Saudi Arabia’s War On Yemen Is Also A British War

Since when did the al-Saud dynasty cast itself as the historic protectors of the Sunni faith, the Guardian does not elaborate, but it may have been since the British Empire stumbled across the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud in the Arabian desert in need of British weapons just over a hundred years ago.

This is clearly the UK’s latest intervention in Yemen but this time it is allowing the venal Saudi theocratic state to ostensibly take the lead — whereas in the past, British military operations in Yemen were far more imperially audacious. For example, in North Yemen in the 1960’s it was the British which co-ordinated Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Shah’s Iran in utilising indigenous so-called “Yemeni royalists” against Egyptian backed republicans after the latter had overthrown the then medieval dictator, the Imam Muhammad al-Badr. The purpose of that intervention (or “deniable undercover operation” as one writer categorises it) was to stretch President of Egypt Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s military resources and. in the words of one British imperialist, to give him a “bloody nose.” [ii]

It was here in the mountains of North Yemen that the British revivied and re-introduced the use of mercenaries in the modern world after a 200 year absence. One could argue that there would never have been a Blackwater, Aegis Defence or any other mercenary company operating today had it not been for British involvement in North Yemen in the 1960’s.

Also in the 1960’s, British imperialists were unsuccessfully facing down a revolutionary war for liberation in South Yemen which finally achieved independence in 1967 after almost 130 years of British colonial rule. However, the British were not finished with South Yemen. In the 1970’s, when British imperialism was waging an anti-revolutionary war in Oman, predominately in the western province of Dhaffar, the British dropped more bombs on South Yemen in the 1970’s than it did in the entire Falklands War in 1982.

Much has been made of the supposed and tenuous relationship between the ‘Ansar Allah’ militia and Iran but nothing, as Hammond acknowledged, of the Saudi Arabian, British supplied weapons currently raining down on Yemen.

[link to www.mintpressnews.com]