Britain lines up behind US aggression in Yemen

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Britain lines up behind US aggression in Yemen
6 January 2010

Once again, the British ruling class has become the first to line up
full-square behind the latest military provocation being prepared by
Washington. After its participation in the wars of aggression against
Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as its support for attacks inside
Pakistan, Britain has joined with the US in making Yemen the next target.

Washington is intent on utilising the failed attempt to explode a bomb
on Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day as a pretext
for further intervention in this poverty-stricken country. On the
basis of reported links between Nigerian student Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab and Al Qaeda elements in Yemen, President Barack Obama
has pledged that “all elements of US power” will be brought to bear
against the country, amidst reports that military targets are already
being selected.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown responded most eagerly to this US
belligerence. He immediately ordered UK airports to introduce full
body scanners, despite the fact that Europe has declared these devices
to be in breach of human rights.

Brown also announced an international meeting in London at the end of
this month to discuss Yemen and said that Britain will participate in
a joint US-UK anti-terror programme in the country. The meeting is to
run in conjunction with a planned conference on Afghanistan, aimed at
deepening the military involvement of the European countries in the
increasingly bloody US-led occupation.

The prime minister’s readiness to back Washington’s threats against
Yemen comes despite serious questions over the attempted airline
bombing. Not least of these is how it was that Abdulmutallab managed
to board the flight, given that he was on a security watch list and
his father had reported him as a potential terrorist threat to
Nigerian and American authorities.

Brown’s response confirms that no real change in policy was involved
in the transfer of power from Tony Blair to himself. The UK continues
to function as something akin to a European proxy of Langley,
Virginia, and the White House.

More is involved than mere electioneering on the part of Brown in
advance of a national election, or simply bowing to the demands of the
UK’s more powerful ally. What has been exposed by Brown’s flurry of
announcements is the extent to which Britain and the US are already
involved in Yemen.

The prime minister initially claimed he had decided to participate in
a joint anti-terror programme with Washington after a personal phone
conversation with Obama. Interviewed by the BBC’s Andrew Marr on
Sunday, Brown conceded that the operation was already underway. “The
truth is we've been doing this for some time,” he admitted.

When asked about the joint programme, an unnamed Washington official
told the Associated Press that there was no new initiative. American
and British forces were already assisting Yemeni security forces in
“anti-terror” operations. US Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the
Senate Homeland Security Committee, was reported in the UK-based
Telegraph as saying, “We have a growing presence there—and we have
to—of special operations, Green Berets, intelligence.”

The implication of Brown’s admission is that there are also British
special forces on the ground in Yemen alongside those of the US.

Days before the failed airline bombing, it was revealed that Obama had
personally given the order for US air strikes on the Abyan village of
al Maajala in Yemen. The December 17 strikes, which killed some 120
people, were apparently coordinated with the US-backed dictatorship of
Yemen President Ali Abdallah Saleh.

Brown, like Blair, does not intend to be left out of “tomorrow’s war.”
While it may seem astonishing that Britain, more heavily mired in debt
than any other developed country and already over-extended militarily,
should get embroiled in yet another war, for the ruling elite there is
no choice but to follow the US lead. In fact, Britain’s desperate
economic and financial condition is driving it into new military
adventures.

Britain can plausibly bring some highly relevant experience in Yemen
to the table. Under the Labour government of Harold Wilson in the
1960s, it fought one of its last colonial wars in part of the
territory that became Yemen. And a savage war it was.

BBC correspondent Brian Barron, who covered what was known as the
“Aden Emergency,” recalled, “One steamy morning in the Crater district
[the Arab district of the port of Aden] I arrived to find Colonel
Colin Mitchell—known to the media as Mad Mitch because of his gung-ho
style—directing a group of squaddies who were stacking, like a
butcher’s delivery, the corpses of six Arabs on the pavement. They’d
been shot as they tried to ambush a patrol. ‘It was like shooting
grouse,’ said the Colonel, ‘A brace here and a brace there. It was
over in seconds.’”

This casual attitude to colonial brutality characterised the British
occupation. What Brown and Obama now describe as a “failed state” is
in large part the creation of that colonial experience.

Britain’s involvement is also dictated by Yemen’s geo-strategic
importance. Aden, a valuable deep water port, sits directly on the
main world shipping lane that links the Far East to Europe and
America. It controls access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. That is
why it was so crucial to the British and why, when Britain was
eventually forced to withdraw in 1967, the US took over efforts to
maintain control of Yemen through its proxy in the region, Saudi Arabia.

Between 1962 and 1970, Saudi Arabia backed royalist forces against the
Republic of Yemen, which had the support of Egypt and the Soviet Union
in the North Yemen civil war. After British withdrawal, South Yemen
aligned itself with the Soviet Union. A united Yemen did not come into
existence until 1990.

When Yemen refused to support the First Gulf War in early 1991, Saudi
Arabia responded by expelling one million Yemeni workers, adding to
the country’s poverty and instability. The legacy of colonialism and
Cold War conflicts ensures that, despite having one of the finest
harbours in the world, Yemen remains the poorest Arab state. Most of
the country’s population of 25 million live on less than $2 a day.

The real target of the US and UK military is not Al Qaeda, but the
Yemeni civilian population. The use of air power against civilians is
a modern version of the British tactic of bombing the villages of
rebel tribes. This state terror has been taken to a new level of
destructiveness, but the purpose is strikingly similar. The intention
of the US is to extend its colonial control over this strategic
region. Britain, the former colonial power, is intent on securing its
share of the spoils.

The opening of a new front in the so-called “war on terror” will have
incalculable consequences. Brown stated specifically that Britain
would assist Yemen in developing its coastguard. Last October, the
Yemeni coastguard seized an Iranian vessel which was alleged to be
carrying weapons to Houthi rebels in northern Yemen. With the world’s
shipping passing through the Gulf of Aden, such a naval policy has
explosive global implications. The prospect of Yemen impounding
merchant vessels with British and US-backing threatens to spark any
number of international conflicts.

Ann Talbot

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j06.shtml

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