The corporate media features stories this week about how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave out top secret plans for bombing of Yemen to people unauthorized to hear them. Those same media fail, however, to mention the big issue involved—the fact that the U.S. bombing itself is a crime.
The war on Yemen, including the U.S. airstrikes and the humanitarian crisis they are causing, has obliterated the country’s health care system and forced millions from the homes they received during the short-lived socialist years of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen from 1967 until the 1980’s.
Since the U.S., Saudi, and Israeli-backed attacks and sanctions against the young republic resulted in the destruction of socialism, the Yemeni people have paid an awful price. The latest rounds of U.S. bombings are worsening the crisis in that country.
Also destroyed since socialism was defeated in that country is the extensive education system that began to be built during those socialist years—a system that wiped out illiteracy all over the country and settled jobless people in working-class jobs in the oil and other industries. An entire generation of people who, as a result of that education, can still read and write today is being replaced with generations suffering, once again in Yemen, the effects of illiteracy.
This has particularly impacted women who were the major gainers from the literacy campaigns of the past. During the socialist years women traveled to the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic to receive training as doctors and went back home to deliver quality health care.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, challenged U.S. bombing of Yemen back in 2017, when it was carried out during the first Trump administration. This time around, however, he has limited his criticisms to Hegseth spilling the beans about a recent bombing campaign without calling into question the bombing itself.
In 2017 Murphy forcefully made the point that the Trump administration did not have congressional authorization to make war on the Yemeni people. The way in which the U.S. was making war on the Yemenis at that time was by providing Saudi Arabia with the weapons it was using to destroy the country. The Saudi ruling class was not satisfied with all the oil they controlled. They wanted what the Yemenis had too.
At the time Murphy correctly castigated the Trump administration for the mass starvation caused by U.S. support for the Saudi military campaign in Yemen. The Saudi and U.S. campaign against Yemen that he opposed at the time would not have been possible in 2016 had the Soviet Union still been in existence. The strong support of the Soviet Union for developing socialism in Yemen also allowed the GDR and Cuba to extend their support to the Yemeni people.
As it did in Afghanistan when there was an attempt to establish socialism in South Yemen, the U.S. employed sanctions, boycotts, secondary boycotts and covert and overt attacks to overthrow it.
The people of South Yemen continue to suffer from this until this day. Outbreaks of cholera were already a problem in 2017 and are expected to intensify in direct proportion to bombing by the U.S., the Saudis, Israel and NATO countries.
The bombing of Yemen blocks humanitarian aid, as did much of what Israel did, with U.S. supplied weapons, in Gaza. Bombings cut off fuel and water to the people. Children die when bombing raids create both starvation and disease in Yemen.
Murphy talked about disease, specifically cholera in Yemen, when he addressed the Congress during the first Trump administration:
“My colleagues, cholera is a truly awful way to die. It is a manmade disease, a man-caused disease that this world could easily eradicate from existence. You become so dehydrated, you vomit so much liquid, your body dispenses so many nutrients, so much water through unending diarrhea that your body is thrown into shock. You literally die from vomiting and diarrhea, sometimes over the course of hours, sometimes over the course of days, sometimes over the course of weeks.”
The bombing campaigns also cripple water treatment facilities that need electrical power. This hampers the ability to treat water that supplies the cities in South Yemen. Essentially the water available to the people then becomes poisonous. Having no choice, people drink it or ingest it in other ways, including when cooking food. The inability to treat water causes a flow of feces and sewage into the cities and towns, intensifying the outbreaks of disease.
All of this is particularly tragic when you consider the things the people of Yemen lost when socialism was defeated in their country.
Already mentioned was the massive literacy campaign which is critical to solving the problems of any modern society.
The Yemeni people had a health care system that was described in 1980 by UNESCO as the best in the entire Arabian peninsula. There were hospitals and clinics across the country and healthcare provided by doctors, many of them newly-educated women, was free. Medicine was also free. That healthcare system, with the demise of socialism, was eventually replaced with widespread outbreaks of cholera, poisoned water supplies, and cities choking in sewage.
Millions are now homeless. During the socialist period the homes of wealthy people, not counting the first homes in which they could choose to live, were nationalized and rented by the state at very low costs to the poor. This was done in addition to construction of new public housing. Bombing campaigns have destroyed much of that housing.
The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen could not withstand the teaming up against it of powerful states like Saudi Arabia backed by the United States. The sanctions, a powerful weapon imperialism uses against developing and socialist countries were too much for the Yemenis to bear. Countries backing the Yemeni people, countries like Cuba and the GDR, were also themselves targeted for attacks by imperialism. Their home-grown enemies of socialism and the resulting civil war and interference from the U.S. backed Saudis combined to plunge the country into crisis
The struggles of the Yemeni people continue, however. They can be expected to resist attacks from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Israel and any of the NATO countries that join in the bombing and war-making against them.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is clearly a dangerous, lying man to have in charge of the Pentagon. Who can blame the Yemeni people, however, for considering as irrelevant whether Hegseth leaked information about what U.S. bombers were about to do.
For them, the critical truth is that the bombing by the U.S. and its allies must come to a halt. The job of the media in the U.S., a job they have not yet done, is to share that truth with the people of the U.S.
As with all op-eds, this article is the opinion of the author.
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