Legitimate target, daft war
The war that Saudi Arabia and its allies has been waging against the Houthi side in the civil war in Yemen took a interesting turn yesterday. Houthi claimed an attack on Saudi oil processing facilities using drone strikes. It is likely to significantly reduce the output of the Saudi exports for a while as the specialised equipment will be hard to get off the shelf.
Regardless of the mouthing off of Mike Pompeo, the current (and probably temporary 1) US Secretary of State – there currently appears to be no realistic evidence of Iranian direct involvement in this rather stupid proxy way. At least no more that there is evidence of the US supply of air weapons to Saudi Arabia with which to attach Yemeni targets in Houthi.
He has claimed that “.. there is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen”. Conversely there is no hard evidence that it did not. The Houthi ‘government’ claimed that they launched it with some ambiguity about where they launched the 10 armed drones from. They appeared to thank supporters inside Saudi so it is possible that they launched from inside of Saudi Arabia.
Which would fit the existing deployed capabilities of Houthi drones of about 150km.. However UN observers have reported the existence of longer range drones with a 1500km capabilities that could reach from Yemen territory. These drones appear to be copies of or are supplied by Iran.
Allied weapon suppliers have been ubiquitous in this conflict. The US has been supplying air weapons to the Saudis.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, rejected the accusation that Iran was behind the attack.
“Such blind accusations and inappropriate comments in a diplomatic context are incomprehensible and meaningless,” he said, adding: “even hostility needs a certain degree of credibility and reasonable frameworks, US officials have also violated these basic principles.”
Saudi Arabia has been leading a
military campaign to quash the Houthi rebels in Yemen since
March 2015. The conflict is widely seen as a proxy war between the Saudis and Iran, which has been backing the Houthis.
Pompeo also called for other countries to denounce Iran and promised American efforts to help support the energy market.
That last claim from Pompeo is simply just bullshit. By exactly the same logic, other countries should denounce America for the vast supply of weapons it has been supplying to the Saudi government to attack Yemen. It really is extremely hard to take this fool seriously.
But what this does remind me of the similar self-evidently false statements by the US government about the existence of WMD in Iraq leading up to their invasion of Iraq in 2012. At the time a lot of the “coalition of the willing” (which NZ fortunately was not), including our simple aussie cousins appeared to be the coalition of sheep following a blatantly manufactured lie.
The ‘evidence’ of WMD then was as manufactured and about credible as more recent Russian ‘evidence’ to provide the equally simple minded sheep who believe RT. That Crimea welcomed their invasion with a massive turnout at a unsupervised referendum seems extremely unlikely. That ‘evidence’ that their troops never fired on and destroyed a passenger jet in the Eastern Ukraine contradicts all other hard evidence.
Just like what happened when the UN looked through the WMB ‘sites’ in Iraq in the debris of the war to find the dusty remains of long abandoned programs – and evidence that sanctions had worked.
However it wouldn’t surprise me if Pompeo’s old gig at the CIA starts finding similarly sourced ‘evidence’ of Iran firing those drones shortly. That well of faith by allies and friends has been well and truly poisoned. I don’t expect that Winston Peters will be any time soon issuing a public and unequivocal condemnation of either Iran or the US for supplying weapons sustaining a destructive war.
I’d even be surprised if Australia would. But I guess that largely depends on how much they think that they could get out of it. Some
delivered spares for their F-35A Joint Strike Fighters might do it – then they could actually start to rely on getting them off the ground.
What I am surprised about is just how clean the attack was. There have been no claims of casualties. It appears to have been tightly targeted to a clear legitimate economic target of a nation warring on the Houthi government – it funds the purchase of the weapons that have been bombing military and the civilians in their area. It hit the correct infrastructure to cause maximum damage.
There are some estimates that it will drop the total Saudi production of oil by up to half for some time. Now on the whole this isn’t a bad thing because increases in prices of oil are useful in reducing the demand for oil and spurring the introduction of technologies that spew less CO2 into the atmosphere. Which is more important as any economic downturn at the present time.
It is important to be aware that there are claims that each of the 10 drones may cost as little as USD 15,000. To me this appears to be a turning point in a lot of regional conflicts. As if it hadn’t been apparent already based on the 4 year lack of progress in Yemen civil war, lots of advanced weapons doesn’t indicate an ability to decide a conflict. But now the conflict appears to be demonstrating the ability to strike back cheaply at economic and military targets inside the homeland of a regional participant.
It is going to be intriguing to see the effects of this genie being let out of the bag.
