Saudi Arabia: Terrible for humanity; great for war party

One of America's best allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, uses tens of billions of war party weaponry to kill thousands in criminal wars. For the past two years the Saudi's have been using our best killing stuff to kill Houthi rebels (and many innocent civilians) in neighboring Yemen. The Saudi's claim the Houthi's are proxies for Iranian hegemony was all justification needed by Uncle Sam to grease arms sales to them. The worst of the worst are US made cluster bombs, banned by 119 decent nations but neither the US nor Saudi Arabia. They randomly spray hundreds of “bomblets” across a wide area and, almost invariably, some kill innocent civilians. They are also not very reliable weapons as many of these bomblets do not explode upon impact. Often these unexploded bomblets are then picked up by children, who are seriously injured or killed when they set them off. The US finally bowed to worldwide condemnation in May and banned further cluster bombs to the murderous Saudis. But the rest of America's finest is still flowing, and the Yemenese body count keeps rising.

How mendacious is Saudi Arabia? A month ago today the UN had enough and put Saudi Arabia on their blacklist of children's human rights violators for their war crimes in Yemen. But when the Saudi's and their Gulf buddies threatened to cut off funding for UN relief efforts in Palestine, S. Sudan and Syria, the UN caved and quietly reversed their noble effort to isolate the Saudi's.

As bad as that was it pales in comparison to the US, fully aware Saudi Arabia was heavily involved in the September 11 attacks, but giving them a pass to implement regime change in Iraq, instead. Hey, what's more important? Justice for the victims of 911...or endless profits for the war party.

Walt Zlotow

Glen Ellyn