Worst in human history

The Guardian now reports that the cholera outbreak in Yemen is the worst one in human history.

One of the doctors described it thus:

The war is a big problem for us, it’s a wound. But with the cholera, you have the wound and you put salt in the wound. It hurts. I hope this war can be stopped. We need peace for the children of Yemen. Our situation before the war was not good, but it was not like this.

There are now some commendable NGO efforts to send antibiotics and clean water to Yemen. Commendable, and yet misguided. As the doctors themselves are saying, the medicine might wash the salt out of the wound, but the wound won’t be healed until the war stops. And let’s be clear. Though the Guardian is coyly agnostic about which side is truly to blame for the conflict, there can be no doubt that this is a true war of aggression by a powerful and filthy-rich petroleum-based power against some of the poorest people in the world. The onus is not on the Houthis. The onus is on the extreme right-wing Sunni states who are perpetuating these atrocities; the Saudis who are dropping the bombs and blockading the ports; the American drones and British-funded planes which are striking people who have nothing to do with terrorism abroad.

If you have any humanitarian qualms at all, shut up about Russian hacking or shadow-boxing in the Ukraine, and for the love of Pete shut up about Iran, and pay attention to this. The Saudis are killing the Yemenis en masse through starvation and disease, backed by some of the worst actors on the Arabian Peninsula, and the American government, first under Obama and now under Trump, have been helping them do it without question.

This is what evil looks like. And however well-intentioned, and indeed necessary, those NGO-funded antibiotic packages might be, they’re useless (and possibly worse than useless, if they assuage American consciences without changing American policy) as long as the bombs still fall. The doctors on the ground aren’t asking for more money for medicine. They’re asking for the bombs to stop, for the blockade to stop. You wonder why I am still so hard on the trigger-happy ‘humanitarians’, that I call them dogs and carrion birds? This is why. There is no question on this subject. In absolute terms, the Communist Chinese are objectively better at being humanitarians, when it comes to Yemen, than we are. The war has to stop. At the very least, our involvement in the war has to stop.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.

And upon my country.