The war in Yemen is a humanitarian crisis with long-term consequences for the U.S.

Back when the Great Penis Hunt of 1998 was going on, Osama bin Laden was blowing up embassies and laying plans for bigger things down the road. In the summer of 2001, when we were obsessing over yet another wandering dick, that one attached to Congressman Gary Condit, those plans were very close to fruition.

One of those places is Yemen, where a brutal war has been waged by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against Houthi rebels for going on four years now. It is often described as a civil war, which is how it began, but now it’s gone beyond that. It’s a complex tangle of national agendas, ancient feuds, and proxy bloodletting.

This was one of the poorest nations on earth to begin with and now it’s turned into a charnel house. Civilian casualties are staggering, the greatest number of them from Saudi airstrikes. There are millions of refugees both inside Yemen and fleeing the country, many of them to Somalia, which seems at this point to be a better bet for survival, which is saying something, too. As of January, according to the United Nations, the situation in Yemen is the world’s worst manmade humanitarian disaster. From the BBC:

More than 9,245 people have been killed and 52,800 injured since March 2015, the UN says.

The serious cholera outbreaks came with the civil war. Specifically, it came with the bombing. Saudi aerial bombardment of the national electrical grid in April 2015 left the Sana’a wastewater plant without power. The plant ran on alternate fuel until the end of May 2015, and was then forced to shut down. UNICEF was able to keep it sporadically operating with fuel donations, but they weren’t enough for full operations. Every time the plant shut down, untreated wastewater began to leak out into irrigation canals and drinking water supplies. By late summer 2015, the diarrhea outbreaks began. In October 2016, the first cases of cholera were reported. By the end of 2017, one million cases of cholera had been reported.
A million cases of cholera. In two years. In the 21st century.

These numbers will have their revenge.

Involvement with the corrupt House of Saud is bad policy for the American people. The Saudi government was aware of 9/11 and did nothing to warn the US or prevent it, They organized and financed ISIS in the bizarre hope of establishing a radical Sunni jihadist state on Iran’s border. The genocide of the Christian and non Sunni populations was the result. They have never been the real friend or ally of the United States. They palpably hate Christians. Sorry but most Americans are Christians. When the US was vulnerable, they had no problem embargoing oil. Today they won’t do it because they would starve and economically collapse without the dollars. If it were not for the dollars, they could not care less about the well being of the United States.

Iran is no friend or bargain either. Eventually the American people will come to realize that our involvement in these countries does nothing to enhance the security of the American people and creates endless, bitter, needless enemies. Islamic culture is collapsing into chronic violence and instability. It cannot cope with the challenge that practices, institutions and personal freedoms that constitute modernity. The US would be far better off if it disengaged from this unstable caldron and watch from a distance. The oil will find a way to our shores as long as we have dollars..

The anti-American, Iranian supported rebels are fixing to lose the decisive battle of the war, so the Left is trying to talk everybody out of winning.

The Saudi-UAE backed Government Coalition forces are sitting at the airport on the edge of the main port city of Hodeidah - the critical supply and financing source for the rebellion.

Time is on the side of the Coalition. The city is emptying out its residents at about 3,000 per day. About 75% have left already. In just a few weeks it will likely be effectively evacuated of civilians.

The siege of the Houthi rebel garrison will only grow tighter as there are less civilians caught in the net (not that the Saudis or Emiratis are particularly soft-hearted about civilian collateral damage). Artillery and airstrikes continue to bleed the Houthis. Support to the Houthis from Iran can no longer continue as it did, and may soon dry up totally, as Iran’s economy goes into crisis.

So with each week, the Coalition gets stronger as more siege and assault equipment arrives, and the rebels get weaker.

The rebels best hope is that media propagandists can get some international leftists to pull the Coalition off them, before they achieve a victory in Hodeidah, which would cut off supply to the Capital, and ultimately win the war.

If Clinton and Gore and the Democrats had kept our intelligence services intact and updated in the mid-to-late 1990’s, a lot of what happened in the 2000s would not have happened or would have happened in a different way and with a different effect.

The only way we are going to find out how Clinton and crew, both intentionally and unintentionally, made eunuchs of the US intelligence services and some of the military branches, is to see the classified policy documents that set the parameters of Clinton’s military and foreign policies.

The near total “stand-down” of our air defenses in 1994-95, after both a legitimate reappraisal of Cold War Soviet threats to the US by aircraft and missiles, and as a more laissez-faire Democrat Party attitude to U.S. involvement in foreign affairs, contributed to our total unpreparedness for a “9/11” type event.

There were NO men armed with anti-aircraft missiles on the top of the Pentagon on 9/11/01. Otherwise the airliner which literally flew over my house, would have been blasted out of the sky with much less loss of life. (About 100 men and women were literally blown apart or burn alive in the Pentagon).

The nearest armed US Air Force plane was from Langley AF Base in southern Virginia, approximately one hour away yet Andrews Air Force Base, right off the DC Beltway, was only about 5 fast flight minutes away for a jet or even a helicopter, AND THERE WASN’T ONE ARMED AIR FORCE AIRCRAFT ON ALERT, EVEN THOUGH THE PRESIDENT’S PLANES ALWAYS LANDED AND TOOK OFF FROM THERE.

A nearby standby airfield, Bolling AF, had nothing on it that could fly to protect the Capitol. Nothing out of Fort Belvoir or Ft. Meade, Dulles, Middle River/Baltimore, Md (Air National Guard with A-10’s at Glenn L. Martin’s facility), or even Baltimore-Washington International Airport (about 35 miles away).

The “READY ALERT” had been cancelled to the point that even armed planes out of Boston arrived too late at NYC to prevent any of the planes from hitting the Twin Towers.

The “Military” thinking that the Democrats/Clinton implemented after the 1992 presidential election literally stripped America’s airborne defense system down to nothing, and we paid a heavy price for this kind of sheer incompetence and stupidity.

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