Pompeo blames Iran for Yemeni-Saudi oil retaliation

This 21 December 2017 Dutch video is by Dutch daily De Volkskrant. It says that Nikki Haley, United States President Donald Trump‘s United Nations envoy, told ‘Colin Powell on Iraq weapons of mass destruction‘ style lies on the Saudi Arabian autocracy‘s war on Yemen. She claimed she had proof that a missile, fired from Yemen to Saudi Arabia, was supposedly from Iran; while she has no such proof.

A 16 December 2017 video from the USA used to say about itself:

WILL TRUMP LIE US INTO ANOTHER MIDDLE EAST WAR?

BREAKING NEWS: U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley presented journalists Thursday with what she called “indisputable” evidence that a missile fired last month at Saudi Arabia by Yemeni rebels was supplied by Iran, thus proving Iran was in violation of international law and a threat to the region. Her findings, however, have been disputed by former leading U.S. intelligence officials whose own conclusions were at odds with President Donald Trump’s administration.

The Trump administration invariably blames Iran for what anti-Saudi invasion Yemenis do. They do that to justify their own support for the Saudi crown prince‘s bloody war on the people of Yemen. And to justify their plans to attack Iran to grab Iranian oil.

At first sight, that might agree with people who see the Middle East in a sectarian Sunni Islam versus Shiite Islam perspective. The Wahhabi state religion of the Saudi absolute monarchy is an extremely distorted form of Sunni Islam. While both the government of Iran and the Yemeni Houthi movement are Shiite. However, the Houthis are of the Zaidi tendency within Shia Islam, the tendency within Shia Islam closest to Sunnis. While the Houthi movement also has some Sunni members. The Zaidi tendency is very different from Iranian Islam. Like when saying that some Christian is from the Protestant tradition that does not have to mean much. The Church of England differs from Mormonism; the Protestant Christianity of the late Dr Martin Luther King is extremely different from the Protestantism of the Ku Klux Klan, of the El Paso racist mass murderer and of the Christian Identity cult.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV, 14 September 2019:

The United States says that not the Yemeni Houthi rebels, but the Iranian authorities are behind the drone attacks on a large oil installation and an oil field in Saudi Arabia. Minister of Foreign Affairs Pompeo speaks on Twitter of an “unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply”.

The attacks were carried out on the Abqaiq oil installation near the Persian Gulf and the Khurais oil field farther inland from Friday to Saturday. They led to huge fires. According to the Minister of Energy, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi state oil company Aramco has almost had to halve its oil production. …

It is said to have been a revenge campaign for Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the war in Yemen. The Saudis lead a coalition that fights violently against the Houthis.

Pompeo attaches little value to that claim. “There is no evidence that the attacks came from Yemen,” he tweets. “Tehran is behind nearly a hundred attacks on Saudi Arabia while [President] Rohani and [Minister] Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy.” He does not explain on which he bases that Iran has carried out these attacks.

Warmonger Nikki Haley is gone. Warmonger John Bolton is gone. But that does not mean in any way that the Trump administration is no longer a warmongering administration. Remember Pompeo‘s recent speech, in which he praised lying, cheating and stealing.

The attacked locations are closer to Iran than to Yemen, more than 1000 kilometers from the Yemeni capital Sanaa. However, that does not exclude that the Houthis behind it: according to the United Nations, the rebels have drones that can cover distances up to 1500 kilometers.

The world’s biggest

The affected oil installation is the largest in the world. The affected oil field, which lies more towards the capital Riyadh, is the second largest in the country.

According to Dutch NOS TV today, US President Trump has phoned Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to say that he supports him.

TRUMP’S ACCUSATIONS SHOW FOREIGN POLICY QUANDARY What happens when a president who rarely gets through a day without lying accuses another nation of lying about its involvement in the latest global flashpoint? The world is about to find out, as the aerial attacks in Saudi Arabia ramp up already heightened tensions between the United States and Iran. [HuffPost]

Speaking in Berlin last Friday on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” and George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” diatribes, targeting Russia and China as “unfree nations” in permanent conflict with a supposedly “free” world led by Washington. Amid reminiscing about his deployment in West Germany as a US Army lieutenant in the run-up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Pompeo laid out a contrived ideological justification for the launching of a new Cold War in which the threat of a nuclear conflagration is far higher than it was three decades ago. The irony and hypocrisy of Pompeo extolling the fall of the Berlin Wall—using the word “freedom” 23 times in barely 16 minutes—was not lost on many. He came to Germany as the representative of a US administration that has made the walling off of the US southern border its political priority, while separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents and locking them in cages: here.

US SECRETARY of state Mike Pompeo used his speech in Berlin last Friday to threaten nothing short of war against Russia, China and Iran, saying: ‘Western free nations have a responsibility to deter threats to our people’ from countries which threaten the ‘democratic freedoms’ of the West: here.