Blood Wealth: There’s a Reason Why Washington and London Won’t Quit the Business of Killing

On August 23, a coalition of Arab countries, led by Saudi Arabia, carried yet another barbaric bombardment in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, which resulted in the death of at least 35 people.

On July 18, at least 20 civilians fell victims of a Saudi air strike in the Yemeni Taiz Governorate, as it’s been reported by the Daily Mail with a special reference to the United Nations.

Since the beginning of the civil war in Yemen in 2014, more than 10,000 civilians perished in the poorest country of the Arabian Peninsula, while another 3 million were displaced. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia unleashed an armed aggression against this state without any sort of approval from the UN, but with an extensive amount of military and political support coming from the United States and Britain. Such acts of aggression have for a long time been a trademark of Washington, but now it’s allies seem to be willing to follow in its footsteps. The Saudi coalition carries on air strikes against targets of the Houthis resistance to this very day, which results in massive civilian casualties, with hundreds of victims being added regularly to the rising death toll.

As a result of continuous attacks carried out by Saudi armed forces schools, hospitals and other vital civil infrastructure are being routinely reduced to the ground, while electricity and drinking water supplies are getting increasingly scarce even in large cities. With the silent approval of Washington and London, the Saudi coalition is taking every effort to make sure that no Yemeni national survives this conflict, using the tactics that can only be described as genocidal.

And the list of war crimes committed by the Saudi coalition is getting large by the day largely due to the ever-growing flow of various weapons sold to Riyadh by the United States, Britain and other Western powers. Today, the British and American arms manufactures receive fabulous profits from their indirect participation in the Yemeni military campaign.

Saudi Arabia alone in recent years received over a hundred billion worth of arms from American military manufacturers, while Donald Trump pledged to carry on the business tactics pursued by his predecessors by signing a deal on the shipment of another 110 billion worth of arms to Riaydh.

The latest annual report issued by the British Committee for Defense and Security shows that in 2016 alone the UK received 6 billion pounds from the sale of arms, with a half of this some coming from to the Middle East, where violent conflicts are raging. For more than 10 consecutive years the UK remains the second largest arms supplier in the world after the United States.

At the same time, London keeps training pilots for the Saudi Air Force, the very people that would bomb Yemeni residential areas. The British Supreme Court, which usually defends “human rights”, did not even want to consider the formal appeal issued by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), which had previously urged the kingdom to put an end to the supply of military equipment to Saudi Arabia.

In turn, Amnesty International would accuse the United States and Britain for handing over weapons to Saudi Arabia for it to be able to carry on its aggression against Yemen since March 2015, delivering more than five billion dollars worth of weapons.

The fact that for London any armed conflict is perfect opportunity to sell its weapons is vividly confirmed by the recently declassified documents of the National Archives of the United Kingdom showing, in particular, that the British government considered Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to be an “unprecedented opportunity” to obtain super profits from the sale of weapons to the countries of the Persian Gulf . Back in the day UK’s Minister for Defence Procurement, Alan Clarke would use exact same words in his letter to British PM of the time Margaret Thatcher, noting that this was an unprecedented opportunity for DESO (the Department of Defense Export Administration).”

As declassified documents show, “an unprecedented opportunity” for Clark was the expected response of the US and its allies to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the outbreak of military conflict in the region. The fact that wars have always been considered as a chance to sell more arms to other states has recently been confirmed by The Guardian.

Mind you that last May former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted that the US invasion of Iraq launched in 2003 had nothing in common with establishing democracy in this country, the goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein and establish a pro-Washington regime in this country . This invasion would then result in a civil war that gave birth to ISIS.

Of the other declassified documents of 1983, it follows that Britain had not interest in stopping Iraqi production of chemical weapons, since British exporters were involved in this trade, according to the documents of the UK Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

So, if for residents of the Middle East wars means death, poverty and grief, Washington and London believe that wars is a perfect opportunity to get even richer at the expense of somebody else’s blood!

Vladimir Odintsov, expert politologist, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.“