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Deterrence Theory

Signalgate isn’t the scandal X

On Saturday, March 15, the United States launched large-scale air strikes on Yemen, killing at least fifty-three people, including five children, by Tuesday. The U.S. military continues to pound the country with daily strikes in an open-ended operation that has also destroyed such infrastructure as a cancer hospital in northern Yemen.

As per the official imperial narrative, the U.S. armed forces are going after Yemeni “terrorists,” i.e. the Houthis (formally Ansar Allah), who govern the most populous sections of the country and are forever maligned as diabolical proxies of Iran—America’s preferred nemesis and the bogeyman invoked to justify all manner of U.S.-backed bloodshed worldwide. Among the Houthis’ recent transgressions are repeated attacks on American and other warships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea, conducted in solidarity with Palestinian victims of the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. Lest Yemenis doubt America’s renewed bloodthirsty intentions in their own territory, current U.S. commander in chief Donald Trump has warned the Houthis that they will be “completely annihilated.”

The Red Sea shipping attacks let up in January in accordance with the implementation of a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza that followed fifteen months of mass slaughter. After Israel blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza in early March—a move that amounted to enforced starvation and a blatant war crime—the Houthis announced their intention to resume assaults on Israeli vessels. Yemen, to be sure, is no stranger to siege and man-made famine: back in 2015, the United States helped enforce Saudi Arabia’s initial maritime blockade of its southern neighbor, which has kept the country firmly on the brink of absolute humanitarian catastrophe. That year, the Saudis and their coalition partners, most notably the United Arab Emirates, took advantage of the opportunity to piggyback on the never-ending global war on terror by bombing the living daylights out of the diminutive nation—a spectacle that was also designed to show the villainous Iran who was boss.? Now, ten years later, the United Nations reports that tens of thousands of Yemenis “are already living in famine-like conditions.” Between April 2015 and October 2018 alone, Save the Children estimated that some 85,000 children under the age of five had died of severe acute malnutrition largely attributable to the blockade.

This is the perfect landscape for what Reuters observes is the “biggest U.S. military operation in the Middle East” since Trump’s reascension to the presidency this year. And yet the news that the United States is once again illegally bombing Arab civilians left and right was deemed insufficiently newsworthy by the American politico-media establishment, which instead opted to obsess over “Signalgate.” Last month’s scandal is named for the private messaging app Signal, which in the days leading up to the March 15 attacks on Yemen played host to a not-so-private discussion between top U.S. officials regarding their bombing plans and then, once the bombing had commenced, a celebration of the destruction. Apparently unwittingly, Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz managed to add Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to the group chat, thereby leaking would-be confidential information—the leak itself again being interpreted as fundamentally more scandalous than the massacre of Yemeni children.

The leaked transcript of the Signal chat contains predictably patriotic ejaculations from America’s leading eminences—a “Godspeed to our Warriors” from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a punching emoji followed by U.S. flag and fire emoji from Waltz—plus some thought-provoking glimpses of officials’ concerns about selling the assault to the U.S. public. On March 14, for example, Hegseth texted to the group: “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” In other words, the United States is fully aware that it is bombing a country using the tax money of folks who are totally clueless about Yemen. As for the alleged “failure” of Trump’s predecessor, it’s worth recalling that Joe Biden pursued exactly the same illegal bombing approach to Yemen as the Republicans are now using, with Biden pledging in January of last year that massive air strikes would continue despite his own admission that they were not “working.”

Following Goldberg’s revelations, “members of Congress in both parties exploded in anger,” Axios noted, quoting Armed Services Committee member Representative Chris Deluzio, a Democrat, as insisting: “This is an outrageous national security breach and heads should roll.” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile took to social media to warn that “this administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.” Media handwringing over the Trump administration’s seemingly apocalyptic carelessness similarly serves to further the notion that the Houthis somehow pose an existential threat to Americans, when in reality it’s Yemeni civilians who’ve been made considerably “l(fā)ess safe” by unfolding events.

Few observers have found space amid all the ruckus to opine that perhaps the United States shouldn’t be bombing Yemen in the first place—particularly given that the undeclared war is in fact unconstitutional, lacking as it does the required authorization from Congress. Historian Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, has remarked that, while Henry Kissinger “kept the bombing of Cambodia secret for years because the bombing itself, of a country we weren’t at war with, was illegal,” the protocol has since been revised. “Now we bomb where and whom at will, and the press and anti-Trump politicians don’t give it a thought.” Per Hegseth’s vision, such wanton assaults qualify as “reestablishing deterrence” —and to hell with the reality that twenty-plus years of bombing one of the world’s poorest countries has neither “worked” nor deterred America’s bloodlust.

Indeed, the United States has been bombing Yemen off and on since 2002, when then-president George W. Bush launched a covert action program against this nation with which the United States has never officially been at war. That year, missile strikes were carried out against the country in accordance with the CIA’s brand-new carte blanche, granted by the war on terror chief himself, to go after Al Qaeda whenever and wherever. Bush’s successor Barack Obama took “covert action” to another level, and by 2015 the United States had killed up to 1,580 people in Yemen, as per data from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Equipped as ever with the good old terror-fighting alibi—as handy a weapon as any in America’s own terrorization of other lands—Obama “embraced the U.S. drone programme,” the Bureau notes, “overseeing more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency.” Nor have U.S. citizens been spared demise by American drone strikes in Yemen, as evidenced by, inter alia, the 2015 Washington Post headline: “The U.S. keeps killing Americans in drone strikes, mostly by accident.” So much for “keeping Americans safe.”

When Trump took over from Obama in 2017, the Bureau reported more U.S. strikes on Yemen during the president’s first hundred days in office than in the previous two years combined. A Bureau field investigation indicated that at least twenty-five Yemeni civilians were killed in a U.S. ground raid and air strikes on January 29, which was just days after Trump had opted to exempt Yemen from Obama’s rules on targeted killing—meaning that U.S. generals now got to “authorise strikes without running them through the White House security bureaucracy first,” as the Bureau put it.

Still, though, the United States didn’t even have to worry about conducting the bulk of the savagery in Yemen itself, as the Saudi-led coalition was still going strong, racking up such impressive achievements as the August 2018 slaughter of forty children and eleven adults on a school bus in northwestern Yemen. This particular feat was pulled off with the help of a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb manufactured by Lockheed Martin, one of the usual suspects of the U.S. military-industrial complex and beneficiary of the 2017 nearly $110 billion U.S.-Saudi defense deal co-birthed by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. To be sure, the role of Saudi oil money in lining the pockets of U.S. arms manufacturers cannot be understated; nor, obviously, can the role of perpetual regional upheaval—Hegseth’s “deterrence”—which is pretty much the whole reason for America’s allegiance to Israel.

Also key to the coalition’s efforts was the United Arab Emirates, everyone’s favorite monarchy-slash-police state, where you can ski in a mall in the middle of the desert, go artificial-island-hopping, or build a skyscraper with the help of migrant slaves. In 2018, the year of the Yemeni school bus massacre, the Associated Press documented at least five Emirati-run prisons in Yemen “where security forces use sexual torture to brutalize and break inmates.” The previous year, the AP had identified at least eighteen clandestine jails operating under UAE auspices, where “extreme” torture methods included “the ‘grill,’ in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire.” The AP report specified that senior U.S. defense officials had “acknowledged . . . that U.S. forces have been involved in interrogations of detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in or knowledge of human rights abuses.”

Now, more than two decades after the launch of “covert action” in Yemen, the United States remains up to its ears in human rights violations in a place Americans know nothing about—an arrangement that works just dandy for a U.S. arms industry accustomed to making a killing off of killing. The current problem, in the establishment view, is that “Signalgate” has dangerously released what is supposed to be covert stuff out into the open, the ins and outs of which “scandal” have in the very least provided the media with a topic to debate for the rest of eternity. And as the Houthis continue to act in solidarity with Palestine and the United States continues to get off on obliterating people in a country we’re not officially at war with, the real scandal might as well be classified information.