began, rather than halting weapons sales or pressuring Saudi Arabia diplomatically, the White House instead opted to ignore calls from the international community to address the suffering of Yemeni civilians. Worse yet, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been given carte blanche to carry out the most brazen and egregious violations of international law and collective murder in modern history without so much as a scolding from the United States.

The Saudi-led war has killed more than 100,000 people since January 2016, according to a report by the Armed Conflict and Location Event Data Project (ACLED). That figure does not include those who have died in the humanitarian disasters sparked by the conflict, particularly famine and the thousands of tons of weapons, most often supplied by the United States, that have been dropped on hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, farms, factories, bridges, and power and water treatment plants.

Thirsty for peace

If Biden is serious about reaching a diplomatic end to the war, he has a real chance to add ending one of the twenty-first century’s most violent conflicts to his presidential legacy. Yemen is thirsty for peace. Both the resistance forces led by Ansar Allah and the Saudi-backed militant groups’ that oppose them have signaled a desire to reach a political settlement, a sentiment, of course, not readily reflected by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Those governments, however, do face increasingly dwindling support among the same forces in Yemen that allegedly invited them to intervene in their country under the auspices of returning ousted president Abdul Mansour Hadi to power. Now, even among the coalition’s staunchest allies, Saudi Arabia’s actions are increasingly seen as little more than an effort to balkanize the nation into regions and factions that can more easily be managed.

Among the Houthis (Ansar Allah), the most stalwart of forces opposed to a foreign presence in Yemen, an attitude of reconciliation pervades. Throughout the conflict, the group has proven its propensity for diplomatic rapprochement and a desire to work within the structures of international mediators to negotiate an end to the war. According to high-ranking officials in Sana’a, preparations for negotiations are being made in case the Biden administration is serious about ending the war.

However, the group’s leadership is taking Biden’s statement with a grain of salt. A wait and see approach persists among decision-makers in Sana’a, and rumors are flying that Biden may work with Yemen’s Brotherhood, a Saudi Arabia ally.

Untangling the quagmire

Trump’s own legacy in the Middle East is another factor that Biden will have to maneuver if he wishes to untangle the complex quagmire that is Yemen. The Trump administration recently notified Congress that it approved the sale of more than $23bn in advanced weapons systems, including F-35 fighter jets and armed drones, to the UAE, Saudi Arabia’s most prominent partner in its war on Yemen.  The Houthis have played down the announcement, saying that consent is one thing, but delivery is another entirely and if the Biden administration does go through with the sale, they will consider it a crime against Yemen.

High-ranking Houthi officials told MintPress that while they do not expect the president-elect to recognize their right to sovereignty, they are hopeful that the situation in Yemen will be re-assessed by the incoming administration and that the Houthis will no longer be seen as a threat to Washington or their allies in the region, and there is some evidence to substantiate that idea.

Every Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia and the UAE has been retaliatory, not preemptive, in nature. Even the attack on the Saudi Aramco facility on September 14,  2019, came in response to ongoing Saudi Coalition military maneuvers inside Yemen. Prior to the 2015 Saudi-led Coalition war on their country, the Houthis did not show animus towards the Kingdom, nor a desire to target it militarily. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia a major exporter of the same kind of jihadist ideology that drives groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS, groups that the Kingdom has used to try to undermine Houthi power, making the Houthis a natural ally to any force working to contain those organizations.

Saudi Arabia launched its war on Yemen in March of 2015 under the leadership of Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman. Salman claimed his objective in launching the war was to roll back the Houthis and reinstate ousted former Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who fled the country to Saudi Arabia following popular protests during the Arab Spring. From the moment the highly unpopular war began, Saudi officials have worked hard to frame it as a necessary step in liberating the Arab country from Iran, repeating the still unfounded claim that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy.

Continued pressure on Yemen will inevitably force the Houthis to lean more heavily into their relationships with Iran, Russia, and China, all perceived enemies of the United States, as they indeed have done under the Trump presidency. Iran’s newly appointed ambassador to Yemen arrived in Sana’a last month, and prior to that, the Houthis sent an ambassador to Tehran. Syria and Qatar are expected to follow and reopen their embassies in Sana’a according to Houthi officials, and if the staggering human cost of the war is not enough, that should give Biden an incentive not to allow the protracted conflict to carry on..

Feature photo | U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, left, offers his condolences on the death of the late Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud to Saudi Foreign minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal on his arrival to Riyadh airbase in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 27, 2011. Hassan Ammar | AP

Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.

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Kuwait

The Ministry of Health today reported 763 new cases of COVID-19, pushing Kuwait’s overall tally of infections to 128,843.

Five people died over the past 24 hours, taking total fatalities to 794.

According to the ministry’s latest update, 662 patients have recovered from the virus, raising total recoveries to 119,742.

The active cases have now touched 8,307, out of which 114 are critical cases in intensive care units.

Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Ministry of Health today registered 426 new cases of COVId-19, raising the total number of confirmed infections in the Kingdom to 348,510

Total fatalities have now touched 5,471 after 15 people succumbed to the infection following complications caused by the virus.

The Kingdom’s total recoveries climbed to 335,594 as an additional 441 patients have made full recovery in the past 24 hours.

Active cases have now hit 7,871, including 736 that are critical.

Oman

The Ministry of Health on Wednesday announced 319 new coronavirus cases and 11 more deaths in Oman. The total cases in the country have now touched 116,847, including 1,275 fatalities.

A further 363 patients have fully recovered, pushing the total number of recoveries to 106,903. The ministry renewed its call on everyone to adhere to social distancing instructions issued by the Supreme Committee.

Bahrain

The Ministry of Health conducted 10,036 COVID-19 tests across the Kingdom, where 230 people have tested positive for the virus. This brings total cases in the Kingdom to 82,363.

The new cases include 64 expatriate workers, 158 who got infected after direct contacts with active cases, and 8 are related to travel. The ministry announced one more fatality, taking death tally to 322. There were 362 fresh recoveries, increasing total recoveries to 79,680.

Qatar

An additional 227 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Qatar, taking its tally of infections to 133,370., the Ministry of Public Health said.

No new fatalities were reported, keeping death toll at 232, meanwhile 212 patients have made full recovery, raising total recoveries to 130,414. Active cases have now reached 2,724, out of which 303 are stable and 37 are serious cases under intensive care.