In the past eight years, 10,000 children have been killed or maimed and up to two million more displaced in a war that many people have not heard of. The world’s worst humanitarian crisis is in Yemen, which was already the poorest country in the Middle East.
Estimates claimed that tens of thousands of Yemeni children were orphaned in the first year of the war. Precise numbers are impossible to determine, given the complete collapse of the country’s infrastructure as of December 2015.
More than two-thirds of the Yemeni population is in desperate need of humanitarian aid, and parts of the country have slid into a famine as a blockade has prevented ships laden with food and other essentials from docking in Yemeni ports. Millions are at imminent risk of starvation.
From a humanitarian perspective, the devastation has created an impossible situation: as the country’s food, transportation, healthcare, sanitation, and water systems are destroyed by missiles that target civilians, more people become dependent on foreign aid. Communities quickly lose their resilience—the ability of people to provide for each other through means such as producing food and educating children—thereby creating an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis. In Yemen, there is no end in sight.
One factor may be doing more than any other to drive the conflict: America’s addiction to oil. The reason goes back to a deal struck between US president Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi king Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud in 1945, as World War II was drawing to a close. A few weeks prior to the meeting, the liberation of Auschwitz revealed the horrific scale of Nazi atrocities against European Jews. One of Roosevelt’s goals at the meeting was to persuade the Saudi monarch, a key Arab figure, not to prevent the migration of 10,000 Jews to Palestine.
But Roosevelt had another goal, too: to secure what would become the linchpin of the US economy, unbridled access to cheap oil from the Middle East. Oil strikes by the companies that would become Chevron and Texaco, along with geological surveys, revealed that Saudi Arabia contained so much oil that the center of the global economy would soon shift in that direction. Once it struck a deal to sell oil to the US, Saudi Arabia quickly became immensely wealthy.
In return for a steady supply of oil that would all but guarantee economic prosperity, the United States became deeply committed to protecting Saudi Arabia. But the US also supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. These competing interests created chaos in both the Middle East and the United States in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, when the US armed Israel against Arab states—including Saudi Arabia—that wanted to force Israel into diplomacy with its neighbors. The result was a six-month oil embargo that nearly crippled the US economy and revealed just how addicted the country was to Saudi oil. Two months after the embargo ended, the US agreed to begin selling weapons to Saudi Arabia in return for guaranteed access to oil.
Oil for weapons has defined US-Saudi relations ever since. As a result, Saudi Arabia has become extremely wealthy and used a portion of its oil revenue to purchase massive amounts of weaponry.
Today’s genocide in Yemen is the result of America’s actions in the Middle East region and the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia. (Reference)