November 20, 2017
Adam Johnson
In one of the most glaring,
power-serving omissions in some time, CBS News’ 60 Minutes (11/19/17)
took a deep dive into the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and did not once
mention the direct role the United States played in creating, perpetuating and
prolonging a crisis that’s left over 10,000
civilians dead, 2
million displaced, and an estimated
1 million with cholera.
Correspondent Scott Pelley’s
segment, “When Food Is Used as a Weapon,” employed excellent on-the-ground
reporting to highlight the famine and bombing victims of Saudi Arabia’s brutal
two-and-a-half year siege of Yemen. But its editors betrayed this reporting—and
their viewers—by stripping the conflict of any geopolitical context, and
letting one of its largest backers, the United States government, entirely off
the hook.
As FAIR has previously noted (10/14/16,
2/27/17),
US media frequently ignore the Pentagon’s role in the conflict altogether.
Pelly did not once note that the US assists Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign
with logistical support, refueling and the selling of arms to the tune
of $400 billion. The US also routinely protects Saudi
Arabia at
the UN from condemnation—a shield that may have vastly prolonged the war,
given that it signals the support of the most powerful country on Earth.
Meanwhile, Iran’s involvement
in the conflict—which, even by the most paranoid estimates, is far less than
the United States’—is placed front and center as one side of the “war.” The
conflict is framed in hackneyed “Sunni vs Shia” terms, with Saudi Arabia
unironically called the “leader of the Sunni world” and Iran the “leader of the
Shia world.” A reductionist narrative that omits that Sunnis have fought
alongside the Houthis, and the fact that Saudi bombs
kill members of the marginalized, mostly Sunni Muhamasheen caste, who are
neither “led” by Saudi Arabia nor part of the “Shia world.”
This cartoon dichotomy is the
extent of the context. Saudi Arabia is rightly singled out as the primary
aggressor (though a dubious comparative body count of 3,000 killed by Saudis
vs. 1,000 by Houthis is proffered that is far lower than the UN’s January
2017 estimates of 10,000 total civilians killed), but who the Saudis’
primary patrons are—the United States and Britain (and Canada, too)—is simply
not mentioned. One would think, watching Pelley’s report, it was a purely
regional conflict, and not one sanctioned and armed by major Western
superpowers to counter “Iranian aggression.”
To compound the obfuscation,
60 Minutes doesn’t just omit the US role in the war, it paints the US as a
savior rescuing its victims. The hero of the piece is American David Beasley,
the director of the UN’s World Food Programme, the organization coordinating
humanitarian aid. “The US is [the World Food Programme]’s biggest donor, so the
director is most often an American. Beasley was once governor of South
Carolina,” Pelly narrates over B-roll hero shots of Beasley overseeing food
distribution.
Beasley, in his sit-down
interview, bends over backwards to downplay Saudi responsibility, insisting at
every turn that “all parties” are to blame:
You see it’s chaos, it’s
starvation, it’s hunger, and it’s unnecessary conflict, strictly man-made. All
parties involved in this conflict have their hands guilty, the hands are dirty.
All parties.
The spin that the crisis is
the fault of “all parties” is understandable from a US-funded de facto
diplomat, charged with providing some cover for a major regional ally. But the
premise that “all parties” are causing the famine is never challenged by
Pelley. It’s taken as fact, and the piece moves on.
It’s part of a broader trend
of erasing American responsibility for the conflict and resulting humanitarian
disaster. The Washington Post ran an editorial last week (11/8/17)
and an explainer piece Saturday (11/19/17)
detailing the carnage in Yemen, neither one of which bothered to mention US
involvement. American complicity in the war is so broad in scope, it merited
a warning last year from the US’s own State Department they could be liable
for war crimes—yet it hardly merits a mention in major media accounts. The war
just is, a collective moral failing on the part of “all parties”—irrational
sectarian Muslims lost in a pat “cycle of violence” caricature.
As momentum
builds in Congress, animated by grassroots anti-war activists, to push back
against the war and hold US lawmakers accountable, how the US contributes to
the death and disease in the Arabian peninsula is of urgent political import.
By erasing the US role in the war, CBS producers obscure for viewers the most
effective way they can end the war: by pressuring their own lawmakers to stop
supporting it. Instead, viewers are left with what filmmaker Adam Curtis calls
“Oh, dearism”: the
act of feeling distressed but ultimately helpless in the face of mindless
cruelty—perpetrated, conveniently, by everyone but us.
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