That’s because anyone who has been paying attention to geopolitics over the last two years knows why the US is bombing Yemen…
Kids were killed but the chat leak was funny and that’s what has been the people talk about instead.
Imagine being the poor family, who is stuck living in Yemen because they cannot afford to relocate, whose kid has died by Trump’s bombing. Then all you see in the news about how they joked with emojis in chat killing your kid. “Oh your kid was killed in that emoji airstrike.” Tell me why the fuck you would grow up anything but radicalized.
Yeah, just to be clear. One of the targets hit was a residential high rise building. Local authorities are reporting over 50 people killed.
The target was one, alleged, terrorist and the building, according to the Houthi PC small group message log, was the building of the target’s girlfriend.
So, the US just killed at least 50 civilians in order to kill a single target. Just to give you a rough idea of the kind of ‘collateral damage’ that is acceptable.
Apparently the USA considers this legally acceptable “Proportionality” according to the wording of the Geneva Conventions, and therefore not a war crime. It is a highly bullshit interpretation according to many lawyers, but they have not been dragged to the Hague over it yet and probably never will be for many reasons. For one because nobody ever takes a swing at the USA in the ICC over anything due to political fallout, 2 because most other countriea are guilty of similar crimes and 3 because it is just too gosh darned convenient for the world power nations to be able to bomb apartments to hopefully kill one guy who they’re pretty sure is a terrorist to keep their shipping lanes open for business. I actually wonder if there is any real legal line of Proportionality that could be crossed, one terrorist in a fully-booked children’s hospital: still OK?
https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/proportionality
Personally I think any extrajudicial executions are unacceptable. If the guy is a terrorist then arrest, try and convict him. If that’s “too hard” then the answer is not to send a drone strike at an apartment building, or a wedding, or a hospital.
kill one guy who they’re pretty sure is a terrorist to keep their shipping lanes open for business.
How does killing a terrorist keep shipping lanes open?
Like for real? Or is a sort of retorical question of how could killing one individual possibly lead to a substantive enough change in the political landscape?
I’m trying to emphasize what matters to the American people. Collateral damage of 50 people to kill 1 is not what they care about.
Maybe they will care about national security?
The thing is, murdering civilians in Yemen is what creates national security threats! People just think we can bomb and bomb our way through civilizations and we’re the good guys when they get pissed about it.
To the average American, these people don’t even exist. Tbf, the average person isn’t going to keep track of everything that’s happening in every country. But like, as a general rule of thumb, if you can’t name a country’s capital off the top of your head, you probably shouldn’t be bombing it. Unfortunately, people in the US will jump on board of just about any conflict anywhere in the world if someone on TV tells them to. Nobody reads books, nobody knows shit about history, nobody thinks about the future repercussions, it’s all just stimulus-response, and the news always includes or cuts off context based on what makes military action seem more justified, because they’re entirely bought off.
Somewhere along the line, all the foreign policy decisions were moved from the democratic sphere to unelected “experts” acting often without the public even knowing what they’re doing. If the US can just bomb anywhere it likes without the public even knowing about it, it can then paint retaliation as aggression and use that as a justification for further bombing. You can see it all over this thread, “dOn’T tOuCh OuR bOaTs” as if we hadn’t been bombing Yemen long before that started, and as if the attacks on shipping were not a retaliation for the genocide of Palestinians.
We are well and fully cooked. The vast majority of Americans are effectively bloodthirsty psychopaths who don’t even realize it. When Americans don’t know anything about a country or what’s going on, many just default to being pro-war. It’s completely insane. I wish we could at least keep our shittiness contained to ourselves, but we just throw our garbage all over the world to the point that it’s inescapable.
Legally, terrorism is defined as a non-state person or group wielding violence. So our government can carry out any number of atrocity, rack up the corpses by the hundreds, thousands, or even millions; and still it would not be terrorism.
We get this definition of terrorism from the British legal system. Ironically, George Washington (and anyone else who fought in the revolutionary war) were terrorists. You can find British newspapers from the era describing them as such.
Houthis are the only international actor acting in open military opposition to the genocide in Gaza. They are doing their best to enforce a shipping blockade pending a cessation of Israeli war crimes. The US obviously wants the genocide to continue, as well as all shipping trade through the area.