Yemen
The aftermath of an airstrike in Sanaa, Yemen in June 2017. Two children and one woman were killed

This article is a preview from the Autumn 2017 edition of New Humanist.

In the Middle East, a thwarted uprising leads to state failure and civil war. All sides commit atrocities as anarchic space opens up, quickly to be filled by jihadi extremists. Regional, then international powers become involved, emboldening the domestic belligerents in a futile escalation of an unwinnable conflict. From the skies, a despotic regime bombs civilian targets indiscriminately, while employing siege tactics that exacerbate a humanitarian disaster that the UN places in its highest class of severity. Tens of thousands are killed or maimed, while millions are driven to hunger and destitution.

Not Syria, but Yemen, a younger conflict that shares many key features with Syria, and is on a similar, appalling trajectory. According to a recent poll, only 49 per cent of the British public are aware of the conflict in Yemen, compared to 84 per cent for Syria, which is understandable given the disparity in coverage. Syria is far more likely to be found at the top of broadcast news bulletins or on the front page of daily newspapers. It is far more likely to be the subject of editorials and comment articles lamenting atrocities and urging intervention. And it is far more likely to be the subject of denunciations and grand moral pronouncements from British and American politicians.

There is one other important difference. In Yemen, the regime carrying out the indiscriminate bombing that has caused the majority of civilian deaths, and using siege-starvation as a military tactic, is that of Saudi Arabia – Britain’s chief ally in the Middle East – at the head of a coalition of Gulf Arab monarchies. The planes from which bombs fall onto schools, hospitals, funerals, civilian homes – and indeed the bombs themselves – are provided by the US and UK as part of their material, ongoing support for the Saudi-led campaign. The recent High Court ruling that UK arms transfers to Saudi Arabia in this context are legally permissible must not be allowed to obscure the moral truth. In Yemen, it is a statement not of rhetoric but of fact that Washington and London have spent the last two years acting as accessories to mass murder.

Syria is vigorously debated in our popular discourse, while Yemen is barely mentioned in passing. But we need to start talking seriously about Yemen, primarily because of the significance of our own role in the carnage. The Saudi-led bombing campaign would grind to a halt very quickly without the British and American support on which it is operationally dependent. Another reason to have the long overdue conversation about Yemen is because this is a war with a lot to tell us about British militarism, British arms sales and the nature of our country’s role in the world.

The Saudi-led coalition’s intervention began in March 2015, with the aim of restoring President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi to office. Hadi had been overthrown by Houthi rebels fighting in an uneasy alliance with forces loyal to former dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had himself been ousted in 2012. Philip Hammond, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, immediately pledged “political ... logistical and technical support” including “spare parts, maintenance, technical advice, resupply ... We’ll support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat.” This practical aid came as part of two of the largest arms deals in history, signed by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s and her New Labour successors 20 years later. Under these agreements, London has provided Riyadh with fleets of Tornado and Typhoon jets, together with an extensive supporting infrastructure and ongoing assistance to keep those aircraft operational, including the provision of component parts and ammunition.

Consequently, the value of British arms licenced for export to the Saudi kingdom has shot up during the Yemen conflict, totalling £3.3bn in the first 18 months of the intervention, compared to £147m over the equivalent preceding period. This is despite repeated condemnations of Saudi atrocities from the leading humanitarian aid agencies, backed by detailed reports on numerous alleged violations of international humanitarian law, including outright war crimes, researched by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. All these organisations have repeatedly implored the British and American governments to suspend arms transfers to the Saudi-led coalition. A panel of experts reporting to the UN Security Council in January 2016 described a pattern of “widespread and systematic” Saudi attacks on civilian targets. By the spring of 2017 the UN warned that 6.8 million Yemenis were one step from famine, blaming all sides of the conflict, including the Saudis, whose blockade of a highly import-dependent country was having entirely predictable effects.

Anti-militarist NGOs such as the one I am associated with, Campaign Against Arms Trade, have long warned that British arms exports to violent regimes, and the wider militaristic environment that Britain’s arms industry is situated within, risk devastating consequences such as those seen in Yemen over the last two years. A new book by Paul Holden, Indefensible: Seven Myths That Sustain The Global Arms Trade, provides a timely rebuttal to many of the official lines used to justify these exports. But the book also raises wider questions about the rationale behind this ugliest of businesses.

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One of the first justifications London offers for military exports is that states have the right to equip themselves for self-defence. But arms sales to regimes such as Saudi Arabia have little to do with the security of the people of those countries. Often they are aimed more at securing the regime against threats to its rule, not least that posed by its own citizens. In Bahrain in 2011, a peaceful, non-sectarian pro-democracy movement, emerging in massive public demonstrations during the spring of that year, was violently crushed by Bahraini security forces armed by the US and UK, with a Saudi-led task force entering the country to secure key installations against any attempted revolution and provide back-up to the crackdown. When Whitehall officials speak of the legitimate self-defence needs of the British arms industry’s customers, this has to be understood in its proper political context.

A second, familiar ministerial refrain is that Britain has “the toughest arms export regime in the world”. If that is true, the Yemen case alone demonstrates its profound worthlessness. Even if the customer states could be trusted, arms sold into volatile regions can and do end up in the hands of people they were not intended for. Britain and the US spent the 1970s furnishing the Iranian Shah with vast quantities of advanced weaponry, only for those arms to end up with the Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution. When Baghdad lost control of vast swathes of Iraq to ISIS in 2014, the terrorist group was able to loot the extensive weapons stores of the US-supplied Iraqi army as the latter melted away, unable or unwilling to fight.

Placing this last example within the broader context of Western militarism serves to further reinforce the point. It is insufficiently acknowledged that ISIS grew directly out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, a group which originally emerged and thrived in the chaos following the Anglo-American invasion of 2003. Al Qaeda itself was of course born out of the West’s proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s. None of this exactly fills one with confidence in the capacity of our military-industrial complex to deal with the great security challenges of the modern world. What it shows instead is that Western militarism is itself one of the major threats to global security today.

Returning to the mythology around British arms sales, a third well-worn justification is that arms export contracts create and secure jobs. Putting aside the question of what the exchange rate might be of British jobs to Yemeni lives, the argument is bad economics. Holden cites research from the US showing that the military industry creates fewer jobs for every $1bn spent than almost any other industry or sector, including clean energy, healthcare and education. Even a tax cut of the same amount would create more jobs through the resulting boost in demand. Moreover, the extensive public subsidies on which the arms export industry depends are deeply inefficient and represent a considerable drain on the economy. One British study showed that halving military exports from the UK would in fact create jobs, because state resources supporting the industry can be more productively spent elsewhere, and because the industry drains rare and important skills that the civilian economy can put to better use.

Many myths about the arms industry rely on a wider mythology about the relationship between militarism and security. The assumption that a state becomes more secure the stronger and more technologically advanced their armed forces are ignores the wider international dynamics that such military build-ups play into. As one state increases its military spending or arms purchases, its neighbours and rivals are often prompted to increase their own capabilities to guard against the perceived risk of attack. This breeds suspicion and rivalry, increasing the likelihood of conflict. “We should arm ourselves in case of war” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nor does militarism work as a response to threats from non-state actors. Holden cites research showing that in the four decades up to 2006, only 7 per cent of terrorist groups were defeated militarily, while 43 per cent ended operations as a result of political processes, 40 per cent were thwarted through successful police work and 10 per cent ceased operations after achieving victory. Armed intervention purportedly carried out with the intention of defeating such groups is more likely to exacerbate the conditions in which they flourish. As Holden notes, outside interventions tend to increase both the length and deadliness of wars. Civil conflicts such as those in Syria and Yemen, or in Lebanon in the 1980s, point to the fact that external support and intervention – whether through arms sales or direct military action – can drive escalation to
devastating effect. The legacy of the 2011 intervention in Libya, a country which now has at least three competing centres of power, provides a further example warning against these long-disproven assumptions.

Moreover, if we care about protecting and saving lives then there are far more effective ways of achieving that. As Holden notes, 1.5 million children die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases, and twice that number of children die annually worldwide from malnutrition. Are these lives of less value than those of the 180,000 people who died in violent conflict in 2015, or the 28,000 killed in terrorist attacks that year?

Then there is the security threat represented by the global catastrophe of climate change. The window of opportunity available to mitigate its worst effects is rapidly closing up. Global warming will lead to droughts, sharply rising food prices that will impact disastrously on the world’s poorest people, a major spread in tropical diseases, unprecedented refugee flows and, as a result, a greater risk of armed conflicts breaking out worldwide. A global military expenditure of $1.7 trillion in 2015, nearly $250 for each human being on earth, is not a prudent use of resources, particularly given the urgent need for technological development to help end our dependence on fossil fuels.

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However, once all these myths have been disproved, Holden’s book may leave us with more questions than answers. Why, if there are easier and surer ways to save more lives, do states not adopt a less or even non-militaristic approach to security? Why, if other industries are better at creating jobs, does the government not divert resources to them instead? Can profits for arms companies really explain the UK’s sheer dedication to its alliance with Saudi Arabia given that, as Holden notes, sales from arms manufacturing constitute less than 4 per cent of the UK’s total manufacturing sales? Are Western governments simply guilty of epic, institutional irrationality? Or are there other logics at work?

Returning to the Gulf can help us find the beginnings of an answer. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies between them sit on 29.3 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Given the thirst for hydrocarbons from the developing nations of south and east Asia – China above all – control over these vast reserves represents a major strategic prize. As the world’s hegemonic power, the US is afforded serious geopolitical leverage in the global system through ties with its Gulf Arab client regimes, and its own major military presence in the Middle East.

In addition, revenues from hydrocarbon sales translate into a combined sovereign wealth for the Gulf Arab states of $2.9 trillion dollars, plus a further $3 trillion in private wealth. For small, repressive monarchies worried about their prospects of survival, this wealth provides a means of buying support from powerful protectors, such as the US, the UK and France. Saudi investment in the UK, for example, currently stands at £93 billion, rising by about £9 billion in 2014-15 alone. This is a major capital inflow for a country like the UK, with its need to finance a chronic and growing trade deficit. By comparison, even in the exceptional year of 2015-16, only £3.3 billion of UK arms were licenced for export to Saudi Arabia.

This is not to say that arms sales are unimportant to the Western powers. One of the leading strategic imperatives of the British state since World War II has been to maintain its status as a global power in the face of imperial decline. Military strength is a vital component. To be a military power one needs a domestic arms industry, and to maintain this one needs to be an arms exporter. Regular exports help the industry to lower unit costs, maintain production lines, retain skills and earn revenues that offset direct military expenditure by the state. With arms exports to the rest of the world in long-term decline, but military expenditure in the Gulf on the increase (Saudi expenditure doubled in the decade up to 2015), sales to the Gulf regimes have gained an almost existential significance for Whitehall.

In short, Western militarism and arms exports cannot be explained with reference to considerations such as security, peace, jobs or the wellbeing of the British and American people, let alone that of people in countries like Yemen. The standard liberal image of Western states as essentially benign actors cannot explain these phenomena, as Holden’s important book shows. It is only when we place London and Washington’s role in the world within the wider historical contexts of capitalism and imperialism that we can make sense of these countries’ major role in creating the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula these past two years. If Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have pushed Anglo-American liberalism into a state of crisis, perhaps this would be a good moment for us in Britain to take an honest look at who we really are as a country, and ask ourselves if that is who we want to be.

“Indefensible” is published by Zed Books