So last night I was trying to relax, get over COVID and enjoy some fights. I found myself doomscrolling instead.
And one particular info-juxtaposition stuck with me, stuck in my craw like my dry COVID cough.
First there were a series of posts from sources on X I consider credible West Asia war news and analysis accounts warning that POTUS Trump and Bibi Netanyahu were telegraphing some kind of massive attack in response to the beating Yemen has been putting on the fragile House of Saud this week.
My first thought was, what are we gonna fucking do, turn this:
Into this?
Meanwhile over on Facebook, a very sweet and sincere Democratic friend was posting some tired old bullshit about Barack Obama speaking in complete sentences and all and all the replies hit the same stale note: man, those were the days.
I had to get all Biblical and shit and cite Matthew 7:16-20 “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Listen up, y’all, the ruin of Gaza and the righteous wrath of Ansar Allah are the fruits of our bipartisan firm of False Prophets Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump and if we Americans continue to let our senescent shitbag POTUS keep throwing mad ordnance around like it’s the day before The Day After, we’re all gonna get what we’re asking for good and hard.
Karma, that is.
About the Oh So Eloquent Barack Hussein Obama
If only he'd spent that eloquence on something other than glossing over the continuation of the worst surveillance and military policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, the biggest destruction of Black wealth in American history, the insurance industry protection racket Rahm Emanuel called the Affordable Care Act, a fascist coup in Ukraine, genocidal attacks on Yemen, Libya and Syria, and making damn sure not one bankster did a single day for the biggest fraud in human history up to that point.
But yeah. Those were the days. Back when the POTUS spoke in complete sentences and bullshitted us right past the massive war crimes he was committing and/or enabling like the Saudi/UAE genocidal assault on Yemen.
In March 2015, the Saudis started bombing Yemen and the Obama administration made sure they had all the Made in America weapons and technical support to do it. And what support it was. In fact, the 2015-2025 attacks on Yemen have been so lavishly funded, and so spectacularly unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, that it really makes me go, “Oh we’re gonna strike Yemen again? With what exactly, that we haven’t already done given that we’ve dumped about $250 billion on one of the poorest countries on Earth for eleven years and all we seem to have accomplished is really pissing them off?”
Let’s Do Some Accounting
The Pentagon flew aerial refueling for Saudi and Emirati warplanes from March 2015 through November 2018, at a cost of about $300 million — and then couldn’t be bothered to collect. It turned out the Pentagon had undercharged the coalition by some $331 million. As of late 2023 Riyadh still owed $15.1 million of it and told The Intercept they were “not aware of the outstanding debt.”
Eleven and a half years later the tab just keeps getting bigger and Ansar Allah just gets stronger and more defiant.
$’s Spent attacking Yemen, March 2015 – September 2026
Saudi Arabia — $100–330bn — Air campaign, air defense, propping up its Yemeni clients
UAE — $25–90bn — Its own war plus a decade of paid militias
United States — $9–15bn — Refueling, intel, carriers, four bombing campaigns
Israel — $0.3–1.5bn — Strikes on ports and airports, plus the interceptors
United Kingdom — ~$0.1bn — Typhoons out of Cyprus, Navy missiles
Grand total, low to high: $135–440bn
Every president since has kept it going
Trump vetoed the War Powers resolution in April 2019 — the first time both chambers of Congress had ever passed one — to keep it going. Biden stood up at the State Department in February 2021 and said “this war has to end,” then spent his term running Operation Prosperity Guardian and Operation Poseidon Archer and parking carrier strike groups in the Red Sea at $9 million a day.
Then Trump 2.0 and his dumbass Secretary of Defense War Greasy Pete Hegseth. Operation Rough Rider, March to May 2025: more than $1 billion in under eight weeks. Roughly 2,000 bombs and missiles worth $775 million. Seven Reaper drones shot down, $200 million gone. Three F/A-18s that fell off the deck of a carrier, $210 million. Brown University’s Costs of War project found us firing $2 million missiles at drones that cost the Houthis $2,000.
And it’s still going. On September 10 the Saudis flew 64 airstrikes in a single day to no discernible effect on the battlefield in a dramatic contrast to Ansar Allah’s missile and drone strikes on Saudi cities in response which have clearly lit the Saudi’s shit up.
The only reason we can put a number on any of it is that one economist at Brown — Linda Bilmes, of the Costs of War project — sat down and counted the carrier days, the C-17 flights and the Tomahawks themselves. The Pentagon has never published a Yemen figure, and Congress has never made it. The Saudi and Emirati numbers are guesses built on daily burn rates, because those are monarchies and they don’t have to tell anybody anything.
Now They Want To Do It Some More Again
The Houthis put ballistic missiles over Riyadh, the Saudis intercepted them, and Trump spent the night at Camp David reviewing Yemen strike options before heading back to the White House early. CNN had already reported the pressure building on him to intervene, and that Riyadh itself is out of options. Embassies across the region are issuing warnings.
Strikes? What are we gonna do? Vandalize the world historic Old City of Sanaa?
We’ve spent billions bombing Yemen for the last eleven years and the Brits have spent a century trying to destroy and subjugate the place.
It’s not gonna work and it’s just gonna make the outcome more disgraceful.
What are we going to do to Yemen that we haven’t done already in an eleven year, ~$250B orgy of genocidal destruction waged on a country that never presented a threat to the US or UK and only threatens their neighbors now because they’re tired of being attacked by them?
The only card we haven’t played is sending the 101st Airborne in to get slaughtered in house-to-house fighting in the Old City of Sanaa.
Call it “Fleet of Black Hawks Down.”
And that’s before the oil math. Iran has Hormuz effectively closed, which left the Saudis pushing some 5 million barrels a day across the East–West pipeline to Yanbu instead — until drones out of Iraq hit its pumping stations on September 10 and 11 and Riyadh shut the line. Brent went over $110. What’s left is Project Freedom, the Navy walking tankers down a southern route past Iranian waters.
Brett Erickson, September 19:
“The reality is clear: Too much is going wrong at once. The United States doesn’t have any good options to change the outcome of this war.
The only solution is to cut a deal with Iran and bring an end to this disastrous failure from the Trump Administration.”
Or we could fire off nukes and really go out like world historic chumps whose name will never be mentioned without the survivors’ grandchildren’s grandchildren spitting before they say the hated word “Americans.”
And then there are our European allies lackeys, who are getting wrecked as a consequence of the Saudi decision to bomb the Sanaa airport following the Ayatollah’s funeral and break the truce that had held since 2022:
One in nine French filling stations is out of petrol or diesel, diesel is past €2.39 a litre at a record, and Macron has called an emergency meeting with the presidential candidates. In Grand Est it’s 16% of stations. European diesel cleared $200 a barrel on the benchmark. French officials say the shortage is logistical, not a crude shortfall.
The EU and its governments of US lackeys deserve this, but the European people don’t. Wake up and throw off your Ursulavonderchains.
This is the part that matters
Obama’s Hopey McChangey BS led directly to Trump.
“By their fruits ye shall know them.”
By the big JC’s own definition, Barry Obama meets the definition of a false prophet.
“Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.”
Matthew 7:16–20
The reason this matters — provided that civilization survives the weekend and coming months — is that if Americans don’t abandon this blue vs. red BS and wake up to the fact that both parties are hopelessly corrupt and in thrall to the most sinister forces of militarism and graft imaginable, we are going to get six years of clown show after big Dem wins in 2026 and then another, scarier fascist queued up and ready to go in 2032.
God help us if “we” “nominate” Klonopin Kamala again in 2028, because we might get an “anti-war” Tucker Carlson right away instead. And POTUS Tucker, I fear, would be as good as his word. He’d pull us out of Europe and West Asia and then get down to business rounding up immigrants and minorities here at home and rampaging across Latin America.
Brett Erickson, September 19:
“All of the alerts issued by the Middle East embassies in recent hours could VERY well be in relation to potential U.S. strikes on YEMEN, not Iran.
The wars between Saudi/Yemen and U.S./Iran could be merging into one…”
Let us pray for deliverance. This shit is insane and scary. The mad, dying empire might kill the planet in its death throes.
America, all the murder we’ve been exporting for 80 years is coming home to roost.
It’s on us for not stopping this shit sooner. Karma’s a bitch.