The Tragedy of Saudi Arabia’s War | Hacker News Reader

The Tragedy of Saudi Arabia’s War

nytimes.com

55 pointsdsr1248 comments

Between the financing of Wahhabism around the world (and the liberal reaction of western governments to this), the liberal purchases of weapons and oil exports, it seems like the world is in bed with the devil.

I'm hoping that after the bad press over killing Khashoggi, the US tells the Saudis to back off on the Yemen war. They are really the only people in a position to do much.

And what are the saudits supposed to do with the 100 billions worth of weapons?

That's their problem. They shouldn't be making it anyone else's problem.

It’s also problematic for the arms dealers.

I found the following reddit discussions to provide more detailed perspective of this war.

View from a Saudi Arabian, https://www.reddit.com/r/saudiarabia/comments/8wnbzl/

View of an independent security analyst, https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/8qyip8/

In 30 years from now, the US, Canada and UK selling billions of dollars of military equipment, support and training to the saudi regime will be seen as morally equivalent to when the US dropped thousands of tonnes of munitions on Cambodia. Or the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, My Lai massacre, etc.

Worthy of war crimes prosecution in The Hague.

How hard is it, really, to take a principled stand and say that the most technologically advanced products of the NATO military-industrial complex should only be sold to similarly democratic countries? The Netherlands or Italy wants to buy some current generation air superiority fighters, gps guided bombs or surface to air missiles, sure. Saudi Arabia? Nope. Pakistan? No way. The Erdogan government in Turkey? Negatory.

In the particular case of the saudis' war against the Houthis, the US doesn't give a fuck, because you know who supports the Houthis? Iran. Anyone who's spent time researching the history and reasons for the last 50 years for the poor relationship between the US and Iran will immediately understand why. Basically, it's "fuck Iran, they've got what was coming to them".

It's a proxy war where they're using US munitions to attack things the US can't politically stomach attacking directly. If the Saudis started open warfare against Hezbollah (again, Iranian supported), I'm sure the US and UK would be just as keen to look the other way.

Trouble is if we don't sell them weapons then they buy them off Russia and China and we have even less influence.

Yes, the good old "If I don't do it, someone else will".

I could go and rob the local supermarket with that excuse.

Yeah but the way to stop robbing at the supermarket is police or similar, not you restraining yourself and hoping the bad guys will follow your example.

1) We're not doing much with all this supposed influence we're getting from the sales of weapons.

2) If they can easily switch to Russian or Chinese weapons, that implies we're not getting that much influence by selling them weapons.

3) If the US is not willing to exercise its influence (point 1) or is not really getting that much actual influence (point 2), it seems like we're just profiteering off a proxy war.

Pakistan and Turkey are democratic countries. Just saying. But I get what you meant.

Anyway, I don't have a simple solution to this complex problem. Should US sell weapons to India? China?

Maybe we shouldn’t be selling them at all.

India has proved itself to be a politically and militarily responsible country unlike its western neighbour, which floundered embarrassingly at even basic human rights.

Not in the current climate, no, and most certainly not for Pakistan where military runs the state!

I understand what you're saying, and agree to a certain extent. But given enough time, all of this will just be statistics. And given even more time, it will be history. I've been reading a lot of history recently, and so much of it is pure analysis, all the emotions and morality removed. Perhaps the concept of humanity is closely tied to chronocentrism. Now think about what we did to survive 100k years ago..

Just a thought.

> But given enough time, all of this will just be statistics.

Certainly you are joking. You know you're paraphrasing Stalin right now?

Or maybe “how will history judge us?” is not a useful question to ask when making moral choices.

It assumes our many times descendants will judge our actions at all, and that if they do they will still have values that say wiping out a civilian population in war is evil.

We should stop helping SA to intentionally starve a people to death because we know it to be terrible now.

You're right. We seldom think of how the future will judge us. If we did, we'd take the whole climate change thing more seriously. I don't think the people who are responsible for making these decisions think morally. So it is baffling to the common person, wondering why we let these things happen.

I'm not joking, or supporting any moral positions. Just thinking of it from another perspective. I am aware of the Stalin quote. There are very few cases in history when we intervene at the right time. Sadly, this will be another one of them.

Given enough time, everyone dies and everything is meaningless. It's easy to be a nihilist until you watch your own child starve to death.

The Erdogan government in Turkey? Negatory

That would be super awkward, as Turkey is the only place European countries can get F35 engines overhauled. It boggles the mind how that was allowed to happen. In general there should have been two locations for redundancy but in the specific case of Turkey, it's now looking to Russia for its defence needs anyway.

Really? Source?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/19/f35_fighter_engines...

It's pretty common knowledge that the work was spread around for political reasons. Similarly everyone's avionics must be overhauled in the UK.

Haha, that's insane. Congrats, Norway. You could have public road take-off and landing Gripen fighter bombers serviced at home for a fraction of the price.

https://www.defenceaviation.com/2010/12/gripens-ability-to-t...

>How hard is it, really, to take a principled stand and say that the most technologically advanced products of the NATO military-industrial complex should only be sold to similarly democratic countries?

Its quite difficult, in view of the fact that the largest so-called democracy is committing the same heinous crimes as the nations you select for target of your ire. The USA and its criminal "Coalition of the Willing" has been getting away with the same kind of warfare - unfettered, un-tethered, indiscriminate murder of innocents - for decades.

So until the USA has its own feet held to the flames of justice that we all yearn for, there is no hope for justice for the 500,000 innocent victims of the Wests own, illegal wars.

In the UK it was Margaret Thatcher that got the formerly Great Britain into selling arms for oil to the Saudis in a big and very corrupt way. From time to time Parliament has to exercise some serious levels of censorship to make sure that no details of this get discussed in the open.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal

(Note the detail on 'sheep's eyeballs')

There are currently six thousand employees of British Aerospace (BAE Systems) out there working for the Saudis tinkering with their aeroplanes and keeping their air force at maximal readiness.

What does this entail?

There are no hard facts, any knowledge is strictly 'oral tradition'. However, I have it on reasonable authority (pub chat with people that work for the 'defence sector') that the Saudis have vast underground hangars chock full of the most modern BAE fighter jets. Because the Saudis have 'free oil' they also have these planes running in the hangars, absolutely totally ready to taxi out the door and onto the tarmac at a moments notice, 24/7, 365.25 days of the year.

The UK's RAF only has thirty thousand or so people in it, probably the bulk of them shuffle paperwork and are not front line. The UK Marines only number seven thousand. So this gives an idea of how large a commitment it is to have six thousand or so people from BAE Systems tinkering with planes in these Saudi bunkers.

Civilians in the UK have absolutely no idea about any of this. When they go to buy petrol they are thinking of what snacks to buy and why the other people in the forecourt are such chavs. They are not thinking about how they are indirectly complicit in the arms for oil (and backhanders) 'Al-Yamamah' deal. Or about how this has worked out for Iraq, Yemen or any of the other Saudi neighbours.

Anyway, it gets interesting soon for Saudi Arabia because they now have the Chinese customers wanting their own special favour. Thanks to The Donald the Chinese government want to buy oil in their own currency, the Yuan, bypassing the step of buying dollars first to then pay the Saudis for oil in USD.

Oil isn't the scarce reserve people think it is, supply has to be controlled so that profit can be made. If the Saudis don't want to take Chinese Yuan then they won't be supplying the largest importer of crude oil which is now China, not those fracking Americans. Iran will take the Yuan and I am sure Venezuela (who have the most proven reserves) will do to, given time and if the U.S. don't do a Libya on them. The Saudis certainly are living in interesting times.

Why is this article, which was the top ranked link on my list when I commented, no longer even in the top 200? What was the rationale for the mods (or algorithm) to censor this?

HN guidelines:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups...

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

The mods routinely put a penalty score on stuff that doesn't fit that.

I dont mean to be defeatist. What can I actually do (as a guy with no voice - literally due to visa issues) to help here beyond just sending aid (which I am not sure is even getting there). Sending aid still feels like "here's some money so I am no longer guilty"! Any ideas?

I always wondered why Germans in the 2nd world war didn't do anything to stop Hitler from committing genocide against the jews and others. But now I understand. Perhaps the biggest genocide of this century is happening now in Yemen. Not only we aren't trying to stop it, but we are sponsoring it and profiting from it. History will not be kind to us.

They didn't because most of them didn't know the details/the scale of what was happening and the extermination on the camps was only "discovered" after the camps were broken up by the opposing armies (depending on the camp)

"Discovered" because there were some reports of it, by one or two people, but I'm not sure how seriously they were taken.

I guess people concluded/knew some of this was happening, but the breakup of the camps was important for validation of the story.

(Edited given the responses)

None of these claims are true. Germans knew.

> The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler's Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand. They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them. They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians.

> The reports, in newspapers and magazines all over the country were phases in a public process of "desensitisation" which worked all too well, culminating in the killing of 6m Jews, says Robert Gellately. His book, Backing Hitler, is based on the first systematic analysis by a historian of surviving German newspaper and magazine archives since 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor.

It varied. Many people knew. But even a few years after the war ended, some people even in neighbouring countries (I am from a neighbouring country) had a hard time believing it could have happened at that scale. I think that changed as TV documentaries become a thing.

Either way, there was and still is great room to look the other way.

But regarding the situation in Germany and occupied areas during the war, you have to understand that by the time the death industry was in full swing, protesting openly in any way could have you yourself summarily executed or imprisoned - with unclear outcome.

There was an exception that proved* the rule.

In 1943 there was a hitch and the Nazis stepped back from mass murdering German women that dared to protest in their capital city.

The problem was that these good German women had Jewish husbands and weren't that keen on having their loved ones sent off for processing into lampshades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest

* The actual facts of this protest are not clear and there is lots to be learned about not just what happened but the stories told about this event.

That's the usual apology of the 60s through 80s, but it's simply not true.

Cardinal von Galen openly preached from the pulpit about the destruction of "unworthy life" (the T4 program) in 1941.

Concentration camp inmates often weren't strictly confined to some walled-off camp, but had to go to work brigade actions all over the countryside, where they had limited contact to the populace, who quite often slipped them a bit of bread or so.

Even when no such work was happening around the populace, it was an open secret. You simply cannot keep a lid on it when tens of thousands of Germans saw something keeping watch over the inmates, delivering goods to the camps, requesting slave labor from the camps, actually building the ovens, conducting trains to the camps, or with soldiers returning from the eastern front.

There was some knowledge, but it seems it wasn't so widespread. Also the Sonderkommandos were "rotated" (hint: they weren't relocated or fired) with some frequency

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6b1z61/did_t...

This is wrong. Yes, the Nazis built systems specifically designed to break up social cohesion with Jews, e.g. first deporting them from smaller cities to Ghettos, then deporting from Ghettos to KZs (concentration camps). And also yes, relatively few actually knew about the scale of operation themselves, but a large part of the population knew that many of those deported were killed and not just deported to work camps or whatever. It was not a well-kept secret. Also, NS propaganda was full of the "[Endlösung der] Judenfrage", eradication of Jews etc., though it did very intentionally leave execution open. I think it is fairly obvious that most didn't want to know anything about it, choosing to ignore what is happening.

US involvement is much larger then simply selling weapons.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/p...

UK government involvement and complicity is also much larger than the average Commonwealth citizen might think it is.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=uk+arms+sales+to+saudi+arabia...

The UK notably is the one country that doesn't adhere to the EU's resolution to suspend arms sales to KSA following the Kashoggi killing.

My understanding is that there has been, and for many years, a 'revolving door' between the Ministry of Defence and the various defence procurement companies & arms manufacturers. So, preserving defence company profits is, I think, a built-in to UK government policy. Further, since the whole area is shrouded in secrecy, it appears to be nigh on impossible to pour sunlight or cold water on what happens in this area.

If there is EU resolution to suspend arms sales why is Macron still refusing to abide and continuing to sell weapons to the Saudi regime: https://www.france24.com/en/20181026-macron-france-halt-saud...

Okay, that makes two. Quite sad. Reason is likely that the EU parliament's resolution on this is non-binding; the EU parliament doesn't have the power to just revoke export permissions already granted by member state's governments.

Saudi Arabia's artificial famine in Yemen has been subject to a worldwide media blockade for well over a year.[1][2] This has taken the shape of systematic under-reporting, preposterously low accounts of the death toll - usually treating the hundred of millions of children dead from famine as collateral damage, or avoiding the subject entirely - whitewashing of the motivations of the conflict and obscuring of its trajectory.

As Gary Brecher pointed out earlier this year, it's not that these stories don't sell. Mainstream news media was rife with accounts of starvation in war-torn Syria in years past:

> But the hundreds of thousands of verified, real famine and epidemic cases in Yemen get very little coverage. There’s nothing subtle about why not. The Syrian Sunni jihadis were de facto allies of the US/UK/Saudi/Israel/UAE bloc. So their suffering needed to be amplified. The Shia Yemenis can be slandered with one word: “Iran.” Anything touched by Iran, for Anglo media, is inherently evil, and anything done to those so tainted needs no further justification. The “Houthi,” i.e. the Shia of NW Yemen, are allegedly puppets or proxies for Iran, the Shia Mister Big of journalistic imagination, and therefore legitimate targets for even the nastiest war of extermination (such as by hunger and disease).

Now, at this late date, we have the New York Times's first real reckoning with Saudi Arabia's crimes. Not only that: there's meta-reporting on the story's traffic on Facebook[3], a self-lauding post about the NYT's audacity in shedding light on the tragedy[4], and an op-ed from Bernie Sanders[5]. All in the course of a few days!

What changed?

Consider this rare moment of introspection from the New York Times: "The tragedy in Yemen did not grow out of a natural disaster. It is a slow-motion crisis brought on by leaders of other countries who are willing to tolerate extraordinary suffering by civilians to advance political agendas. And yet somehow the vast catastrophe has failed to catch the world’s attention as much as the murder of a single man, the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul."

From a Saudi standpoint, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Khashoggi's murder. The Saudi Arabian legal system is not codified and has no system of judicial precedent; royal decree trumps the system as a whole (so long as it putatively follows Sharia Law); capital and corporal punishment are both common - beheading and flogging in particular. Freedom of speech and press are anathema.

From a worldwide media standpoint, Khashoggi's kidnapping murder was exceptional. He was one of their own. With his murder, the Saudis broke the devil's bargain they had maintained with worldwide media for years - the one that had (bafflingly) cast MBS as a great reformer and Saudi Arabia as an emerging Silicon Valley of the middle east. The question now is whether this contract can be rehabilitated - and if so, how.

The social dynamics of the reporting on this tragedy should serve as a warning to all of us. Stories like the OP don't get published in a vacuum.

[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/war-nerd-anglo-ameri...

[2] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/11/yemen-having-lost-the-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/business/facebook-blocks-...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/reader-center/yemen-photo...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/bernie-sanders-sa...

> preposterously low accounts of the death toll - usually treating the hundred of millions of children dead from famine as collateral damage

Quick google puts the population of Yemen at about 28 million. This immediately makes me suspect everything else in your comment is exaggerated or false.

Yeah, big typo there - should have said hundreds of thousands (as indicated in the sources cited, including the OP) - but too late to edit now :)

I'm not sure even World War II had a death toll that high.

50 Millions

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