The American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison has been one of the few journalists I’ve come across that covers the US-funded, Saudi-led slaughter of one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, Yemen. His almost daily posts detail the latest atrocity, and he always points out where the guns, bombs, jets, and gold are coming from. His latest, The U.S. Enables and Indulges Saudi War Crimes, is straight to the point. A Saudi coalition airstrike targeted a bus of schoolchildren in a crowded marketplace in Saada, Yemen. 51 people were killed, 40 of them children. To understand this from an American standpoint, imagine an alternate universe where China were funding some authoritarian religious autarch in Mexico. This autarch wants to suppress some disagreeable political shift in the U.S. that is gaining support and power. So China funds a Mexican campaign of terror against civilians and “supporters” of this new political movement. It begins starving and murdering American citizens by the thousands. It’s a question of, how would you feel about all this? If Mexico were bombing schools, WalMarts, churches, and buses, how would you feel? That’s what Yemen feels, because that nightmare is a reality for them. And the world, for the most part, doesn’t appear to even care.
The morning of 9/11/01, everyone in my school piled into the commons area and watched the coverage of the attacks, with everyone wondering why anyone would do such a horrible thing. Several borderline thug coaches, who for some reason also taught classes at the middle school, emotionally claimed that the U.S. should nuke the Middle East. Everyone called the attacks an act of cowardice, which they were. But they were also attacks of revenge. We were attacked because our government attacks their countries, funds their enemies, kills their families. And it wasn’t some secret that our government did this. It wasn’t covered by CNN or Fox, but it was public record that our government bombed, starved, and occupied Middle Eastern kingdoms, paying off the tinpot dictators, but all the while fueling the hatred of the citizens. It’s not that it wasn’t known, but that no one cared what their government did overseas.
Terrorism is an act of desperation from a people that see that their own government is not only ineffectual, but partly responsible for their situation. The slaughter of Yemen’s poor by the country on the receiving end of the largest arms deal in history has sown dragon’s teeth. In five, ten, or twenty years, Americans might die in an act of terror, and the survivors will say that their attackers repeatedly screamed incoherently about ‘Yemen’.