By Robert Barsocchini
HuffPo reports that US intelligence says:
Iranian representatives discouraged Houthi rebels from taking the Yemeni capital…
Iran is not directing the rebels, who follow a different branch of Shiite Islam than Iran’s leaders and are believed to care more about corruption and the distribution of power in Yemen than the spread of Shiite influence across the Middle East.
“It remains our assessment that Iran does not exert command and control over the Houthis in Yemen,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, told The Huffington Post.
“It is wrong to think of the Houthis as a proxy force for Iran,” a U.S. intelligence official told The Huffington Post.
These judgements by US intelligence confirm a prior assessment by Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges, made over a week ago:
“Houthis are not Shiite [they are Zaidi], and it is totally incorrect to identify them as an Iranian proxy force.”
It is suspected that Iran has provided limited material support for the Houthis, but leaked US cables state that most intelligence believes the Houthis bought their weapons not from Iran but on the black market, a market largely stocked with US imports and weapons from state arsenals looted due to US aggression campaigns. Indeed, the US, the world’s biggest arms dealer, has, when it found doing so advantageous, provided lethal or material support both for Iran (illegally) and the Houthis themselves.
Though eight countries, including Russia, China, and India, are rescuing thousands of their nationals, as well as foreign nationals, including Americans, from the Yemen war-zone, the US still refuses to do so, ignoring lawsuits trying to force Obama to allow a rescue operation for the 3-4,000 Americans trapped there.
In theory, rescuing Americans is exactly the kind of thing our armed forces, which wouldn’t exist without us, are supposed to be used for, but in practice they are simply used by US elite sectors to expand US hegemony through violence and terror, such as by invading Iraq.
Instead of rescuing US citizens trapped in Yemen, the US has been rescuing Saudi bombers, refueling Saudi bombers, directing Saudi bomb-attacks from within and outside of Saudi Arabia, and re-arming Saudi Arabia with bombs and ammunition – all openly announced by US officials in public statements. Such behavior is standard operating procedure and unsurprising to people who seriously follow US actions.
Obama has been planting and detonating explosives in Yemen throughout his time in power, working to keep the former US-backed dictator, whom the Saudis are now trying to re-install, in place. A week after being awarded the Nobel “peace” prize, Obama planted a banned cluster bomb (an industrial version of the type the Boston Bombers attempted to improvise) in a Yemeni farmer’s market and detonated it, blasting shrapnel through and murdering 44 civilians, including at least 14 women, five of them pregnant, and 21 children. Whether Obama would have carried out this act of terrorism if it were his daughters and wife in the line of fire and shrapnel remains unanswered but predictable.
For its part, Saudi Arabia has stressed that its aggression against Yemen is in line with Wahhabi Sharia law, an ideology traditionally supported by the US and known for its brutality, particularly against women and civilians, though the US kills far more.
Indeed, with the US coordinating its targets, Saudi Arabia this weekend carried out a bombing that killed 46 civilians and zero armed forces, adding to thousands already killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.
The extremist Wahhabi/Sharia-law ideology is favored by groups such as the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS, the first two of which have been openly supported by the US, and the latter knowingly, though purportedly unintentionally, strengthened through US arming of terrorists in Syria.
Indeed, due to the Saudi-led axis-of-dictators’ campaign against Yemen, al Qaeda is making unprecedented gains in that country, a fact well known to the US and its Wahhabi proxy, Abdulaziz. The presence of the Houthi had been blocking al Qaeda from obtaining a foothold.
Historian and US-empire expert William Blum, in a recent interview, stressed that Washington simply acts to expand its empire, already the biggest in history. When that is understood, there is nothing confusing or contradictory about US policy.
Author and UK-based colleague on Twitter. Author is a regular contributor to Washington’s Blog and Counter Currents, and writes professionally for the film industry.