Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
Jeff Deist and all them, Mises Institute, are having me out to give a talk about media stuff.
And that's November the 3rd down there in Lake Jackson.
If you like Ron Paul events and you're nearby, I'll see you there.
Sorry I'm late!
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR!
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing they army.
We killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying.
Say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Martha Mundy.
She is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the London School of Economics.
She's written this extremely important study for Tufts University and the World Peace Foundation.
It's called The Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War.
Welcome back to the show, Martha.
How are you?
Very well.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me again.
I'm very happy to talk with you again and such important work that you've done here.
People might remember.
I cite you fairly often.
I'm sorry?
One tries to document a bit seriously some of this stuff, yes.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's among the most serious issues on the face of the earth right now, so it's a good thing you do.
And I was going to say, I do refer to your work pretty often in coverage of the Yemen War because, and you talk about this in the study, too, but you taught me back two or three years ago now, I guess, about previous American IMF, World Bank, and whatever type international community sort of intervention in Yemen's economy had led this poorest country in the Middle East to be far more dependent on foreign food imports than they otherwise would have been as the Americans talked them out of growing their staples and talked them into growing cash crops for sale in the global market, which is fine, I guess, until America puts a blockade on you, and then you have a real problem here.
So I mean, as long as we're at it, you want to start with that and maybe tell us a little bit of background of American and IMF economic policy in the 90s and 2000s leading up to the current era.
Yes, it was the classic Washington consensus, as it's called, quote unquote, neoliberal policy, but applied to a country that has very, had two characteristics.
One, in the 1970s, still 85 percent of the population was living in rural settlements.
That's very high, even for that period.
And the rural settlements, the geography of the country, the reason it has sufficient rainwater is because it is a mountainous country in the middle massif of the country.
And the political ecology, the historical techniques that allowed for a landscape like that with summer, dominant summer, bits in the spring, but summer rains, not winter rains, to produce food and with crops that had been developed, seed types, over centuries, in particular, so sorghum based barley and only as a third alternative, corn or wheat, that complex, which was also a cattle, cow raising complex, was undercut by massive PL 480, cheap wheat from the 1980s, sorry, the 1970s onwards.
And policy, and it's not only in Yemen, of course, but agricultural policy of the Washington consensus was to push for high market value crops.
And that meant essentially undercutting the entire grain economy and the balances that were in that and the infrastructure, notably the terracing that had allowed that over the decades.
This was compounded, of course, by the integration for 20 years of Yemeni male rural labor in a very big way into the building of Saudi Arabia.
And then in 1990, with the Gulf War, over a million laborers were thrown out of Saudi Arabia, causing a major crisis that in many ways has continued until today.
But in several articles that if people look at the report, they can find the links to with agronomists, I detailed the impact of that Washington based consensus on the structures of production in Yemen.
I think that's doubled on myself.
I think that and I've also brought that out in those papers.
That's doubled by quite reactionary policies about the family and women that meant that there was very little structured support for women's employment in the north.
That wasn't so in the former PDRY, People's Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south in the old days.
And and thereby, you know, family planning for smaller families.
So there was an enormous with the integration of labor to in the oil economies, there was an enormous growth in population and a great decline in basic food self-sufficiency in Yemen over the couple of decades.
Is that that's that's the the the nut of the the core of what I was demonstrating.
But with agronomists down on the coast where you have big irrigated systems, the Washington policy was to put in foreign engineered diversion structures, which have proved to be extremely difficult to maintain.
But the aim was to produce high value fruit crops for the Saudi market in particular.
And you can just imagine where that has all gone under the pressure of this war.
And yes, so by the way, they they wanted and they pushed for sorghum and barley and cattle and other traditional Yemeni staples to be replaced with what coffee and you say fruit and what else?
Well, coffee and honey, but but also with the cheap weed.
I mean, in many ways, it wasn't replaced.
OK, many of the terraces up the mountains were abandoned.
What what has happened is in in the flatter areas of the highlands, then you've you've gone to irrigated wheat, which exacerbated the the drop in the water table and the shortages of the emerging shortages of groundwater.
So you've had a shift.
You've had an increase in wheat.
And you've also gone to the one crop that had for farmers that had no outside competitor, which was Qat or Qat Adulis, which is a mild amphetamine that is socially chewed.
The former regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh certainly, I mean, they would distribute it.
They would distribute it even in the demonstrations.
Certainly did nothing to to plan to to curtail or to regulate that market.
And it made sense for farmers because it could rescue them.
But that also is not a food crop.
And it greatly expanded alongside alongside wheat, which expanded.
There was some expansion of vegetable production in the highlands and in the lowlands, too, for the market.
And now it was the U.S. that encouraged them to switch to wheat.
Is that right?
I guess I'm a little confused because I think you were saying that the Americans were kind of dumping real cheap wheat in their kicked open door market.
That was so in the 70s and 80s, you remember, right?
It was called the P480 program.
There was a lot of American wheat that today Yemen is not importing that much wheat from America.
But that was the tipping balance in the 1970s and early 80s was that this wheat was, you know, practically free as opposed to, you know, the immense cost in labor and in cultivating other grain crops, of course.
And I don't mean cost in money, I mean cost in time and everything else.
And that facilitated the departure of male labor to Saudi Arabia for two decades.
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Well, again, people, you can read much more detail about all of this history and find the footnotes and all the rest of it, again, in this piece of strategies of the coalition.
So now let's talk a little bit about that.
You break the war down into three major stages.
I think you call them in the war at the very beginning, starting in March 2015, when the U.S. and Saudi launched this war.
You say in here that they spend at least the first two or three months focusing on attacking military targets.
Is that true?
Yes.
The war, you remember, started, what was it?
The 26th of March and April, May, June, and even into July was really a military war in so far as they were hitting of civilian targets, but it was a military war primarily.
And you can see that from the Yemen Data Project logs of what were the targets, actually.
I want to, there was also some spectacular shock and awe type bombing around Sana'a, which clearly was more designed to terrorize the population than to affect a particular military objective during that period.
The exception in that was from June.
The exception in that was from June, and there we, it's very clear when it's mapped, from June already in Saudi province, which is the far north butting the border of Saudi Arabia, they had, they already started attacking rural targets and agricultural targets, very much so.
But in the bulk of the country, that shift only occurred in this, began to occur in the second half of August.
But when one looks at September and October and carrying through that, the autumn, although there were negotiations that led to a lessening of attacks after October, in the autumn of 2015, there was a heavy focus on hitting civilian targets, on hitting markets, farms, animal production, food processing factories around the towns, roads that were relevant for transport, grain being transported.
And you also see, when you look at the runs on the hitting of fishing infrastructure, that it is then that that really took off.
So I argue, just looking at, trying to make sense, because I think that this war has been very illegible in a sense.
On the outside, one gets the occasional coverage of something horrible, an atrocity, but a kind of reading of what the coalition was trying to do, what kinds of strategies it was deploying in order to produce what it did and what people have, like Feierstein, the former American ambassador, would occasionally refer to as the collapse of Yemen.
What on earth that means, I think the word should be banned, but they didn't get surrender with the military.
And then they, from that period in the early autumn and through to the end of 2015, with the heavy bombing of, and it of course includes cultural monuments and mosques and graveyards and things of great cultural value, as well as what I have focused on, which is what's related to food production.
Then again, in the negotiations of 2016, when there was a real lull in coalition bombing, and that's shown in the graphs in the paper, in the report, then again, they didn't get the surrender on the part of Houthis, and it was then also parts of the army under Ali Abdullah Saleh.
They simply didn't get the kind of surrender that they wanted.
And part of the problem there, of course, is that UN Security Council Resolution 2216 actually required that the Houthis lay down all their arms and not the other side for a settlement.
So that backed the demands of the coalition that what they needed was essentially surrender.
And so then later, the third phase of the war is less kinetic.
The third phase of the war begins really from September 2016, as a kind of intensifying economic war.
It is true that from the beginning, the Saudis were permitted to inspect and blockade ships, even though in UN Security Resolution 2216, all that was specified were five named individuals as being under a ban on the import of arms.
It took the UN 18 months to get the UN verification and inspection mechanism up and running.
But even after UNVIM became operative, as it has been ever since, the permanent members of the UN Security Council still did not object to the Saudis inspecting themselves, also boats.
And so you've had an economic war that is what is often referred to in the press as forms of blockade.
But in the autumn of 2016, and perhaps most importantly, the Central Bank of Yemen that had been paying the government, the salaries of all government employees until that time, was moved to Aden and severe banking restrictions were placed on the remaining banks of Yemen.
And government employees have not been paid since that date, which is the beginning of a double pincer in the economic war.
Most recently, we've seen a vast collapse, a huge collapse in the value of the currency over the last two months, basically last two months.
And that is what is driving the real panic in the humanitarian community about the degree of possible famine in the country at the moment.
Now, the cholera epidemic really could be traced directly to the move of the central bank there, right, where all the sanitation workers were then fired because there was no one to pay their salaries up in the north of the country.
Many people have continued to work, believe it or not.
Well, I can believe that they're trying.
Yeah, I mean, you got to do what you got to do, right?
But yeah.
But the coalition has also hit sanitation works below Hodeidah, around Sana'a, in Sada repeatedly.
So I think it is there, too.
One would have to chart, which I haven't done in detail, we'll have to chart all the strikes on water installations over time.
Well, I know just recently Amnesty, I think, complained that they had struck a water treatment facility in Sada again, and as they keep hitting it over and over and over again, and these groups were complaining that stop pretending this is some kind of accident.
You can't do this.
Yes.
And they hit south of Hodeidah, the main sewage and water plants, a month, six weeks ago.
I'd have to check exactly.
I think it may be given in the notes in the report.
And so there has been deliberate, I think one can say, you know, targeting of water facilities in various parts of the country.
But also, one should bear in mind that for the very poor, a lot of the access to drinking water was through oil-fueled pumps, and then they simply don't have the money to run those pumps, nor the fuel.
And that has also, of course, hit agriculture in a big way, the fuel shortages.
And so then they are using very shallow, you know, lifting up with buckets, very shallow oil-based wells, and those are often polluted these days.
So I think it's a combination.
Plus, there has been direct hitting of cholera clinics.
But in Saada, in Abs, up in the north, there has been, you know, hitting of cholera, actually identified cholera clinics.
Right.
And now, and by the way, as long as we're on the cholera thing, I wanted to point out, because I've been interviewing as many experts as I can about this, from Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam and all kinds of other things.
The UN, McGoldrick, I think was his name, the UN guy.
And so I guess it came out in the, you know, discussions over the last year.
I'm sorry?
He's the UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator.
Yeah, exactly.
Jamie McGoldrick.
And so it came out, I forget which all exactly, which interviews, but it came out sort of over the last year that the often repeated phrase, a million cases of cholera was really quite inflated, that they were saying that, and I think it was McGoldrick who said this, that the categorization was, well, anybody with diarrhea, we're calling it cholera because there's no way to really test and we have to assume the worst and that kind of thing, which is fair as far as how you deal with the situation on the ground.
But I worry that's the kind of thing that ends up being, you know, could end up being used against anti-war people that, you know, numbers come off as inflated when the reality is so horrible.
There's no need for anyone to exaggerate.
It's still obviously in the hundreds of thousands of people who were infected with cholera last year, and there's a whole new epidemic that's ramping up again right now.
But I just want to mention that I think it's important because people still try to say that, you know, oh, come on, you know, Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton, they didn't starve 500,000 Iraqis.
They only starved 300,000 Iraqis.
And, you know, people want to quibble about stuff like that and it can be a detriment, you know?
Well, that's why I'm trying to be, you know, as clear as possible from the nature of the sources that we're mapping and not making, you know, wild claims.
Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, yeah, I didn't mean to put those words in your mouth.
No, but I think that there is, well, why should I be doing this kind of thing?
Because there is a problem of knowledge production in the case of Yemen, as often there is in war situations.
But it was compounded by the withdrawal of any support to the Yemeni ministries in Sana'a by the international organizations from the beginning of the war.
Now they're back in the humanitarian guise.
But, you know, that is a major issue.
And I think people who are trying to contest this war should bear that in mind that there are great problems in knowing, OK, in the data, in the information.
And I think people in the NGOs, be it Oxfam, people in the OCHA, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, are doing their best now.
But just as, you know, the press fixed on 10,000 were killed, which then sometimes goes down to 7,000, which is then we get, you know, escalation on the other side of a million, which doesn't really mean anything.
As you just said, it could be people with diarrhea and bad water, for sure.
And yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the 10,000 thing, because that's the error of the other direction, where two and a half years ago, the UN estimated that at least 10,000 people had been directly killed in the violence, in airstrikes and this kind of thing, never even mind the excess death rate from deprivation or any of that, but just in direct.
And that was two and a half years ago, but that was the last official number.
So you can read it in the Wall Street Journal or anywhere else.
That's the highest estimate that you almost ever find in American media when it must be in the high tens of thousands by now, if not hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war since then.
And the problem is, you know, severe malnutrition affects the growth of a child and will affect into the next generation.
So you don't have to have starvation to have, you know, terrible damage.
And you don't have to have the person die of cholera, particularly children.
OK, I mean, adults can usually recover because their body is formed.
But it's staggering what this represents for the children and that whole generation and not, of course, not going to school in general.
But even with childbirth and so forth, it can carry into the next generation.
The studies begin to show.
So I think that the scale of the disaster should not be minimized.
But one has to be extremely careful about numbers on both sides of the fence.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
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All right.
So and now, I mean, so this is to the real point here.
You're talking about, you know, the next generation, the amount of suffering that people are going through here is going to be reverberating for decades into the future for the people of Yemen.
And, you know, for partisan reasons, mostly and other reasons, this war is just, you know, almost completely banned from American media.
It's just not discussed to any great degree.
Of course, the Khashoggi thing has gotten a thousand times the coverage that the war in Yemen has gotten.
And yet, you know, I'm reading in this in this thing, and we all know from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, from Iona Craig and The Intercept and from all over the place, we know that the U.S. is involved in the targeting, the intelligence and every bit of the war, not just the refueling, but in helping the Saudis with every bit of their air war here.
And I'm reading in this piece about, oh, I want to mention again real quick what you said about the currency's collapse.
We all know what that means, what hyperinflation means for anyone with any savings, any wealth whatsoever.
It's completely evaporated.
It can happen overnight.
But then you're talking in here, I'll be quiet in just a second, but you talk in here about bombing flocks of sheep, bombing cattle, bombing the irrigation systems, bombing farms, where there's just no question that these are just outright, absolute illegal war crimes deliberately targeting the civilian food infrastructure of this poorest country in the Middle East.
This is not something Saudi is doing.
This is something that the USA is doing to these people.
Yes.
And I think the parallels with, not so much the bombing in that sense, but the economic war on Iraq, the Iraq sanctions regime, should be borne in mind.
Unfortunately, the UNSC permanent members have an extraordinary power to give proxies the rights to do things that no state could do normally.
I mean, it doesn't really give them the rights, but there's a lack of accountability through that proxy authorization.
So yes, the US is clearly, and the UK, clearly involved in the control rooms.
I just recently read a congressional report of August in which one got one denial after the other that, no, we don't select the targets.
We do this, we do that, we do that, but we just don't select the targets.
And when we refuel, we don't know what they went and did.
It was as Congress members were calling the Department of Defense and others for statements.
So I don't think it's only the bombing.
It's the extraordinary kind of proxy delegation of powers of war that, as you just said, are completely illegal under international humanitarian law.
But who is holding them to account when you've had that proxy authorization and some of the permanent members are behind the scenes involved in the selection of targets?
Yeah, that's the problem with world government.
When you need the US to be the world policeman, then that just means the US exempts itself from all its own laws.
We see this with UN peacekeepers selling children and God knows what all over the place.
You know, when you're the ultimate authority, there is no authority over you.
Well, that also has structures which need to be better understood in the hope that someday one could reform them.
Or just abolish them all.
But yeah.
So I'm sorry, I'm interrupting you and I completely forgot what I was going to say.
Oh, I know.
Tell me, Martha, as much as you could about the source for this quote.
Once we control them, we will feed them.
It is a very, very senior Saudi prince, okay?
Said that to you?
I cannot say because, I mean, I know he said that to a colleague of mine, but because it was off the record, we cannot quote it on the record.
But I think it expresses very much what one is seeing there.
But I know perfectly well who said it and in what context and at what time.
Yes.
All right.
Well, that's good enough to go in my book.
But to protect my colleague, I cannot tell you.
And it would quite amaze you if you knew who had said it.
Yes.
Well, I bet I'd be shocked, but not surprised.
You know, we've seen these, there's these quotes.
And I think actually you link to this in your footnotes, in your study here, is this story, Bin Salman threatens to target women and children in Yemen, despite international criticism there.
Yes.
I mean, that's another important leak, you know, through the press.
Yeah, yeah.
The quote was, we want to leave a big impact on the consciousness of Yemeni generations.
We want their children, women, and even their men to shiver whenever the name of Saudi Arabia is mentioned.
Well, yeah.
You got to hand it to them.
It sounds like they're waging an effective war for that.
I leave it to your readers.
But I think it's a really important thing.
I'm an American citizen.
I think it's a really important thing that we react to this, because essentially, it will come back to haunt ordinary people in the United States.
It's not enough to say, you know, it's jobs for arms.
It's really not enough.
Yeah, especially for the low, low amount of money.
They're even supposedly talking about $110 billion, which is completely inflated anyway.
But that's chump change.
That's nothing.
You know, our government wastes that on tires for planes they never use or something.
You know, it doesn't amount to a thing to the American economy.
For that to be the excuse for this policy is just...
And of course, that's not the real reason.
That's just the excuse.
Yes, you remember when we first met in my counterpunch article, I speculated on or questioned what the wider strategy was.
And I don't think I was very wrong.
And there's an amazing amount of, between the Chinese and even the Russians, I read the other day, let alone CENTCOM down in Aden of investment in bases around the base of the Red Sea and strategic contests.
So clearly this is, this has a much wider, poor Yemen.
I mean, this has a much wider global strategic contest aspect to it, this war that's simply not addressed at all with, as you just said, by, you know, the promises, because in fact, even 110 hasn't been delivered.
But yeah, this is a much bigger thing that relates to US, China, you know, in the long term, for sure.
Britain's declining empire and its relations with the Gulf States and all that nasty bundle.
Because otherwise one cannot understand what's going on.
There would be a war of this ferocity in a place that where a political settlement is perfectly possible, totally possible.
Right.
Well, and think of how unnecessary that is when it would be simple enough to have whatever, I'm sure they already have whatever treaties about keeping the Persian Gulf and keeping the Red Sea open for business.
You know, keeping the Bab-el-Mandeb open and keeping the Suez Canal open.
That's all under international agreements already anyway, right?
There's no reason to think that, oh, China's going to take it away from us.
No, but that seems to be a bit the madness flavor of the month.
Yeah.
Same thing for the Afghans, too.
You know, we talk about Taliban this and democracy that and the coalition government.
All of it's completely irrelevant.
All it's about is just keeping the Bagram Air Base there in case China ever wants to develop any of their investment properties or this kind of thing.
And they're completely blatant about it, too.
They admit it, too.
However many Pashtuns have to die for some ridiculous geostrategic, you know, game being played between America, Russia and China.
Oh, wow.
That's how it is.
Yes.
We hope we don't go into, I saw that Bolton wanted to tear up nuclear agreements with Russia was on the front of the paper today.
Anyway, yes.
Madness.
I mean, madness.
Yeah.
All right.
So and I'm sorry, I won't keep you much longer.
I just want to ask you one more thing.
If you could elaborate a little bit about the fishing.
I know that there have been quite a few different attacks on fishermen lately, just in the last what, six weeks or something.
There have been numerous major attacks.
But then your your study actually begins with this anecdote about these 18 fishermen who were captured and then murdered.
17 of them died, according to the reports, which then, of course, the coalition denied.
But that was an Emirates gunship.
I think that there are more, for example, the Yemen Data Project is a log of bombing.
And I think quite a few of the deaths out to sea naturally escape it.
Naturally escape it.
That's why we were a colleague.
His report should be out in a week or so was working, did field work, did interviews with fishermen down in Hodeidah, also with the ministry, with security officials and of the ports and also with merchant fish merchants.
And so that report for which we prepared Cynthia and I some the three maps should be out next week.
And I think that there's a lot more of that kind of death that doesn't really hasn't really gotten recorded.
And the coalition said, you know, immediately did not tend to deny as in that report.
But some of this, you know, if you think about the fishermen off Gaza, there's some of this is it's not so shocking because the limits on fishing, the Emirates have an interest in fish stocks, too, although they do industrial fishing, not artisanal fishing.
And some of it seems really very vengeful against these poor men, really.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's one of these Stalin's millions of statistic and but one's a tragedy kind of thing.
We see this with Khashoggi.
I mean, how is this for an anecdote?
Just pretend that there was a Washington Post reporter on board with these fishermen when they capture them, interrogate them, set them free.
And then as they sail, as they're sailing away, go ahead and shoot them all with a rocket and kill them anyway.
Shoot them in the back.
I mean, this kind of thing.
Well, just think if Iran or Russia did that in some conflict that they were in, what America would have to say about that.
But when it's our side doing it, there's no big deal or or doesn't really exist.
And then, as you say, it's just what it really indicates is this economic war where they're they're trying to shut down the people of it's like a medieval siege warfare where they're blatantly trying to starve the population out.
Yeah.
Or or to read in the dream, because I mean, if one looks at Israel and Gaza, you've seen, you know, things that are not totally dissimilar, although you have a huge international presence to mean, you know, in Gaza in a way that I mean, in terms of per head of population.
Right.
And and programs.
But there's a crazy dream that, you know, people will, quote unquote, collapse or surrender if you if you may, if you starve them, right, that they won't be able to or they won't be able to resist.
And it's noteworthy.
I just I mean, what is extraordinary is the political awareness of the Yemenis.
There were huge demonstrations in Sana'a, but also in tides of all places and with echoes even in this in the south with a new slogan called the the authority.
Yeah.
That means the revolution of the hungry or of the not quite starving, but of the of the famished, the revolution of the famished.
And and with thousands of people on the street about a fortnight ago.
And so the Yemenis are aware of what and they have a political they develop political languages to express it.
That does not get translated in our, you know, our Western press.
I didn't see any echo of that in the Western press.
I just saw some pictures in the in some of the Arab press.
Right.
Well, I know that Nasser Araby, who the New York Times used to see fit to publish all the time when he was covering the war against AQAP there in the early Obama years.
He certainly told me that the people of Yemen, I guess of Sana'a, call it the American-Saudi war.
They're under no illusions at all.
Who's behind this and and what's going on here?
And so the American people may be kept in the dark, but the victims are not.
And the consequences of this?
I mean, who knows?
But they're going to last.
No question about that.
As he said, literally for generations, I don't think we should absolve the French and the British, because without them and their permanent members on the UN Security Council and the British hold a pen on the UN Security Council, too.
I don't think we should we should we should we should we should we should we should we I don't think we should we should absolve them.
And they were, after all, the former colonial power at all.
The reaction and there has been considerable reaction.
The European Parliament has produced very strong statements.
There have been strong statements in the UK Parliament.
France has been fairly supine.
But all power to those in the American Congress and Senate who are trying to call into question this stuff.
Yeah, well, it is getting better politically here slowly.
And by the way, yeah, I mean, we're far from a solution, but there are some that are trying, as you mentioned there.
But now in terms of the UK and the French, I've read, you know, that they're still selling bombs aplenty there.
But do you know any more about the role that they're playing?
I mean, and you mentioned also diplomatically how powerful they are on the UNSC and all that.
I think it's particularly the British that's working with the Americans very closely.
Macron, being a banker, is interested in arms sales.
But I don't think that the French, aside from not dissenting, are playing a major role in this.
I think it's the British who are most important diplomatically, as well as with regard to arms sales after the Americans.
But for example, the Dutch, the Germans, etc., have tried time and again in the UN Human Rights Council and other places to get statements or actions, and they get slapped down.
So there is division.
And there's great, great awareness in the EU Parliament.
But of course, that's a purely advisory body, speaking of democracies.
It's not a voting body.
All right, Martha.
Well, I'll let you go.
I really appreciate your time, especially on a Saturday here to talk about this.
Sorry to bring you out on a Saturday.
Oh, yeah.
No, no problem.
I'm working 12 hours a day, as always.
I really do appreciate it very much, though.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
And I hope people read the report.
Yeah, me too.
And I just want to talk about that a little bit more.
First of all, Martha Mundy, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
And this study, it's not that long.
It's 23 pages, including the title page and everything.
You guys will blaze right through it.
It's so important.
There's so much important stuff in here.
And it's drawn from hard data.
And all the data sets are available and explained very well and everything.
It's called The Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War, Aerial Bombardment and Food War by Martha Mundy.
And it's written for Tufts University and the World Peace Foundation.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
