The ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’ get little help from Iran. The Saudis are committing terrible war crimes in Yemen.

Peter Hitchens and many other people say the invasion of Ukraine is not so bad as the war waged by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against the Houthis. I confess I long ago forgot to follow this and real news is very hard to find anyway.

Patrick Cockburn is the person I most trust on the Middle East because he's very left-wing and left-wingers seem to be the most objective people to read on the subject of the Middle East. They are not committed to the American narrative (dread word Wallace Arnold would say - I find myself sounding like him).

Increasingly hard left and hard right resemble each other: anti-American, anti-war. This war in Ukraine splits both left and right but too many people swallow the Russian (renamed KGB) line hook, line and sinker. Far more people think Putin is Hitler or mad or both.

This is Cockburn in a very interesting recent essay in the New Left Review.

"The Houthis in Yemen, for instance, have been fighting for years and receive little material help from Iran, but are almost always described in the Western media as ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’, implying that they are simply Iranian proxies, which they are not. In Iraq, some of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Shia paramilitaries) are under orders from Iran, but others are independent."

What a huge amount of harm America has done in the world, especially since Reagan left office but going back to Lyndon Johnson and the 1960s cultural revolution.